- Urban Dictionary
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This year, as October drew to a close, we came to the end of a season of construction and home repairs in the Oakes household. Over the last six weeks, we home-based workers and students have grown so accustomed to the sporadic comings and goings of tradesmen that it will seem lonely when the last of them has packed up his tools. The results of their labors include a new furnace that is supposed to save us a quarter on the dollar compared to what the old one cost, the shoring up of some subsidence under the mud room, and twenty or so feet of new sidewalk in front of the house.
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The subsidence issue came to light during a visit from Petra’s parents last Thanksgiving. When her father pointed out the clues--one interior door that was scraping the floor, two others that swung closed as if with a mind of their own, and a puddle of standing water that never drained from the clawfoot tub--it was clear that the situation had been evident for at least a year or two, at least for anyone who knew how to read the signs.
Unlike that kind of person, I’d “fixed” the more annoying of the recalcitrant doors by ordering a $4 rubber doorstop and then never giving the overall circumstances another thought.
After Thanksgiving dinner and the departure of the rest of the guests, Petra joined her father in correcting the scraping door before it carved a gash in the linoleum. The next morning, I was making coffee when my father-in-law appeared in the kitchen, wearing insulated coveralls he had fetched from the trunk of his car, and announced his intention to wriggle into our unfinished crawlspace to see if he could determine what was going on with the foundation.
A certain kind of son-in-law would have been right behind him. This particular son-in-law handed him Petra’s old digital point-and-shoot, suggested he bring back some photos, and then retired upstairs to his home office to record Important Thoughts in a notebook for the next few hours.
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As for the furnace, to start with you need to know that one grows accustomed to feeling cold in this house. The ductwork connected to our forced-air furnace only runs to the first floor, and although heat is said to rise, it does not do so particularly energetically in this house. When I walk downstairs on a cold day, I have the sensation of descending, step by step, into a swimming pool full of warm air.
Or at least that is usually the sensation. One Saturday last May, however, as I made my early-morning way down toward the kitchen and coffee maker, I noticed that the temperature contrast between the second and first floor did not seem as pronounced as usual.
I chalked this up to the late cold snap Waldhurst was experiencing. Because the furnace wouldn't have been running as much lately, I reasoned, albeit illogically, it was having to play catch-up in response to the sudden unseasonably low temperature outside. Finding the children huddled under blankets in front of the television, I passed out winter hats before going back upstairs to my office.
Descending the stairs after an hour or so, I discovered not only that the downstairs temperature had plummeted from cool to meat locker but that the household’s women were at work troubleshooting what I now realized any idiot should have realized was a non-functioning furnace. Petra had put on her own insulated coveralls and was in the crawlspace, lying next to the furnace and using a flashlight to peer into its guts. Belle, attired in parka and mud-streaked snow pants, was happily clambering back and forth through the crawlspace hatchway, fetching tools and greatly enjoying the novelty of it all.
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Petra’s father returned from his spelunk under our house with bad news concerning the foundation, and Petra and Belle never were able to return the furnace to working order. (There was a momentary false hope that a new air filter had corrected the problem, but then there seemed to be signs of a problem with the ignition system, at least according to Google, and as a result the situation seemed decidedly outside our ken.) We called Sam, Waldhurst’s master builder, and he put us on his list for the fall.
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In my early twenties I spent four years in the Coast Guard. One day, I was showing a new crewmember around our cutter. There was some gizmo or other that hadn’t been working right, and I was explaining my temporary fix for the problem—I don’t remember the gizmo or the solution, but for the sake of argument let’s say I told him to “smack it on the side,” or something equivalent—when I was interrupted by the chief engineer, who had overheard us from his desk in his stateroom.
“No, actually what you need to do is tell me when something doesn’t work and we’ll get it fixed,” he barked. “We aren’t handle jigglers on this ship, Oakes!”
Petra grew up in a house where hand tools lived on a peg board, outlined in black marker. Her father kicked off the weekends with the Saturday morning publication of a list of project and chore tasks for her and her brothers.
I grew up in a house where hand tools lived in a dusty pile in a dark corner of the basement, and I don’t remember much of anything going on that I would classify as home repairs or improvements. My mother might want me to note her devoted gardening here, but really that’s not quite the same. I do remember matchbooks under wobbly table legs, Vise-Grips substituted semi-permanently for broken faucet handles, pictures hung in front of damaged drywall, and, altogether, a general sense of accommodation with and acceptance of the general trend of the universe toward disorder. Things fall apart. Why not read a book while you’re waiting?
One of my favorite photos of Petra shows her walking to the car after her bridal shower. She is wearing a pretty sundress and, in the moment the photographer snapped the picture, she appears to be wobbling slightly while making her way across a grassy lawn in heels. In one hand she is holding a plastic case containing the circular saw that she had registered for. At Home Depot.
Petra and I have now owned three houses together, and each has boasted at least one tool pegboard, no thanks to me. Our friends and families perceive me as hapless and Petra as the handy one. It’s not that I am unable or even unwilling to swing a hammer on one of Petra’s projects, but there is a decided difference between our respective levels of motivation.
Let’s just say it would probably never have independently occurred to me to lay a tile floor in the sunroom of our first house; construct built-in shelves to conceal a section of furnace flue pipe that for some reason climbs the wall of our dining room; install ingeniously engineered rope and tire swings and a rock-climbing wall in our backyard; or really any of the rest of the long list of projects through which Petra (often with her father’s advice and help) has left her mark our various homes and made all of them such nice places to live.
I am sure that I must have resented the chief’s implication that I was a handle jiggler at the time. By that point in my enlistment, you’ll have to take my word for it that I had actually become a competent sailor, and of course I understood the abstract principle that a military ship must be kept in tip-top condition so as to be able to head out into storms and other challenging circumstances at a moment’s notice.
From the vantage point of 25 years later, though, I have come to wonder if the chief might have been on to something, might have identified a personal quality in me that, although I can overcome it when I need to, remains somehow essential to my identity.
I am a handle jiggler, and I am not ashamed.
Handle jiggling may very well be the song of my people.
