Tsuris Tsummer 2023

Since Janet left for Ireland last month it’s been one thing after another — different makes and models of the struggle bus. Here are three stories.

Story number one: a few days before Janet was scheduled to leave (Saturday, June 17), friends who are moving away from State College asked Janet if they could stay at our house for a week while they dealt with moving-tsuris. It turns out they were under the impression that the house would be empty. Janet, being famously magnanimous, said that Jamie and I would be there but that they could stay anyway — we have a spare room. I was fine with that but wanted it to be clear that I couldn’t do much socializing, because I’m revising a book manuscript and doing the usual Jamie care. But I’d be happy to cook dinners for four instead of two — I would just alter my shopping plans.

Our friends arrived on Thursday. On Friday afternoon, we got a surprise text: NERF (Nick Evie Rachel Finn) had made a last-second decision to come to State College for the weekend! Well all righty then, we can manage that — friends stay in the spare room, Janet and I move to Jamie’s room for Friday night, Jamie relocates to his basement lair, NERF takes the upper floor.

Late Saturday afternoon I drive Janet to the airport and see her off. Upon my return, friends say, “Michael, did you know there’s a puddle around the washing machine?”

Oh, sweet mother of Moloch. This house has water issues. Friends were feeling bad about having done a laundry, but (as we will see) the washing machine had nothing to do with it. But I saw that the drainage basin was full to overflowing: that was the cause of the puddle. Thinking that maybe the new filter Janet had attached to the drainage hose had let through too much stuff, I plunged the drain (causing, of course, more puddling) while friends kindly wet-vacuumed the area, and quickly learned that plunging had no effect. Nor did sticking my arm into this very dirty water and trying to determine whether in fact the drain was clogged in the first place.

Nick, who had noticed that water had also seeped into the main basement room and was threatening all of Jamie’s stuff, suggested that I get a bucket and bail. So I did! That was my workout for the day — hauling about twenty buckets (and, at the end, one full wet vac, almost too heavy to lift, never mind drag up the stairs) out of the house and dumping them into various places in the backyard. I am quite sure that if I had not gotten myself back into shape over the past year, I would not have been able to do this.

I detached the pipe under the basin (with a bucket under it, but still, more mess) and determined that there was no clog there, either. Great. That meant something was wrong either in the big pipe leading out to the street, or in the city’s pipe. Thinking that it was a safe bet that I had been dealing with sewage for a few hours, I took a quick shower.

But when I went back to the basement, the horror went to the Next Level: the basin was re-filling. Now we had to ban all water usage (a shower! what was I thinking!) with eight people in the house, two of them small children. I put a stopper in the drain and started bailing again. The water pressure displaced the stopper. I put the stopper back in really firmly and stopped the bleeding, then called Roto-Rooter and said we had a legit plumbing emergency on our hands. They called back about two hours later and said they could come out around noon tomorrow.

The kitchen sink was now unusable. Friends booked an AirBnB.

Meanwhile, Janet was at Newark Airport waiting on a delayed connection, so we called to update her, making sure that she understood that everyone in the house knew that she had called down a curse on us. Unphased, she suggested calling the Borough of State College water management people. A fine idea! They came out faster than an Uber, shone a light down the city pipes, and reported that the pipes were dry — the call was definitely coming from inside the house. But at least the drain wasn’t re-filling; the next question would be how to dry — or more likely, remove — the 12 x 10 rug from Jamie’s part of the basement.

Sunday. Roto-Rooter teaches us a new word: fatberg. We Google it and learn some really foul things about the London sewers. But this makes no sense! We compost — we don’t put food down the garbage disposal. And we never flush non-biodegradable things down the toilets. So maybe this small meteorite had built up over a decade or two? And just decided to declare itself on a weekend when eight people were in the house?

As Nick and I put on our rubber gloves and shlepped the rug out of the basement (more wet vac, more fans to dry the concrete floor underneath), I said that I have always disliked the phrase “blessing in disguise,” and would not use it here, since there is nothing blessing about sewage. But if the fatberg had announced its presence when I was alone with Jamie, there is no way I would have been able to get that rug out of the house. Nick’s help was invaluable.

