Life is Perfect Even When Your Toilets are Clogged

Back in 1963 I had a picture on my college room bulletin board that was torn out of a magazine. It showed a young woman sitting in a tree swing and the caption read, “Life is perfect even when it’s not.” It was an advertisement for sanitary pads. Today if you google the phrase it gives Ellen Degeneres credit in a meme for saying, “My life is perfect even when it’s not.” She was born in 1965 so I suppose her parents could have kept a copy of that magazine until she was old enough to read it and adapt a version of it as her personal mantra. No matter how it happened that magazine ad was inspirational enough for me to keep the page until recently when I moved. In my google search I came across a soft cover book of blank pages with those words on the cover. Amazon has one listed today at $6.99.

The trouble with those kinds of books is I’m afraid to write in them and mess them up. My nephew gave me a thick book of handmade paper pages with a real leather cover for Christmas and talk about being intimidated, that book sure does it to me. I looked it up on Amazon and it cost him $34 which makes it even more of a challenge to find the right purpose for that book. I could sketch or paint in it, paste quotes I love in it or fill it with original "Jean-isms." It could be a scrapbook or diary or I could carry it around and look arty-farty doing it. Whatever I end up doing with it, it’s giving me lots of fodder for dreaming. It’s sitting in my office and making me feel guilty that I haven’t settled on what to use it for yet.

I thought of that "life is perfect" phrase this morning because I’m having plumbing problems. It started when one of my toilets wouldn’t flush no matter how much I used a plunger on it. Maintenance came yesterday and tried it but he couldn’t get it unplugged either and said he’d be back in the morning to snake it out. The CCC’s rule is if you only have one toilet you will get same day service, but if you have two they may take two days. Overnight the toilet in my half bath wouldn’t flush either. Fortunately my apartment is close to the fitness room and there is a public bathroom right around the corner from my apartment door but even that one started acting up by morning.

The lead maintenance man was here first thing in the morning and said, “I’m afraid this is going to be a long ordeal.” Oh, goodie, to pee I had to walk to the next building. But you know what, in the grand scheme of things it didn't meet my Litmus Test to qualify for a disaster---an inconvenience, yes, but a disaster is having your entire bathroom lost to a tornado, flood or fire. Life is still perfect, even when it’s not. And I really like talking with the maintenance man so there’s that for the bonus round. A half hour after he got here two other guys showed up---one to deal with the gray water that suddenly started flowing out of my furnace room. (It opens into the hallway and not my into apartment, thank goodness). The other guy was from a 911 plumbing service of some kind and he was on the phone with the city getting advice to relay to our maintenance men. They couldn't use the connection in the basement to snake out the pipes because the sewage was backed up above it thus they had to do it from the first toilet on the line. Mine. I'm SO lucky I didn't end up with raw sewage from the entire building in my apartment.

My dad was a glass-half-full kind of guy. There wasn’t anything bad that happened in our lives that he couldn’t come up with something worse that could have happened, something to put things in perspective. Life is perfect, even when it’s not fit right in with the philosophy my dad lived by. The worse a problem is the more I unpack of my dad's glass-half-full perspective so I was calm and laid back the entire time the men were working on the sewer line. 

My mom has been on my mind lately, too, because she died forty years ago this week, on an Easter Sunday. I usually have to look up her death date because I always associate it with Easter which, or course changes every year. Remember me writing a week or two back that I wasn’t sure if I was experiencing mild depressed from the broken ribs? It finally dawned on me that the first two weeks of April (and days leading up to the month) always puts me in a melancholy mood. My mom and dad’s anniversary falls in that time frame as well as Don’s and my anniversary and our birthdays. My brother’s birthday, too. And because Easter is never on the same date as my mom dying it seems like I have two death dates to reflect on her. If the past is any indication of the future as soon as the middle of the month passes my emotions will change, like shedding a winter coat and welcoming in the warmth of spring.

