The fluid valve on my toilet is leaking.
It began some time back as an annoying drip and now has progressed to a fine, gurgling dribble that benefits from the tiled acoustics of the bathroom to sound like a distant clarion tinkling out some hysteric new age composition. The time for "gettin'-around-to-it" has come, and I aim to fix it myself. After all, I performed the exact same surgery on my second toilet in the basement about a decade ago,
and how much can things have changed since then?
But this is not the point of my story. It's not the fixing that I am reflecting on, but the buying of the parts with which to complete the fixing. For these I went to my local Home Depot. It is a familiar haunt for me, and once I find the aisle with the new toilets aligned high on a shelf along one side, I do what I always do at Home Depot; I wait. And I do believe that for anyone with half a brain, I looked like someone who was waiting. I waited because besides the parts, I have this fantasy of finding someone who will assure me that what I plan to do is easy and only a fool would pay a plumber to do it for them.
This time as luck would have it a handsome young employee in the orange apron was already in the aisle helping a young couple with the sink faucets. Finding what they want in this aisle, he accompanied them to some other part of the store in search of their next item. As he passed, we made eye contact and he smiled, so I thought, 'Great, he'll be back to help me when he's done with them.'
Now, I was waiting alone.
But not for long, a woman pushing a shopping cart entered and planted herself midway down the aisle examining faucets. We were waiting together.
Finally, a young woman in HD orange passed by in the main aisle, and I asked her if she could help me. She couldn't (she's just a cashier), but she promised to find someone who could. She seemed sincere, so I go back to waiting. The funny thing about waiting, without a watch, it's really hard to get an accurate idea of how long you waited. It felt like a very long time.
Finally, an older gentleman with a deliberate gate and a thick West African accent shuffled over while tying on his orange apron and asked if I need help. I explained to him what I was looking for and he decided that what we needed to do was look at new toilets, which confused me briefly and led us both to a model in the middle of the aisle.
The woman with the shopping cart was still waiting,
Once I caught on to the direction of his line of reasoning, I stopped him and explained again that what I was looking for were kits that contain the innards for a toilet made in 1942. I assured him I knew that new toilets don't come with those parts anymore, but I didn't want a new toilet.
"Oh," he said, "Those are in aisle 9."
As we turned to make our way to aisle 9, the women cleared her throat and interjected, "Can you help me when you're done with him?" And I thought to myself that that was my first mistake back with the young man and the couple. I should have made a verbal request and exacted a spoken appointment for help from him before he slipped away. A smile is such a fickle thing.
This request seemed to confuse the man, and he looked at me for some inexplicable reason, and I said, "It's okay. You can help her now."
Here's where things got awkward for me. The woman commenced into explaining about how she has this faucet that has one of the swing-arm in the middle controls, but she wanted to replace it with one that has a separate hot and cold handle. She was under the impression that with her old faucet there was only one source of water, one hose, if you will, and that the new faucet she wanted would require two hoses. Based on this she had two questions: A) Could she change between the two types of faucets? And B) if so, where would she get the hoses that she will need?
For the life of him the older man couldn't give her a straight answer. They spoke at one other creating a confused tangle of thoughts that seemed further from making sense with every new statement or question. Finally, I just couldn't take it anymore and so I slipped in a question that allowed the woman to know that I understood what she was trying to ask. I hoped it would by extension help the HD assistant to get on board, too.
But it only seemed to confuse him even more, so then I just gently stepped in and explained to the woman about how the faucets work and that she doesn't need additional hoses or to worry about changing from the one style to the other. I explained that I had recently done the same thing with my kitchen faucet. She seemed elated and thanked us both in a way that emphasized me by adding, "and you too sir,
you've been very helpful."
So, here's the thing. The assistant who I will guess was around the other side of 60, and who was born in another country on another continent, probably didn't train for a career at Home Depot. He demeanor suggested an upper class education and up bringing. For all I know his could have held a degree in engineering or accounting, education or law. But there he was. Working at Home Depot. And in spite of his intelligence and good manners, not doing a very good job of it. I thought about this as we walked to aisle 9 and hoped that our interactions there would prove more fruitful.
What he knew about aisle 9 was the general contents, but aisle 9 like all aisles at Home Depot is long and has a lot of stuff in it. Finding a place where a bunch of plumbing related items where arranged on hooks in plastic packages he declared, "Here it is."
But it wasn't. None of the stuff had anything to do with toilets. In fact, as shiny and fascinating as some of the things were, I'm not exactly sure what most of them had to do with anything! I waited awkwardly for him to grasp this, which he did and then we moved a little further down and he again announced that it was "here".
This time I suggested that all of this stuff looked like it was related to bathtubs.
"Oh, yes, you are correct," he responded. "So let's see...."
Now he stepped back and surveyed the rest of aisle 9 with a chin pinched between his thumb and the facing side of his index finger.
"Over here," he declared and pointed and at last we found what I had been looking for, or more accurately, what I had been waiting to find, for the past 30 minutes easily.
What I will tell you now is something of which I am not ashamed. There are times when falsehoods are not simply acceptable, but seemingly required; this was one of those times.
I thanked him profusely for all his help. I went so far as to shake his hand. I do wish him well, too. After all, who knows what I will be doing when I'm 60-something?
Just finished Abraham Verghese's first novel, "Cutting for Stone." It's a sweeping novel that takes us from the India and Ethiopia of the 1940's to an inner city hospital in NYC in the 1980's and back again to a missionary hospital in Addis Ababa. The course of the lives we're given cross history and localities few Americans have knowledge of while discovering the pain of betrayal and the power of redemption. And like all great morality plays, there are sacrifices for the propitiation of the sins committed.
