Less Than Zero

This morning, the pipes in our bathroom burst as I was feverishly trying to thaw them. Specifically the pipes behind the shower.

The previous owner, when renovating and installing the bathroom years ago, failed to put in shut off valves which proved (up to this point anyway) disastrous. I raced down into the basement to shut the water off to the bathroom and could find no valve. After three more trips up and down the basement stairs, looking and looking, I finally got the previous owner out of bed with a frantic call. I learned that I needed to shut the water off to the entire home.

I sit in our living room writing this, awaiting the arrival of my brother-in-law and my sister's boyfriend, both of whom have the knowledge and equipment to fix the pipes. I'm tired. Corrine is tired, and crying, and our bathroom is destroyed.

This is not an exaggeration. The floor, the sub floor, the baseboards are soaked and ruined. They will need to be replaced. The pipe that burst will more than likely not be the only one. When you shut the water off to the house, there is still water in the pipes, unless you blow it out.

It's 26 degrees below zero outside. The day care - our source of income - had to be closed. No running water means no bathroom breaks, no way to make lunch (unless you make them sandwiches).

Fallon's birthday is today and I called her at her mother's and sang Happy Birthday to her. The party we had been planning for her will now have to be moved to my parents and there's a good chance we will not be able to buy her the gift we wanted to.

Oh, and the truck wouldn't start because of the cold.

And the furnace will not keep running and needs to be restarted constantly.

We sleep on mattresses in the living room during the night to conserve heat.

We have the wood stoves in the kitchen and the living room going, with sheets hung in the doorways to keep both rooms warm. Therefore, when you walk through the rest of the house, you can see your breath.

I am searching for the humor, because that is what we have left at this point and that is my primary coping device.

I'm sitting here writing this with my winter jacket on, my boots, and Gabrielle sits next to me eating apple slices and caramel dip watching Toy Story 2.

How's that for funny?

No Nuts! (And other exclamations)

Our two-year-old, Gabrielle, is at the age of verbal discovery, deciphering what she is told, and weaving it into her own special spoken tapestry.

This morning she produced a drawing that included a heart. The heart was Corrine's contribution amidst Gabi's colorful scrawl. (Lots of lines, circles, loops and wriggles) She came to me as I sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee and reading The Fellowship of the Ring for the 36th time in my life.

"A hawt!" she yelled, and I looked down at her holding her drawing. She was pointing to Corrine's heart.

"You're right. It's a heart!" I yelled back (because all forms of communication are in the form of window-vibrating exclamations. "I HAVE TO GO PEE!" or "IT'S CODE IN HERE!")

I then asked her where her heart is. She looked at me and scowled. A look of confusion.

"Here!" she shouted, but it came out as He-You because she can't yet wrap her tongue around the letter R. She was pointing at Corrine's drawing.

"No. That's a drawing!" I yelled, but happily. I believe in boisterous positive reinforcement.

She looked at the drawing, then at me and scowled again.

"Hawt!" she said and pointed.

"Where's Gabi's heart?"

She pointed at the drawing.

"Nope. That's a drawing!"

I then tapped her on the chest.

"Gabi's heart is here!"

She giggled. She's ticklish everywhere. I can point at her from across the room and make her giggle.

"Gabi's hawt?!?" she said, and tapped her own chest.

"Right!"

"I want to see it!"

She lifted her sweater and tucked her chin into her chest and studied her shirt.

"It's inside," I said.

"Inside? Why?"

"It's in here. It's inside!" I yelled.

"It's inside? Hawt inside?"

"Right!"

And so on and so forth for another ten minutes. She didn't grasp the concept of course, and really I didn't expect her to. I really just conduct these conversations so that I can hear her talk. I remember Fallon and Harrison, when they too came out of the verbal fog of toddlerhood to form complete (if not a bit garbled) sentences for the first time.

It was as if on a Monday they could only chip away at the words here and there, and then magically lifted a veil on Tuesday and could string words into sentences.

