Category: Life

An old fashioned fix

The mechanism that keeps the fly door shut broke off during the Christmas day festivities. Someone must have pushed too hard against it and the screws that held it in place against a strip of wood on the side of the door cracked open and the whole thing fell down.

The door still works but you have to close it purposefully. It will not swing shut of its own accord and so my husband decided to fix it once and for all. He’s fixed it before, new screws, and a new anchor strip of wood but somehow it never manages to hold fast beyond a few years, so this time he fixed it the old fashioned way.

He took a piece of stainless steel wire. He has a lifetime supply of the stuff, which he keeps on a roll on his workshop. He bought several of those little cup type hooks, the small brass ones that people use to hold up pictures and he screwed in a line of these along the top of the flywire door. He tied a weight to one end of the wire and threaded it through the hooks to a certain height down the side of the door so it acts like a pulley and weight.

Every time you open the door and leave it open, the weight of the contraption on the end of the steel wire slowly forces the door to close. It’s slow because the weight is at a certain level and density such that the door will only close softly. My husband did not want the fly wire door to slam.

The extraordinary thing about this construction to my mind is the nature of the weight itself. An old tap atop a piece of brass fitting like the top of a squat tap. It once belonged to a family friend, now long dead who used to turn metal for a hobby.

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The whole construction reminds me of this friend who made so many gizmos out of metal. This friend fixed things the old fashioned way and rarely relied on modern conveniences to run his life.

Not for our friend the new water jugs. He used the porcelain jugs of yesteryear, the ones that contained an exposed element, which periodically blew. And when the element blew, he replaced it with another element.

Our friend was a man ahead of his time for recycling. He recycled, not because it was good for the environment though that might have been part of his motivation.

He recycled mostly because he was appalled at the cost of things.

In supermarkets he’d argue with the shop assistants whenever the price of an item suffered a steep rise. He’d ask to see the manager every time his regular supermarket decided to relocate items on the shelves – as supermarkets tend to do from time to time so that you need to re-learn the lay out of your local shop, and if the supermarket decides a product is not selling they pull it from the shelves.

This final crime was the worst.

Our friend’s wife hid behind a shelf while her husband regaled the manager with threats of letters to the editor whenever they took his favourite mustard, jam or butter from the shelves.

He liked things to stay the same. At first no one noticed but in time there were other signs.

Twenty years later he had all but lost his identity and could not even hammer in a nail.

It was tragic that our friend should suffer such an affliction, one which took away his greatest talent, his ability to fix things, if only the old-fashioned way.

My husband’s door – however ungainly – is a tribute to this man and to people everywhere who use old style techniques to make the world a better – if not less stream lined – place.

Silverfish don’t grieve

 

There was a silverfish on the wall of our bathtub yesterday. I caught sight of it from the periphery of my vision. A mark to be wiped away until I realised it was one of those monsters, paper eaters and destroyers of books.

Silverfish, a lovely name for an ugly creature, not so much the creature itself but what it does.

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So I plucked off a square of toilet paper and tried to trap it. The fish did a few laps around the bathtub before I had it pinned, and then I flushed it down the toilet.

‘Drown silverfish. Drown. No more paper for you’.

It occurred to me then that my knowledge of silverfish is limited to my childhood when someone told me these insects were pests for the way they ate up books. And I believed them.

A moment later, after the drowning, my guilt set in. Another person might not have been so quick to be rid of the silverfish, this insect without wings and with two long feelers in front. Silver grey like dust, these insects blend in well with the places where we find them, the cool and moist corners of libraries, the place of old books.

There was only one silverfish in our bathtub. Where was its family, the others of its kin?

Would they grieve?

Of course not. Silverfish don’t grieve. Kangaroos might.

I saw a YouTube clip on Facebook of a male kangaroo cradling the head of its kangaroo wife, a dying female, while their joey looked on.

And later I saw the short clip of a koala throwing a tantrum and screeching furiously after its fellow koala had ousted it from a eucalypt somewhere in Adelaide.

The koala looked indignant, paws punching the air and it squealed like a devastated child.  The kangaroo, too, had looked grief stricken.

The point of these clips perhaps: animals feel too.

A silverfish is lower down on the animal pecking order. But can we ascribe emotions to the insects of this world in anything but a Disney or Pixar cartoon?

We measure psychopathology by the degree to which a child, typically, a small boy, takes pleasure in plucking off the wings of butterflies.

I find myself remembering a Katherine Mansfield story about a man whose ‘friend’ visits and reminds him of that man’s son who had died in battle six years earlier during the First World War.

Left alone soon after, this man, the father of the dead son, expressionless and in shock, unable to grieve it seems, notices a fly struggling at the lip of his ink bottle. The man helps the fly out and onto some blotting paper on his desktop, where he marvels at the fly’s determination to dry its wings.

Then the man takes out his fountain pen and lets a blob of ink fall down upon the fly, now resting in the sunlight. The fly beats its wings again as if to flap them free of the tormenting ink.

It flaps and flaps until it looks as though its wings are ready to work again, when the man picks up his pen and drops another blob of ink onto its back.

This time the fly hesitates before starting to work once more at drying those wings. All the energy involved in getting them dry, flap after flap of wings, until at last the fly is ready for take off, and once more the man drops a blob of ink onto the fly’s back and this time, or maybe it’s one time later, the fly cannot muster the energy to go on.

It flops down motionless, dead on the blotting paper.

End of story, or maybe the end comes when the old man flicks the fly off the blotting paper and into the waste paper basket, a man unable to grieve, a man who cannot let himself know about how dreadful he feels to have lost a son in a war that he is responsible for, however indirectly.

The wars of old men, the generals who set things in motion, the war lords, the presidents, prime ministers, dictators, men who compete with and try to dominate, men who use their sons as fodder.

And here I am letting my mind wander too far afield.

The silverfish I flushed down the toilet in one swift act did not suffer as much as the fly in Mansfield’s story.

Grief is like that, too. It comes upon us when we least expect.

And grief can also be exhausting, something some of us might well want to tip into the wastepaper baskets of our lives so that we need not know too much about our suffering.

Only, the removal of rubbish or flies or even silverfish does not work.

The grief sneaks back, repositions, like a swarm of insects. It comes again and again to haunt us.