All the Fixins

Many people know my husband as a bishop, dealing with matters of the spirit, but I also know him as a guy who can, God willing, fix stuff around the house.  Now obviously there’s a pretty big difference between what is sometimes known as “Soul Repair” –a divinity school in Texas has a whole center with that name– and the seemingly endless tasks that seem to amount to nothing but keep cropping up at home.  I like to think that the do-this-and-it’s-done nature of life (in part, anyway) on the domestic front, in some small way, offsets the fact that people out there rarely walk around, or into churches, with signs that say, “All Set.”   Much as I support broad concepts like Tikkun – a title of a magazine referring to the literal “Repair of the World” –I admit that there have been times this fall when “Repair of the Thing that Just Broke in the Next Room” seems worthy of some attention, too.

Years ago, our daughter made a Father’s Day card that listed a number of her dad’s attributes, from her point of view; it ended with “You come in handy.”  His parishioners probably never expressed their appreciation quite that way.  It was a little crass, but I didn’t exactly disagree.  Somewhere along the way, he gained some really practical knowledge – probably around the time I was being dreamy out in Nature or working in a bookstore.

He’s the kind of guy who dives right into those directions in fine print, the ones that make my eyes glaze over, and can assemble most anything or figure out why something has stopped working right.  He hasn’t enjoyed fiddling with cars all that much, but I still wasn’t surprised when, driving through rural South Carolina on the way to see my uncle a couple of years ago, I came upon this sign for a business.

Even though my husband had not even put his hat in the ring for bishop yet, I had a hunch that this reality might be coming, and it seemed perfectly feasible to me that he might actually become a bishop who also had a body shop on the side.  He’s a versatile guy, really he is.

Only thing is, around our house at least, he has to fix things when he’s good and ready.  Oh, and when the schedule allows.  And he also has to try not to think about all the other more restorative activities, like painting or otherwise creating something, he could be doing.

October was a packed month for him, with just about not a single day off, and there were some household casualties: the constantly running upstairs toilet, for instance.  I was much more patient about this one than I’d been about the downstairs one the month before.  The fact is, in these moments I feel like I’m at his mercy: heck, I don’t even try to fix the thing, a fact that does not exactly make me beam with pride.  Anyway, after a number of days of the toilet doing its best gurgling brook imitation, when he’d call from the road to ask what I’d been doing that day, I might say something like, “You mean in between times when I’m taking the top of the tank to adjust the black thingy?”   Terrible, I know.

Eventually the work skies cleared just enough for him to march upstairs with tools and face the music – my hero.  I knew enough not to try to get him to explain much of anything about it to me, just to be grateful.  Then, a few evenings later, he was flipping through channels and came upon an episode of “This Old House”:  you guessed it, the running toilet repair segment!  Of course he called me in to watch it too, and we had a splendid ten minutes together there, transfixed, in front of the TV.  It was kind of like a travel show about a place we’d just visited. The main characters are Richard Tretheway, who really loves what he does, and the woman who is fed up with her misbehaving toilet. There’s no husband in sight, although he does come up in the conversation. After they establish what the problem is, Tretheway asks her, “Have you done anything about it?”  She says, “My husband changed something, which didn’t do any good.”  Poor guy, he is so beside the point.

The most entertaining part of the segment, my own husband and I agreed, is how the woman stays completely engaged, matching the enthusiasm of the pro fixing her toilet.  They both seem to be having the most fabulous time in the bathroom.  He says at one point, “The spud gasket fits beautifully right here!” and she utters exclamations like, “Oh, great!” and “That’s wonderful, Richard!” at opportune times. By the end, it seems kind of too bad that they can’t just go on to make a completely harmonious life together, free of running toilets.

Meanwhile, in this house, I don’t think I’ll peer over his shoulder or gush every time my resident handyman tackles something needing fixing.  I’ll keep pressing for him to have a regular day off, too. But it’s a good time for me to become more self-reliant, especially since it doesn’t look like the larger Soul Repairing business out there will be slowing down anytime soon.