Fallon liked to sing "Strawberry Peels Forever!" when I was going through my Beatles stage 15 years ago.

Gabi's vocabulary list now includes hundreds of words, but these are some of my favorites:

No Nuts = Donuts "Daddy brought no nuts! Tanks you Daddy!"
Rinn = Corrine (She is learning that her mother has another name; e.g., "Riiiiinnn! Come he-ya. I gotta poop!")
Code = Cold ("Brrr. It's code")
Fiffin Seeping? = Griffin Sleeping?
Dissious = Delicious (Things that are pretty to her are delicious) "My Gabi Turner. I'm delicious."
Pider = Spider "That's a baby pider!"
Ring a-wound a Horses! = "Ring around a horses" when singing ring around a rosey.

There will only be one window of time that her conversation will be considered cute of course. All children go through this window and once on the other side, the side in which talking is almost exclusively arguing, it ceases to be cute, and becomes annoying. And then I'll have to wait another 15 years or so before our talks become enjoyable again.

But that has not happened yet, so I will take advantage as much as I can now.

Deprived of Sleep

It's 12:48 a.m.

I am beyond tired. I'm flipping through the channels and finding nothing. I did happen to go to bed but was kicked out by Gabrielle, our 2-year-old warden. She started out on my side and when I went to bed, I hoisted her into my arms and carried her to her own bed.

She insisted, loudly, to be returned to my side of the bed. This leaves me with a quarter inch of mattress.

Doesn't really matter anyway. The furnace has once again shit the bed, which requires me to sleep on the couch, keep the living room fire going and every so often venture down into the basement to see if I can get the bastard going again.

Corrine hates this. Well, so do I for that matter.

I feel banished. Curled up, trying to sleep but waking every half hour to make sure the fire doesn't go out.

She lopes down the stairs to fetch the warden a cup of milk. Gabi can't sleep without her milk.

Corrine doesn't say anything when she comes down. I think she's sleep waking (sleep milk fetching) .

The fact is, we both had forgotten these days. The days of caring for young kids. The days of having to set aside all things in order to keep our attention squarely on completely dependent souls.

Our other children have been fairly self-sufficient for some time. They bathe themselves, feed themselves, go to the movies without us needing to escort them.

We've been able to sleep relatively unencumbered (see: childproof) for years. Now, we're back to the days of breastfeeding and bed relinquishing.

Okay, the furnace issue has nothing to do with child rearing. I would be down here on the coach, writing my blog and keeping the fires hot regardless.

I am beyond tired, and Robert Downey Jr. is climbing a ladder in his underwear in a movie that came out when I was 20.

God this sucks.

Burke Mountain, Vermont

Taken in 1998. Fallon is six, Harrison four, on the slopes of Burke Mountain in Vermont. My favorite photo of them together. They were running around, chasing each other as they often did, and I told them to stop so I could take their picture. This is what they gave me.

It pretty much embodies who they were and who they became. Close, a little goofy, a bit competitive (he's keeping a bag of Oreos from her).

Pipes Filled with Ice

I had to thaw a pipe beneath our kitchen sink two days ago. And so began the winter of our discontent. Chapter three.

Our first winter here, during the 2006-2007 campaign against the cold, was my induction into a special fraternity shared with Maine homeowners. A special breed we are, I learned quickly.

When we bought the house earlier that summer I was told by those with knowledge of such things, that I was destined to have problems with my pipes. I passed off these comments the same way you shrug off someone who tells you to change the oil in your car every 3,000 miles. You hear it passively, more excited about your shiny new car than to hear advice on how to avoid running it into the ground. Hubris, I think it's called.

Well, we had a shiny new house - built in 1850, mind you - but shiny new to someone like me, who had never owned a house. I was more excited about finding a three-hole privy in our barn than about the possibility of frozen pipes, the danger from which was months away.

"Dude, people used to actually shit in these things? Cooool."