Over the next few days, I dried out the basement, bought Jamie some new storage units for his books and DVDs (a literal pain to assemble, since I have acquired De Quervain tenosynovitis recently), and took the opportunity to clean pretty much everything in Jamie’s lair. It now looks pretty good!

NERF left on Juneteenth. Things settled down. Until the following Saturday, when … the back door would not open. From the inside! Dang, I thought, getting my keys, going out the side door and proceeding to unlock the back — oh, no, wait, the door wouldn’t unlock, either. The doorknob lock was stuck somehow! The door could not be opened from outside or inside! Making matters worse, and this is an absurd self-own, the back door is the only house door for which I have a key. I could of course go back in the side door (it didn’t lock behind me), but long term, this would not really be sustainable. You know, leaving a side or front door open, especially when leaving town for two weeks.

I unstuck it and thought it was just an anomaly — did I close the door too tightly the night before? But when on Sunday the same thing happened and the doorknob stayed skewed, I knew I had trouble on my hands.

Janet advised me to watch some YouTubes about how to repair broken doorknob locks, and the first I hit upon said, “don’t repair the lock — if it’s sticking, it’ll stick again. It’s broken. Replace it.”

So off I went to Ace Hardware, seven-eight minutes away (this detail will matter later), and got myself a new doorknob lock. But it didn’t fit quite right, even though it said it was a standard size lock — because, never having done this before, I didn’t know that you could adjust the length of the bar-thing-in-the-middle from 2–3/8" to 2–3/4", and none of the YouTubes I consulted informed me of this. So I repackaged everything, and back I went to Ace to ask for help.

They asked me what the instructions said. “It didn’t come with instructions,” I replied. “Everything we sell like this has instructions,” they said, puzzled. “I can assure you that I did not throw them out by mistake,” I assured them; “I guess I assumed that this thing was so self-explanatory as not to need instructions.”

They opened another doorknob package and looked at the instructions with me. Aha! Adjust the middle bar thing to 2–3/4" and everything will fit right! Happily, I went back home.

And then got to the point where I was supposed to attach two machine screws that did not exist. I checked the instructions again, particularly the list of parts. Yep, Ace had sold me — quite inadvertently — a doorknob lock set that had no instructions and was missing two screws. Only at this point did I see the clear tape on the side that indicated that the package had been opened before I bought it.

So, third time back to Ace, this time to report that the package was seriously weird and to ask to exchange it for another. They were nonplussed, but could plainly see that the package had been opened.

Now here’s the place where I do the self-own thing again. The thing I had bought was the last one of its model, and I didn’t think Janet would like a silver or black doorknob; it had to be brass. Seeing nothing good, I decided to get a single-cylinder deadbolt (with instructions!). Taking it home and installing it quickly (I was getting adept at this), I realized with chagrin that I need a doorknob to open the door! This latch thing wouldn’t do it! Of course it wouldn’t! I am really bad at this.

So, fourth time back to Ace, and now I’ve literally put in an hour just in driving alone. I get a medium ugly doorknob lock, bring it home, and install it. Total time on task, three hours. But now I have a functional back door! All I needed to do after that is make extra copies of the keys, and the following day, that is how I learned that the mechanical Minute Key device at Lowe’s makes really, really bad copies of keys. So I had better copies made by actual humans. More driving around muttering to myself.

Whew! Now all I had to worry about was how to pack up two travelers for a sweltering New York and a chilly, rainy Ireland.

To dampen my travel / logistics anxiety (conscious as I am of the infinite number of things that can go wrong), I started packing three days ahead of time, which meant that (a) I was really really ready and (b) I was so ready that by the time our departure day arrived — the following Saturday (everything happens on a Saturday!) — I had forgotten where I had packed some things and forgotten even whether I had packed others. Chargers? Yes! Adapters? No! That sort of thing. (Janet told me there were three more adapters in the walk-in closet.) I remembered the lesson of my first (and only) trans-Atlantic just-me-and-Jamie trip in 2018: the chargers and adapters are almost as important as underwear. All devices must be accounted for, and of course each one has a distinctive charger that doesn’t fit anything else.

