Mr. Fix Shit

In case you've been living underneath a life-size Sphinx made of foam core and cat litter, you know that we re-elected Barack Obama recently.  A bunch of different demographics came together to make that possibility a reality-- so the news media says-- and it's looking like minorities, women, and "the young" played a significant role in the President's validation.

At 32, I guess I no longer qualify as "the young".  I think membership in that particular subsection goes to 18-25 year-olds, it might even go as high as thirty-year-olds, but it definitely doesn't extend to those of us born in 1980.  I know for sure that I'm not a woman, because I just played with myself recently and I came very quickly, and we all know that only happens to men.  (Sensitive ones, especially.)  Now, the more complicated question-- am I a minority?-- gives me a slight pause, and rightfully so.  After all, my father was born in Iraq, then emigrated (read: fled) to Israel, the emigrated (read: ran away from his religion and his parents) to America, and married my mother, a half-Ukranian/half-Hungarian euro mutt.  But, ask anyone who's ever seen me dance, and then tell you without hesitation that I'm white.

White male.









White space.









White.

Am I, though?  Maybe, maybe not.  I don't know.  Guess it depends on who's seen me cut a rug at a Bar Mitzvah recently.  One thing I know for sure is that I'm a Jewish husband (and father, but let's stick with husband for right now.) and while I don't know if the number of Jewish husbands who came out in support of Obama is statistically significant, one thing I do know is that there are some stereotypes about Jewish husbands.

The one with which I'm most familiar is that "Jewish husbands don't beat their wives".  A bigoted follow-up to that is "they just hide their Macy's cards", and that was all good fun, and we all had a jolly good laugh.

I realized this weekend that there is also a stereotype about Jewish husbands relating to their inclination to engage in household repairs/improvements, but that, according to which Jewish husband you're talking to/about, the stereotype is radically different.

Take my father-in-law.  He's seventy, doddering, bewildered, hyper-intelligent, super disorganized, mechanically inclined, and attentionally defective.  Nothing makes him prouder than to install something, or create something, or refine something, or correct something around his house, or ours.  As he mentioned to me this weekend, one of the reasons he's so hell-bent on fixing things himself is that he's cheap, and no matter how much sawdust you get everywhere (EV.  ERY.  WHERE.) or how many times you have to drive to Home Depot (three in one day) because you forgot to buy something (that you already owned) it's a damn sight cheaper than picking up the phone and hiring a professional to do it for you.

Which is where this Jewish husband comes in.

Last week, our plumber installed a new kitchen faucet and repaired two toilets in our house.  Total cost: $350.  Could I have done any or all of these repairs myself?  Um, why spend energy, time, and many hot, furious tears to find out?  Are we well-off?  Absolutely not, but my wife and I are both employed, and we make enough money to know that we can call a plumber or an electrician every now and then and it's not going to give us Hoover pockets.

There are things I can do, and there are things I can't do, and there are things that I maybe could do but probably shouldn't do, and I strongly believe that, if I look at a project and my gut says "back away" then that is what I should do.  My wife's dresser drawer came off its track.  A strategically-placed screw solved the issue.  Gut said, "you can do that", so I did that.  Am I going to spend hours fucking around and potentially irreparably damaging the porcelain device that hauls away my family's feces?

Not this Jewish husband.

And not this Jewish husband's father, either.

When I was a boy, and I'm sure for a long time before I existed, my father mowed the lawn of our family home.  He trimmed all the hedges and he painted the outside and inside of the house when it needed it, he cleaned the gutters and unclogged drains and did things to the hot water boiler that I don't understand and he built a big wooden ramp for me to drive my pedal car on and he fixed and he maintained and he used his rough, careworn paws like they were tools themselves.  And one day, much much later, while we were watching out the dining room window together as Frank the gardener mowed our lawn for us, he turned to me and said,

"And I always said, 'as soon as I can afford to pay some motherfucker to do all this fuckin' sheet for me, dat's exactly what dee fuck I'm gonna do'."

I suppose, after all those years, there was nothing he felt he had to prove anymore, and it must feel pretty liberating to send a plumber a check instead of being on your hands and knees on a bathroom floor underneath a sink for five hours, if you don't have to.  My father-in-law and his son have just spent two days trying to install a clothes dryer for my mother-in-law.  They're connecting a pipe using brass wire meant to be used for a bassoon.  And, wonder of wonders: they did it, and they're happier than pigs in shit about it.  And you know-- that's fine, for them.  That's just fine.  

