Jiggle the Handle

Somewhere in your house, either here and now or back then, you have a toilet that always runs. If you're lucky, you can just jiggle the handle to fix it. As kids growing up we had to reach a certain age before we heard it. Our parents could hear it from the driveway when they came back from the grocery store but we lacked that level of audio acuity. I'm thinking because we weren't paying a water bill (assuming we even thought you had to pay for water), we didn't pick up on the sound of money splashing and sloshing.

As a mechanically-challenged adult, whose children had the same hearing defect (so is it heredity or environment-I honestly don't know), I used to pray that all I needed to do was jiggle the handle when we had technical difficulties with a porcelain fixture in my house. I am the walking (in light of my bad knees, perhaps limping is better) embodiment of 'don't ask the question, if you can't stand the answer.'

Whether it's a running toilet, a kitchen faucet that almost-but-not-quite doesn't drip, a creaky step on the front porch or a check engine light in the car, I have routines masquerading as solutions that I can only hope continue to keep me from having to attempt real repairs. Remedies and repairs can cost money, always require thought, planning and execution, involve time and invariably have consequences (none of those are my strong suit). And that's if they work.

Then you also have to monitor the process and make sure the repair is a real and actual solution, otherwise it's on to bigger and better things. In my house, aside from lick and a promise patches, my wife is the wizard and I've learned to stay out of her way (I don't even know the names of the tools I will hand her (that's my job) that she instinctively knows she'll need to use to repair something even before she gets the lid off and really looks at it).

I think we may do a lot of our day to day living in the 'patch and pray' mode. We go to the grocer where food prices are up, so we try to buy smarter and failing that, we buy cheaper. There's more fat on the meat, or less meat in the meal or we go from fruit juice to fruit drink, but we're jiggling the handle and hoping for the best. We elect in our city, and you do, too, neighbors who promise to do their best for all of us and then we sit at our kitchen tables in the morning reading the newspaper all the while shaking our heads at what 'those people' are doing 'to us' never realizing us and them are the same.

When it's time to buy school clothes, a more reliable car, pay our taxes or develop a family or municipal budget, we can look at a sweeping long-term solution to our situation or we can apply the goldfish memory trick and nibble away at the edges while hoping someone, somehow, somewhere, will fix things for us because we can't (when what we really mean is we won't). My family, probably like yours, is living the way horses run: looking no more than one foot-fall ahead of where we are. Such are our lives in this Brave New World that we don't always see anyone else, and everyone else, running and living the same way.

Am I annoyed or frustrated (or both) that my utilities will cost more in July, no matter how many light bulbs I replace or how often I jiggle the handle? That my property taxes will go up no matter what budget my City Council adopts because they've gone up every year I've lived here? That the streets and sidewalks in my town, Norwich (CT), look more everyday like the Appalachian Trail? You betcha, and all of that is true to varying degrees for you as well.

But in my house and in my city, we look before we leap and then we look again, and then we look away and, finally we look elsewhere (usually for someone to blame for whatever it is we're too afraid to actually fix ourselves). We prefer problems that are familiar to solutions that aren't. And while I'd love to sit and chat with you some more about all this, do you hear water running?
Hang on, let me have a look. Jiggle it again.
-bill kenny