In the meantime you would not believe the flood that was in my hallway and our whole building was within one minute of having the water shut off any purpose and everyone forbidden to use their toilets. The email announcement was typed when the clog broke up and the water shut-off was canceled. They had to snake it out almost to the street before they found the plugged up place so this was a long time coming. After that, they could access the connection to the sewer line in the basement to sent a camera down the line to look for the reasons why it clogged in the first place. But first they put my toilet back together and thoroughly cleaned up after themselves. Apparently my apartment is the bellwether for all sewer and water related issues in the building, being the first one on the line. (Remember the milky colored water I had last fall?)

By lunch time they were packing up their tool cart and power equipment/snake and I left to go to the cafe` in the other building. When I sat down a man across the table, who lives in that building, he asked how my day was going so I gave him the thumbnail version. And not unexpectedly he said, "You need to sue this place!" "Why?" I replied. "They dealt with the problem quickly enough. No harm, no foul." Don't we all know people like him? People who think when something goes wrong it's someone's fault and they should get paid for any inconvenience they experienced. I'd say I feel sorry for Mr. Sue-Happy's wife but she the same way. Nothing is ever perfect in their lives, even when it is. ©

What Else Can Go Wrong?

It feels like I’ve been caught up in a practical joke with the jokester being Old Man Winter with his accomplice, my snowplow service. I’ve had the same service for thirteen years and they’ve never, ever let me down…until now. Two nights of not getting plowed out left me with seven inches of snow on my driveway with more on the way. Oops, they got a new driver and it turned out he had plowed my neighbor’s drive instead of mine. More frustrating than that was the fact that they didn’t return the four messages I left over two days so I had no idea this is what happened. On the third day and fifth message I said: “If you’re not going to plow your customer’s snow or return their calls the least you could do is change your out-going message to explain what’s going on. People can be pretty understanding if it’s a temporary emergency, but if it’s not then we need to know so we can arrange for another service.” (Like it’s even possible to hire someone mid-season; who was I fooling?) That did the trick. I got a call-back but it came after I had spent an hour and a half with my little electric snow blower and one working arm clearing my driveway. I only got a third of it done before I came inside to warm up and thank goodness that I did or I would have missed that call-back. "Customer Service" had exactly the right personality to deal with a call like that. As a silver lining to the mix-up---every situation has one if you look for it---think about all that exercise I got to go along with my diet.

That wasn’t all that Old Man Winter threw at me. It’s been bitter cold and two of my three outside doors froze shut including the one I let Levi out. That’s only happen five or six times in thirteen years and it creeps me out when it does. If a fire were to ravish my house when the doors won’t open it better be on the other end of the house because it takes ten minutes with an electric heater on a door to get it open again. Not related to the cold---at least I think not---two of the streetlights on my block also burned out this week and my toilet got plugged up. I’ve never had a burned out streetlight and it took Google a while to connect me with the right place to report them. (Without those lights, it’s too dark when you’re up in the middle of the night looking to see if your driveway got plowed!) The power company website promised seven business days to fix them, I predicted a month due to the weather; in less than 14 hours a nice man was taking care of business in the frigid wind chill that was fit for neither man nor beast. He was the first human I’d talked to in days. But we were both so bundled up in layers of clothing that it was impossible to see anything but each others eye---that is we could have seen each others eyes. He was up high in a bucket and I was down on the driveway.

The plugged up toilet: That hasn’t happen in ages, since I started doing Bio Clean treatments every other month. I knew it was coming, though, because for two days it was making giant gulping sounds when it was flushed and silly me, I was too dumb to do the treatment ahead of its schedule. What was I thinking? Answer: I wasn’t. It’s not like that schedule is carved in marble. I use pencil in my day planner for crying out loud! Won’t make that mistake again. The next time the toilet gulps and I’ll be there telling it to gulp down its “medicine.”

Friday I had planned to get out of the house for the first time in nine days to go to a travelogue about New and Old Jamaica. It was only a mile away but the roads were bad because it was too cold for road salt to work, so I stayed home. I don’t intend to go to Jamaica but I’m on the travel agencies’ mailing list and they don’t care if you’re only going to the monthly presentations for amusement. They’re hoping word of mouth will reach some serious clients. “Bring your friends!” they say, and I love the Trader Joe's cookies they serve.

