I am not much of a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to home maintenance. In fact, I’m generally one of those do-as-little-as-possiblers when it comes to maintaining my environment. My desk at the office is a farrago of files, messages, stray documents, bills and small clerical devices. Often, my daily approach to getting work done is working on whichever file I see first on the surface and attacking the layers like a mountain top removal excavation. Finding the calculator, correction tape applicator or the letter opener often requires vertical mining methods punctuated by expletive blasts of frustration.
At home, when I was living alone, the kitchen sink could go as long as a week before either shame, disgust or the inability to prepare a meal would motivate me to do the dishes. I rationalized that it was more efficient and economical to allow the unstable stacks to fully ripen before harvesting the entire crop. Now that there are two and half of us, including one helluva cook, the speed at which the dirty dishes, bottles, pots and pans reach critical mass accelerates to daily velocity. Floors also require regular dredging but other domestic surfaces don’t clamor as loudly for attention. If there is no immediate need to navigate through an empty space, piles of flotsam and jetsam quickly accumulate and harden into dauntingly impenetrable geologic formations, archeological time capsules filled with the fossilized daily effluent of stuff draining into my possession.
I’m a decent groundskeeper as far as mowing the grass, watering plants and chopping up branches. When it comes to unskilled labor, I’m willing to give it a go. However, if the job requires expertise in plumbing, electrical or carpentry skills, I wisely restrict myself to the level of plunging toilets, changing lightbulbs and hanging pictures. The bathroom is one area of the house into which I have boldly ventured where no incompetent should go. My efforts at fixing the flushing mechanism of the toilet by stringing thin wire around a rusty lever and trying to attach it to a floating plug were based more on desperate hope than skill and met with only fleeting success.
Caulking the tub is a recurring bit of maintenance in the lavatory that seems more suited to my talents. The Battle of the Mold in the shower is one of those grueling struggles in which I can only bring myself to engage at the point that the science project threatens to escalate into a biological weapon of mass destruction. Scrubbing the discolored tiles and grout exercises areas of my musculature and patience that don’t normally get much use. However, ripping out the spotted, rubbery ribbon of caulk and replacing it with a glistening white stream of creamy sealant is an aesthetic challenge I relish. Creating a thin uniform line out of viscous silicon requires the same steady hand-eye coordination I use when I paint my watercolors as I sculpt a delicately rounded surface between wall and tub by gliding through the cool wet lava with the tip of my finger.
As I prepared for my latest adventure in caulking, I knew that a number of home repair materials used for projects over the past decade or so lay buried in the concrete graveyard of once-useful items hoping for an after-life that is my basement. This museum of my past, filled with randomly piled relics from my life with the Girlfriend, remained virtually untouched over the years of her absence like the bedroom shrine of a child who had disappeared. I decided to sift through the timeless chaos for what I needed to do today’s job instead of shopping for it. I found an applicator gun and virgin tubes of caulk which I hoped would be filled with the stuff that would return the seal around my tub to its once-gleaming glory. I vaguely remembered that an angled cut needed to be made on the plastic nozzle. When I squeezed the trigger on the gun loaded with the circumcised tube, nothing happened. Even after poking it with a nail to puncture what I hoped was the hardened crust topping a gooey center, nothing oozed forth. I pulled the tube out and looked at the part of the label that read “Best when used by 4/08”. It hadn’t occurred to me that the fresh, pure white impregnant, never exposed to the world outside it’s cardboard chamber, would petrify into an unusable memory.
