Did you read my blog detailing my first year of retirement? If you did, and I hope that was the case, you read about travel and pickleball, playwriting and volunteering. What you didn’t see was a description of any of the multitude of home improvement projects that kept me busy. There is a good reason I didn’t include them in my post. You see, there were none. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
To be quite clear about it, my Y chromosome totally lacks the Y326798g gene, more colloquially known as the “HandyMan Gene.” First identified in Bob Villa’s righthand-man Norm Abram of This Old House fame, with a variant discovered in Home Improvement’s Al Borland 10 years later, it is Y326798g that gives a man the confidence and the ability to hang drywall, paint a baseboard, and to cut once without measuring twice. I just have a big, gnarly, gene deletion where that stretch of DNA should be. It’s a gap only CRISPR could repair.
Despite my genetic deletion, there are some minor repairs and adjustments I am capable of accomplishing. For instance, Barb has repeatedly reminded me that the pair of twin beds in one of the loft bedrooms are as close to collapse as the Berlin Wall had been in the autumn of 1989. In an attempt to avoid an international incident, I lugged my toolbox (more on that later) up the stairs, used trial and error to select the proper hex wrench, and in the span of slightly less than one hour tightened the 16 bolts that kept the two Bob’s Discount Furniture beds from falling apart. Tragedy averted!
Now about the toolbox. I may use them rarely, but I have a lot of tools in that black box; 26 pounds worth, to be exact. It has an insert tray of wrenches and another of screwdrivers. It contains whatchamacallits and thing-a-ma-jigs and even a petite-sized hand saw with a rusty blade that reeks of tetanus spores. Where most of the tools came from is a mystery to me, but I love their brilliant patina. I just can’t recall buying any of those wrenches, screwdrivers, thing-a-ma-jigs, or either of the two hammers that nestle at the bottom of the rectangular box.
I did make one significant tool purchase recently. The ancient electric drill we inherited from my father-in-law drilled its last hole a few months ago, ending its life in a blaze of sparks. Feeling emasculated not owning a working driller (a name bestowed upon drills by a long-ago Israeli boyfriend of our daughter Laury) I ventured into Home Depot and found a menacing-looking battery-powered model for under a hundred dollars. I have only used it once, but it looks cool hanging in the garage. At least, it looks cool to me.
So if any of you need help with something around the house, please don’t call me for my help or my advice. But I will be happy to lend you my tools, all 26 pounds of them. You can borrow my cool drill too. Just be sure to return it to its spot of glory on the garage wall. I might even find a use for it–someday soon.
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