I actually went to Jamaica in my twenties and I loved it down there. I got so drunk on steel drums and fancy drinks one night that I kissed every cab driver we met and we were bar hopping so you do the math. It was a safe place for tourists back then, can the same be said today? We took an Italian ship around to different islands and I got my butt pitched so many times on the trip it wasn’t funny. I don’t know if Italian men still do that today, but they sure did back then. Speaking of butts, just when big butts are in fashion for the first time in my entire life, mine is getting smaller. There’s something fundamentally wrong with that. It’s got to be another practical joke, this one played on me by the gods of weight loss, bless their fickle, little black hearts. ©

The Gifts This Widow Gives herself

Have you ever researched something online, then for the next few weeks everywhere you go on the internet that product pops up in a sidebar or banner across the top? Right now I’m dealing with the reappearing toilet ads and to make them disappear I have to find something else to research. What should it be? Thrill seekers vacation packages? Serenity retreats in Tibet? Spanx undergarments? Anything to get rid of the Toto toilet ads!

I went out to our trusty plumbing shop this week and ordered a new ADA toilet. “Big deal,” you’re saying, “what does that have to do with widowhood?” Actually, quite a lot in my case. You see, for the past twelve years of Don’s life we had a potty chair over a low toilet because that’s the combination that gave my right-side paralyzed husband the most independence when it came to butt wiping. It took an hour appointment with an occupational therapist to figure that one out, but I like the height of the potty chair so I kept on using after his passing. Then the seat broke and they won’t let you just order a new one, you have to buy a whole new potty chair. It seemed silly to put $150 into a potty chair when I could use that towards a real ADA toilet that is costing me $340 plus labor to install it. Little by little the reminders of my spouse are drifting away. Don’t get me wrong. I won’t miss the ugly potty chair but replacing it is still a sad reminder that my life will never be the same with Don gone from my world. <big sigh here>

The Red Hat Society business meeting tea was my Wednesday outing. We each signed 80 Christmas cards for the shoeboxes full of goodies we’ll be putting together next month for homeless vets and residents at our adopted nursing home. We also chit-chatted about past fun and future plans. Somewhere in the conversation a lady made a comment to me that I should write a book. And dumb me, I outed myself by saying, “Oh, I already have.” Long story short, one of the other ladies e-mailed me several hours later to say she found my books online and ordered them both. My “secret life” won’t be so secret after she reads them. What’s the worst that could happened? No one will want to sit next to me unless I sign a pledge of confidentiality? They’ll ask me to drop out of the group because they can’t trust me not to write about them next? See, I told you I’m a worry-wart. I’m actually quite careful not to use people’s names when I blog/write because I do value other people’s expectations of privacy when they are in social situations.

This week I also got the test results back on my bi-yearly checkup---I’m going to live!---and except for a thyroid issue we’ll have to deal with I’m doing fine. Changing the way I eat has made a big difference in my blood work. Under protest I got a breast exam, too, which turned out fine as I knew it would. Also this week, my antique booth got a quick overhaul. The last time I was there I put my notice in that I’ll be moving out at the end of the month. The whole booth is now marked down to 50% and sales should be good through Thanksgiving. If I had any brains I would be moving out after Christmas but I don’t want to drive that far out of town in snow season so I’m letting commonsense rule over greed.

Today I volunteered at the museum where I spent a boring afternoon with the director of the place. He’s not boring---quite the contrary---but there was very little traffic coming in and that’s not likely to change until next spring except for an occasional Boy Scouts troop and other school aged group tours. One of these days I’m going to volunteer to be there when they are scheduled but I’m almost afraid to do it for fear I’ll get bit by the bug to do it again. It's kind of fun to play with the Lincoln logs in the kiddie corner.

The second anniversary of Don’s passing comes the middle of January and my holiday season in between now and then sure is lining up differently this year. Last year, there were no parties or social engagements, nothing to look forward to but the dark side of grief. Not that I would have felt like partying last year but by contrast I can see the fruits of my efforts to build friendships the past 4-5 months. I still won’t have any place to go on the actually holidays, but there are plenty of other parties in my day planner starting next Saturday with a purse party. Don’t ask me what that is. All I know is I said, “yes,” when the invitation came in to our Red Hat chapter. ©