Yes, I certainly gave passing thought to the idea of pipes when I went into the basement, but nothing more. I mean, the basement was not a place I ventured to very often. And when I did, it was a cool, musty place that made me sneeze and where pregnant spiders liked to hang out and ensnare my face with their webs.

I certainly remember seeing pipes down there, running along the wall in pairs, joining with others in dark corners, crawling up into the floorboards above or disappearing through walls. There were fat pipes too, but I had no clue what those were. And a lot of valves that appeared as if they had not been turned for years.

So, knowing my luck with machinery and things made of metal, I ignored the pipes altogether, chalking them up as necessary but mysterious workings beyond my small understanding. Like, you know, Slim Jims. Or ships in a bottle.

And so it came to pass that summer turned to fall, the leaves changed and then fell. The ground turned hard and the grass stopped needing mowing. And on a particularly nasty day in late November, I got THE CALL.

Corrine, downstairs, yelped and I came running.

"There's no water in the bathroom!"

And, with my acute sense of awareness and a striking ability to face an emergency clear-mindedly, I said, "Huh?" And I cocked my head to the side the way a dog does when you ask him if he wants a beer.

"The pipes are frozen!"

This sets a man in motion if nothing else does. When you are told that the pipes are frozen, the first thing that springs to mind is Gene Hackman in The Poseidon Adventure wading waist deep, the seawater surging higher, frantically looking for a way out of the doomed ship. You are sure this is your fate.

Your hand grabs the doorknob to the door leading down into the spider incubator and you wonder "Shit, if I have to step into water will I get electrocuted from the furnace?"

Seriously. It brings to mind a CNN crew on your front yard interviewing your neighbors.

"He was a great guy. I mean, I just talked to him yesterday when he was pouring K1 into his oil tank."

Anyway, I ripped the door open, despite the imminent drowning that awaited me, and I dashed down the stairs. There wasn't a drop of water anywhere, of course. I hurried to the general area of the bathroom, which is to say I had to stop and draw a picture in my head of the first floor, and then trace my steps to that spot. Of course, had I just, you know, FOLLOWED THE FUCKING PIPES ABOVE MY HEAD I would have gotten there quicker.

I knew somehow that thawing the pipes meant using a blow dryer. (Technically, if you're from Maine, it would be "unthawing", the same way we call a driveway a dooryard. Or foot riggin for shoes. We get it if the rest of the world doesn't) .

Now, mind you, I am still in 911 mode, thinking that at any moment all of the pipes within the house would explode. So I am rushing, my breath puffing white clouds, my fingers aching, assured that this is how people were found dead from hypothermia. I raced upstairs and did the best ER impression ever, pulling Nurse Corrine aside by her arm. She was standing at the head of the stairs, obviously listening for the sound of me drowning or burning up from electrocution.

"Are you mad, woman? Find the space heaters. Stat!"

I found the hair dryer and plummeted down into the freezing bowels of our house once more. I hurried to beneath the bathroom and found the outlet in a corner. I plugged it in and turned it on. My eyes fell upon the place where the pipes turned 90 degrees and up into the floorboards of the bathroom.

I went to it in a rush and yanked the cord right out of the wall.

"Heinous Mother of the Invisible Bile Monkeys!" I shouted.

I needed an extension cord. And I knew, I JUST KNEW, that I was using all the extension cords in our house because every room only comes with ONE OUTLET.

I raced back upstairs nevertheless, found a cord in our bedroom and nearly destroyed the lamp into which it was plugged.

"To hell with light! Save the basement!"

Nurse Corrine was hovering in the bathroom door. I pointed and shouted, just before disappearing back into the basement, "Stand guard and check the water every three minutes!"

Not sure where I got three minutes. In the heat of the moment, in instances of high drama, it is best to shout important-sounding things to put at ease the harried minds of the women folk.

Corrine scowled but nodded in affirmation. She is my rock, I'm telling you.

I plummeted again, straining my ears for the telltale eruption of metal, the crushing wave of water I was certain would come down upon me at any moment.