Sometimes I feel guilty or incompetent or like I'm not measuring up somehow to the challenge of being a homeowner, being a husband, being a father.  There are things I should be doing that I don't do, effort not being applied, energy wasted, money flying out the doors and the windows and wallets and pockets.  Then I remember bringing my father glass after glass of 7-Up as he perspired through his shirt, his bald spot glistening in the July sun and his hands bleeding as he manically tore out foot after foot after foot of hedges that lined my family's house.  He just couldn't take it anymore.  Trimming them made him physically ill, or mentally ill-- or both.  And he wasn't quite at the stage where he had embraced the idea of paying someone else to trim them for him.  He hadn't made that psychological leap yet, he wasn't ready to move from one stereotype of the Jewish husband to the other.  He was still in that mindset that it had to be all him, all the time, at every moment, doing every thing: fixing, making, doing, being, providing, surviving, maintaining and straining, all for his family, all for an ideal.  All for love.

And finally, one day, he let go.  He let go of all of that.  Not the love, of course, never that, but of the idea that it always had to be him.  He's able to exist now, in a world of handymen and plumbers and electricians and contractors and gardeners.  And I think he's happier now, and I love that.  A few months ago, we told him that we were going to finally attack the insidiously weeded over flower beds in front of our house, to make the place look less like Boo Radley's residence and more like a place that isn't the scourge of the neighborhood.  His brow furrowed with momentary concern as he asked,

"Mummy-- you're not going to do that fuckin' shit yourself, are you?"

"No," I said to him, privately smiling at the memory of him ripping out hedges with his hands in 1988, "no fucking way."      

Try Not to Get Backed Over By My Father-in-Law

In case you didn't know, Sunday is Father's Day.

Last night, my wife left the house to go tutor her student. A couple minutes after she left, she called me.

"Hi, buddy," she said, "what are you planning on doing tonight?"

"Well, I'd like to practice banjo," I replied.

"Oh. Would you like a p-word?" (This means "project." A "project" is usually defined as some haphazard, fucked up errand usually having to do with her family.)

"Um, not particularly." Pause. "What is it?"

"Well, I just listened to a voicemail from my mother-- it was about a Father's Day gift for my father."

"Yeah?"

"Would you please go to Amazon and order him a copy of "My Father's Paradise" by Ariel Sabar?"

I was relieved. Finally, an easy request, and a normal present to boot.

"Sure," I said.

Pause.

"And, could you also research audible backup warning alarms?"

.............

Right.

You know what we're talking about here, right? Throw a truck in reverse and hear a BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! loud enough to wake up your Facebook Zombie. These reverse warning alarms are typically found on, oh, I don't know-- big rigs... U-Hauls. Mail trucks. They're not necessarily items you would expect to find on a 2003 silver Honda Accord.

Now, my wife's father is a strange duck, as are lots of our fathers, but this particular gift desire took even me by surprise. As I was researching the various audible backup warning alarms on Froogle and Ebaymotors, I couldn't help laughing hysterically and pounding the desk in front of me. This man is my father-in-law and he deserves to be respected, but, come the fuck on already. What could a psychiartist in his mid-sixties want with an audible backup warning alarm?

Has he run somebody over?

Does he routinely drive in reverse on the grounds of a local school for the deaf during recess?

Does he harbor some secret wish to feel like a UPS man? Will he eventually carry out the fantasy by brush-painting his car brown and ordering large quantities of chocolate-hued uniform shorts?

I think it's probably less about the actual device and more about the gadgetry. He's all about techno-baubles. His car looks like the inside of a police cruiser. He has a custom-built laptop table which he made himself out of spare pieces of wood from the basement. There are more fucking wires and shit draped all over the interior of that car than there are vines in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. There's the auxiliary thermometer, and the compass, and the GPS unit and Christ knows what else-- probably a homing device or a mini-satellite dish. I guess this is the one final piece of auxiliary technology he hadn't gotten around to installing on the car. Besides the fare meter.

It's not about the beeping when he reverses. It's about the technology and the nerdery. He's a total nerd. As I was researching the alarms, I saw the specifications and I said to myself, "Aha, this is what he really loves:"

Voltage: 12V±3V
Temperature: -40ºF~+185ºF
Beep volume: 70~90dB
Input: <4W Range (Rear): 1.0~8.4 ft

All that shit that is essentially Mandarin to me. He loves it. And he'll totally get off on installing it, too, all by himself, in the driveway. It will take him all Sunday long, but he'll be in heaven. He will be out there, all 101 pounds of him, in his button-down, short-sleeve, threadbare blue Oxford dress shirt and torn trousers, crumpled tissues hanging out of his pocket, his salt-and-pepper hair awry whistling Mozart bassoon solos and airs from that infernal nonsense Pinafore and mumbling calculations and machinations to himself that the rest of the world would never understand as he blissfully tinkers and putters the day away.

And, shit, if that's the Father's Day he wants, let him have it.

My only fear is that he won't install the alarm exactly correctly, because that's his M.O. I worry that he'll install it connected just a hair wrong so that it will beep incessantly whenever the car is put into Park, say, or-- worse-- Drive. These things tend to happen, you know.

But, still, I love him, and I wish him a Happy Father's Day. Beeps and all.