Monday, November 3, 2008

Plumbing and The Violinist


Part I:

About a week ago the weather in Nashville began to change.

Having grown up in the Northeast, both my wife and I welcomed the cooler temperatures with gratitude.  There is something severely wrong about serving turkey on Thanksgiving in shorts and a tank-top. 

Like most people, fall weather makes me crave certain foods.  

Unlike most people, those foods include parsnips and brussel sprouts. 

I know it sounds crazy but you can blame Rachel Ray. 

She taught me about roasted brussel sprouts and root veggies and I was hooked. 

The sprouts are pretty easy to prepare but the root vegetables need to be peeled. 

This led me to one of the many lessons of home ownership. 

The average garbage disposal does not like to have large amounts of vegetable peels shoved down its gaping, grinding throat. 

Mutiny will ensue. 

Thus was the case, about a week ago, when I was making a batch of (drool) sprouts and roots. 

That’s when our sink backed up. 

I flipped the disposal switch hoping to move things along. 

The water “vortexed” and then spun to a lazy halt peppered with chunks of parsnip and carrot peel. 

I sighed a frustrated, “Of course!” and began to figure out how to fix the problem. 

We have a two-basin sink and water flowed down the unclogged side without a problem.  Therefore, I reasoned, the blockage must be between the basins, in the pipe that comes out of the disposal. 

This led me to lessons number two and three of home ownership:

2. You never know as much about plumbing as you think.  And

3. Before you attempt to remove your garbage disposal…empty the water out of the sink. 

A roll of paper towels, two saturated dish rags and copious amounts of nonsensical muttering later, I sat with my entire garbage disposal disassembled and strewn across my kitchen floor.

I looked down the pipes, I checked the disposal and could not find the cause of the block.

So I put it all back together and ran the water. 

It backed up again. 

Now, you would think, that sloshing backed-up dishwater all over my face would have drilled lessons two and three (outlined above) into my brain.

If you thought that, then you would have thought wrong. 

Another roll of paper towels, three more dish rags and a flurry of muttering later, I began to expand the focus of my hunt. 

Against all reason, I start disconnecting all the pipes under the sink. 

And that’s when I found it. 

It looked like a normal, unassuming pipe from the outside, but this one was different.

Where the garbage disposal fed into the drain from the other side of the sink, the pipe had a divide in the middle, greatly restricting the diameter of the pipe. 

And that half of the pipe was jam packed with parsnipy coleslaw. 

I cleared it out, reassembled the pipes, reconnected the disposal and ran the water. 

It drained perfectly.

 

Part II:

Back when I was a kid, my parents used to host traveling students at our house.  From “Up With People” kids to roaming string quartets, we always had an open door.  It gave me an amazing opportunity to meet people from all over the world.  Countries like Switzerland, Sweden, and Texas found their way into our lives. 

They taught me about alternate guitar tunings and how to iron a shirt. 

It’s the latter of these that is pertinent to this story. 

Since the classical musicians that stayed with us often wore tuxedoes for their performances, they had developed several ironing shortcuts.

One particular Italian violinist explained it this way, “If they never see what’s under your jacket, why iron it?” 

It seemed to make sense.  Why fix what no one will see. 

This same lesson was reinforced, later in life, by a boss who said, “don’t waste time sanding the top of a wardrobe.” 

The essence of these statements is this: 

What you don’t see won’t hurt you so don’t bother fixing it. 

I wish I had let that lesson apply only to ironing and sanding furniture. 

But I didn’t. 

For a long time, anything I could hide from other people got left alone.  I didn’t work on it and I didn’t let God work on it either.  But, like the pipe and parsnips, God, in his mercy, let things get backed up.  

He had to disassemble, and examine….everything.  Not just where I thought the clog was.  God even had to take apart the places that seemed to have nothing to do with it.  

That was the only way to get rid of the clog and get things flowing again.  

While I know that, when He was on Earth, Jesus was a carpenter, sometimes I think He might be a plumber as well.  

2 comments:

carlcartee.com said...

excellent Adam. thank you

bb said...

i love it.

and I bet wen Jesus was a carpenter, He sanded the tops of his wardrobes. If they had wardrobes in Jerusalem.