I plugged the blow dryer into the cord, the cord into the wall, turned the power on high and aimed it at anything that looked cold or frozen or long and filled with water.

I brushed the hot air onto the pipes as if I were painting. I focused it on the bent places that I was later informed were called "joints." It's important to know the technical details of these things, I find.

My arm started to get tired. My legs ached from dancing in place to get circulation of blood to the toes. The cobwebs were dotted with dead spiders and blew lazily from the frantic waving of the blow dryer.

Corrine called down, three minutes to the mark.

"Nuthin!"

"Damn the copper gods!"

I trained the blow dryer more intently, the nozzle barely off the cold pipes. I waved more crazily, thinking that a greater exertion of my energy would transfer into the blow dryer and out of the nozzle.

Three minutes later, "Nuthin!"

"Hyperbole of Saint Ignatius Toad Kissers!" I roared.

And then a horrifying realization. As I looked at the parallel pipes, it dawned on me that there are cold water pipes and hot water pipes and that I hadn't a clue which was not working.

"Which pipes aren't working?!" I shouted at the ceiling approximately where Corrine's feet would be.

"The bathroom pipes!"

"No shit! Which faucet won't turn on?!"

"The one to the sink!"

"MY ACHING ASS! WHAT WON'T WORK - COLD OR HOT?!?!?"

There was a pause. I heard the tinkling of water and hope rose suddenly.

"The COLD!"

So the hot water was working, then, I told myself and then aimed the blow dryer. But then quickly lowered it.

"Left or right?!" I harangued.

"What the hell does that mean?!"

"I'M NUMB FROM MY BOTTOM LIP DOWN. DO YOU REALLY NOT UNDERSTAND ME?!"

"Oh. Cold is on the right!"

I had been warming the hot water pipes for the last 10 minutes.

So, needless to say, after a furious assault on the other pipes for a few minutes, I heard the magical words from above.

"Got it!"

I turned the blow dryer off. I unplugged everything. I trudged back upstairs.

That night, after a day in which the stress of potential more frozen pipes that meant checking the water every three minutes, Corrine and I slunk upstairs tired and beaten. We turned the corner and Corrine made her way around to her side of the bed.

"Hon?"

Yes?" I said, and yawned, absently scratching the small patch of dead skin on my frostbitten fingers.

"You forgot the extension cord to the light."

I did something New Years Eve that I have wanted to do for awhile.

I got my ears pierced.

I took my nearly-seventeen-year-old daughter to get her bellybutton pierced and, while I was there, decided to get my lobes done. Both of them.

A few years ago I took my seven-year-old son and together we got one ear pierced. He got one stud, I got the other. His looked cool. Mine got infected and I had to remove it. I had not gone back until December 31, when I chose to have them both done.

I like earrings. I like tattoos, too (I had my first done last year - an ink quill on my right interior forearm. Get it? An ink quill?)

Anyway, there's still something a little naughty about a man getting earrings and tattoos. but not nearly as scandalous as it used to be. My brother, Woofie (that's his real name, and another blog for another day) was the first guy I knew who had either done. I thought it was cool but I feared for his life, too. I mean, these things were not looked upon by our parents as being all that cool. In fact, we attended a church whose leadership preached that such things were an assault against the temple of God. Even earrings or makeup for girls.

Woofie, as you might gather from his name, marched to a different beat. You just expected him to get marked and pierced. I mean, the guy had shoulder-length blond hair and was the drummer in his own rock n roll band. He smoked and he was the first person that I can recall ever swearing in front of our father.

I do not think of myself as a bad ass. Let's just get that clear right now. I have no delusions about myself. Well, yes I do. (I'm pretty sure I think I'm cleverer than I really am.) But not delusions about how tough I am. I cried once when I had to remove a band aid from my big toe. I have hairy Hobbit feet! It hurt like a bastard.