On one of our dog walks (we have since left the dogs with a friend), Jamie made the brilliant suggestion that we should go to Harrisburg and take the Amtrak from there. It would give me a 90-minute drive instead of four hours, and reduce our parking costs considerably — let alone the tsuris of driving to JFK long-term parking. "That is a brilliant suggestion, Jamie,” I said, “and I’ll see you and raise you — we’ll leave from Lewistown, just 40 minutes away.” Cost of parking at the tiny whistlestop Lewistown station: zero dollars and zero cents. And did I mention that it is 40 minutes away?

The only downside is that when Amtrak gets west of Harrisburg on its Pennsylvania route, it loses priority to freight, so it’s anybody’s guess when the train actually arrives. I used to joke that the Lewistown route sometimes involves cattle, and I wasn’t far wrong. There is no platform, and you can only board at one location, so boarding takes a while, especially for passengers (like us) with big suitcases who need the help of the conductors (this detail will matter later).

The benches at the station are ridiculously uncomfortable; the bottoms of them have only two slats about six inches apart, tilted toward each other. What bottoms were these bench bottoms designed for? I kept squirming in mine while playing Scrabble on my phone and watching the Amtrak train tracker as our ten-minutes-late train became a 25-minutes-late train. But finally, at 11:49, our 11:24 arrived, and people began to queue, because you can only board at one location, etc.

We were sixth or seventh in line, among maybe twenty passengers, and as we shuffled toward the train door I did my habitual, almost unconscious pocket checks. I don’t like making major journeys without a jacket, because I need the pockets. But in 85-degree heat, I was just wearing polo shirt and shorts, and the pocket check consisted of left rear pocket (phone), right front pocket (keys), right rear pocket (wallet). And that is how I learned that my right rear pocket was empty.

Empty! What in the world had I done? Had I outwitted myself, just as I did when I packed compression socks a few days early and then thought (on the drive to Lewistown) that I had forgotten to pack compression socks? Was the wallet in my briefcase for safekeeping? No. Then maybe it fell out in the car! That has happened before. “Wait here please, Jamie,” I nearly screeched as I broke into a run. Thank goodness Lewistown is a whistlestop — the car was only fifty yards away. But there was no wallet in it.

I looked back and saw people boarding the train — slowly, thank goodness. I began to think that I would simply have to drive back to State College with Jamie and cancel everything. And then I thought: that stupid fucking bench. I was squirming on it, and surely the wallet worked itself out of my pants? Yes, the wallet had worked itself out of my pants. And there it was, under the bench, almost imperceptible. But only almost.

We made the train. My heart rate did not recover for half an hour, and during that time I realized that if I had not done the habitual, almost unconscious pocket check, I would be even more fucked. I also realized that it would be a good idea, henceforth, to button that pocket, difficult though that is.

And then Jamie and I got to New York, and had a really wonderful time. But this is why travel anxiety exists, no?

Since we left New York for Ireland, I have made so many mistakes along the way that I cannot enumerate them. Forgetting that I hung up my jacket and slacks in Janet's cottage near Ballyvaughan, check (thank all the deities, I can retrieve them today); putting Jamie's sleep shirt and shorts in the suitcase I did not bring to Inis Mor, check; not knowing that you have to pay for the car park at the Doolin Ferry, check. This last required me to run back at the last moment, thereby losing our place in the queue, thereby leaving us to board after all the seats in the back of the boat were taken, thereby subjecting us all to the worst of the sea swells, which eventually got the best of poor Jamie. There's much more, but you get the idea. I told Gail and Martin, our traveling companions, that this is all on brand for me — I am sometimes impeccably well organized and a savvy planner, and sometimes a total incompetent. To which Martin replied, "well, would you rather be a consistent mediocre?" A fine question!