A tuft of dry grass, possibly a scrap of bird’s nest, clung to the window screen above my bed. It had been there all summer.
Abruptly, I tired of looking at it. It seemed a simple matter: Remove screen, flick tuft and, while at it, vacuum mesh.
I should have known better. “Things take longer than they do,” my friend Michael likes to say, a statement both nonsensical and true, especially when it comes to me and household chores.
I wiggled the screen every which way. Its removal was blocked by the window crank.
A less stubborn person might have said, ah well, it’s only a tuft of grass, after all. My brain works like this: This screen comes out, surely. I’m a smart guy. I ought to be able to figure out how.
The problem is, I am not at all smart when it comes to solving mechanical problems.
Eventually, it dawned on me that the window crank must be removable. It was (after a bit of a struggle.)
So then I did what I set out to do: flicked tuft out window, ran vacuum over screen, replaced screen (after a bit of a struggle), replaced window crank.
But why stop there? Might as well de-schmutzify the screen on the other bedroom window. The second one, as you might expect, went more quickly than the first (though there was a bit of struggle.)
Success went to my head. It was like I heard the voice of “Let’s Make a Deal” announcer Jay Stewart informing a lucky contestant that her year’s supply of Birdseye frozen peas was only the teaser for – A NEW FRIGIDAIRE!:
“And while you’re vacuuming the window screens, how about also vacuuming that hard-to-get-to place behind the bed!”
A word of explanation: I once bought an attractive but flimsy bed frame. When it collapsed, I buttressed it as any college professor would, with piles of books placed along the frame’s spine.
Moving the bed entails moving the books. A project. Therefore, dust collects. And my sleek new lightweight upright vacuum cleaner does not reach the space between the headboard and the wall.
Fortunately, my clunky old upright vacuum cleaner has a long hose. I keep it around specifically for long-hose jobs.
I was about 10 seconds into my new task with the old machine when the nozzle, like a hungry anteater, got too close to a silk scarf that was hanging too low. Thup!
Aghast, I switched off the machine, peered down the length of the hose and saw the wadded-up scarf.
I tried pushing it through with an untwisted wire hanger left over from my previous household chore, which involved extracting a hairball the size of Cincinnati from a clogged drain.
No dice.
Next I tried poking a wooden dowel up one end of the hose, then the other. It’s hard to imagine that a flimsy bit of silk could block the passage of a ramrod through a tube, but it did. After two hours, I gave up.
When my wife came home, I told her about my misspent morning. Time, I concluded, to seek professional help. She was unconvinced.
So together we tried the things I had already tried for another hour. Unavailingly.
Next day, I left the machine at the shop. My wife asked what it was going to cost. I hadn’t inquired.
She tried not to roll her eyes. Let’s find out, she said. Because if it’s going to cost an arm and a leg to service our deputy vice vacuum cleaner, it probably makes more sense to destroy the hose to save the scarf.
(The scarf has sentimental value. We got it in the windswept old mining town of Ward, Colorado, the day we saw a moose on the Peak-to-Peak Highway.)
So my wife called the shop and told them we wanted an estimate before they did the work. Thirty smackers, they said. Worth it, I decided, to get the scarf and still have use of that long hose.
The operation was a success, though the patient was worse for wear. Our silk scarf now looks like a sow’s ear. (Not the shop’s fault.)
I asked owner Bob Frye to recall other interesting items he’s recovered from the throats and bellies of the beasts he’s serviced over the past half-century.
“Everything you can think of,” he said. Specifically: toys, socks, rings, bobby pins, Cheerios, condoms…
Once, while on a house call, he cleared a pair of panties from a central vacuuming system.
“That’s not mine,” the mistress of the house declared.
Clearly, there are worse things a husband can do than damage a silk scarf.
* *
P.S. Speaking of misadventures in daily life, I’m pleased to report that my new Social Security card arrived 10 days after I applied for it (see my previous column). Thus equipped with the proper docs, I returned to the DMV to get my new Real ID driver’s license. I was in and out in 10 minutes.