I got my ears pierced because I like how they look. That's really as plain and boring the truth of it is. It's a purely vain, cosmetic reason. It's my boob job and lipo.

I have to admit too that a part of it feeds my ego. I mean, the reaction I get from people is priceless. It's a study in personal expectation and perception that others have of us. We expect someone to be a certain type. We perceive people within the context of personality frames. I wear glasses, keep my hair short and build web sites for a living. Nothing screams geek more. Or take Corrine. She's a mother of four and used to work in the local school library. Trust me. There is nothing dowdy about my wife. Nothing. (She has a tattoo on her lower back that is the hottest thing I have ever seen.)

People see me newly adorned and I witness a rainbow of thoughts spread across their brows. It makes getting them pierced well worth it. Most are kind and say they like it. But, behind their eyes, you see the gears clicking. The judgements falling into place like tumblers.

A 40-year-old getting his ears pierced and a tattoo screams MID LIFE CRISIS.

Of course, there are those who make the gay references, too. Oh Andy, how thweet. I juth love the new you, they slur, wrist bent.

They joke, but I always wonder if they are truly affronted. If they, deep down, wonder about my "orientation." Are people still that insecure? Are they, well, naive? Shallow? What's the word?

Well, for the record, I am not under the influence of a mid-life anything.

And I've never been more "oriented" in my life.

I love my naughty librarian. I visit her stacks every chance I get.

My 2008 Resolution. Yes, I said 2008

Be forewarned. This blog will disappoint. I'm just saying.

I used to keep New Year's resolutions the way you make a grocery list. I would fill it when I was hungry, and therefore made wild, unrealistic entries. I would randomly rip them off the top of my head as they came to me, excited at the possibilities of how much change I was going to wreak upon myself in the coming year.

Because of how much of a complete failure I was setting myself up to be, I stopped making lists a few years ago and instead implemented the one and done plan. One resolution. And not some supersize resolution either, to make up for the list of many. Like "Save Mankind". And not something vague that I could wriggle out of, like "Work out." Work out what? My Taxes?

I also made the decision to NOT publicize what that resolution is. Not because if I failed at it people could nag me, but because I superstitiously felt that telling others would jinx me.

So I will REFUSE to tell you what my New Year's 2009 resolution is, but I will gladly share with you my 2008 resolution.

To marry Corrine.

Okay. I can already hear the grumbling dissatisfaction in some of your heads, the ones who know me. You are saying "Well, that was a toughy. You had been living with her for two years and had two children together. Please."

Well, the truth is, there was a sub clause to my resolution. A sub-rez if you will. A dependent clause. One that finished the sentence with an ellipses, thusly:

To Marry Corrine...Because It Feels Good, Not Because Others Want Me to.

Basically, I wanted it straight in my head that I was marrying her out of no obligation other than for love. As Hallmark Card as that sounds, it's the truth. I had her already. I enjoyed a fulfilling happiness, a deep friendship and passionate connectedness. We had a house. We had two children together and each brought two more into the family to make it a cozy 8. We had a couple of pets.

We also had all the headaches every couple have. Mortgage and fuel and groceries and no money ever. We had tension. We had highs and lows in the same day. Hell, in the same minute.

Marriage was not going to change anything is my point. Not a thing, except legal status. Corrine would have the dubious honor of absorbing my debts and take my last name. Lucky lass!

So, to resolve to marry Corrine in 2008, it had to come with the supplemental tidbit that I would marry her purely and absolutely because it felt really good to do.

We got married in a Legion Hall down the street. She wore a dress designed by my niece. I wore a long-sleeved shirt and dress pants. We had hay bales and straw scarecrows and Christmas lights strung. (we had planned to do it outside at our house, but Mother Nature intervened.)

We had a justice of the peace. We had no processional music. We walked with all of our children to a stage, got it done, and then ate with our friends and family.

The beauty of it was in its simplicity and how it reflected who we are. It was what we wanted.

It felt right. It felt good to do.

Resolution made and kept.