----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2007 9:55
AM
Subject: [Livingontheland] Mom and dad
could've done it
Humorous and all too real!
Doug
My husband and I are typical urban homeowners which is to say, at the
mercy of our aging house. A while ago we got up one morning to discover a
distinctly swampy odor emanating from our bathroom sink. I figure swampy
odors are men's work, so I sent him down to the basement to take a look.
Sure enough, our sewer had backed up.
Our dads would have known what to do. We didn't. Instead, we panicked.
Four or five thousand dollars later, we had new sewer pipes and a new cement
floor in the basement. We also had a notion that we'd probably been hosed.
What should it really cost to fix our plumbing problem? We didn't have a
clue. Like most homeowners today, we are at the mercy of anyone with
expertise. We're dumb bunny rabbits in the forest, easy marks for anyone who
wants to eat us for lunch.
Don't get me wrong. I married my husband for his congenial disposition
and his shapely frontal lobes, not his skills with a hammer. Yet, I confess
that deep down inside, I expect every man to be able to fix things, as our
dads did, or at least to know how they ought to be fixed. My romantic
fantasies generally do not include billionaires, athletes or handsome movie
stars. I dream about Mike Holmes. I dream that he will one day show up in
his tool belt at my door and say, "Hey, little missy, I hear you've got a
leaky skylight."
Is this sexist? I guess so. But men are worried about the loss of these
skills, too.
"We can't do one-quarter of the things our fathers can," one blogger says
in a widely linked lament. Most younger men today, he notes, cannot operate
a drill press, a band saw or an angle grinder. They're absolutely stuck when
the air conditioner breaks down or the toilet backs up. They are also
hopelessly at the mercy of more qualified personnel.
My dad wasn't unusually handy, for his time. But he could build a radio
from a Heath kit, sand down, varnish and repaint a wooden boat, rewire a
light switch, fix a furnace and hang a door. When we added a second story to
our little house, he and my mother did all the finishing work and painting
themselves. (Only rich people hired painters in those days.)
My father-in-law could bag a grouse and shoot and skin a deer. He was an
exquisite woodworker, and made turned bowls and furniture. He once built a
canoe. Both dads could make a fire in the rain and had a basic working
knowledge of auto mechanics. Clogged toilets were nothing to them.
In other words, our dads were able to function competently in the world
they lived in. Their skills were crucial to the daily operation of the
family unit.
As we rely increasingly on cognitive skills to earn our living, our
practical skills are dying off. When you can make more money manipulating
symbols than you can manipulating tools, it's more efficient to call a
plumber than to take apart the sink yourself. Still, an entire encyclopedia
of common knowledge is being lost. As we become more and more affluent, we
also become more and more helpless.
The disappearance of practical skills isn't just a guy thing. Cooking has
pretty well died off, too, if, by "cooking," you include the menu planning
and food prep necessary to produce three squares a day for an entire family,
with no microwave ovens and no cheating with takeout. Our moms weren't
exactly gourmet cooks. But the meals were always on the table meat, starch
and vegetables, with the occasional homemade pie and cake, day in and day
out. Few have the time or inclination for this type of work any more, unless
they're getting paid for it. That's why the fastest-growing category of
supermarket food is ready-made meals in a box.
The outsourcing of food prep is the greatest revolution in domestic life
since indoor plumbing. You can track the steep decline of interest in
cooking by the cookbooks on my shelf (the ones I never use, although I mean
to). >From the 1980s, there's the classic 60-Minute Gourmet. From the
1990s, there's The 30-Minute Dinner. This week, I printed out an invaluable
piece from The New York Times called "101 Simple Meals You Can Make in 10
Minutes or Less." I plan to try out a few of them, when I have the time.
The trouble with not doing it yourself is that you eventually begin
doubting your ability to do it at all. The less I cook, the less I feel I
know how. I'd no more paint the house myself than I would try to make a
dress (although each is theoretically doable).
I don't even trust myself to arrange my own furniture. Instead, I call my
friend, the interior designer, who is, after all, an expert.
Sometimes, my husband and I wonder how we'd survive if, say, the entire
power grid got knocked out for six months and there were suddenly no
takeouts, no plumbers and no bank machines to get the money we use to pay
for all the things we can't do ourselves. Here's our plan: We'll use our
last tank of gas to drive up to the country and throw ourselves on the mercy
of our neighbors the ones with the Grade 8 education, the market garden,
the shotgun and the beat-up pickup truck. Swampy odors never baffled
them.
We hope they'll take us in, even though we're useless.
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