The Handyman Can’t

Earl Fowler

My dad was one of those guys who could fix anything. Jammed carburetors, leaning fences, plugged pumps, broken vacuum cleaners that one of his sons might have used to try to siphon leaded gasoline from a 1962 Plymouth Valiant (which died but once), cracked toilets, frayed furniture — you name it, he could mend it.

Everything, as the cliché goes in most working class families like mine, except his own broken heart after Mom died.

Save for the foundation, he built our family home with his bare hands (and hammers and nails and that other gadgety and gizmo stuff I never got around to mastering). When he was a little older than I am now, he took one look at the decrepit bungalow my wife and I had bought in a Montreal suburb (via the 30-grand down payment he provided) and rendered it livable by insulating and ventilating it properly, with such valuable assistance from me as holding the ladder and guessing which one was the Robertson screwdriver.

“Not that one. That one.”

It didn’t escape his attention, or mine, and certainly not my long-suffering wife’s, that I somehow missed out on the family DIY gene. Early on, it must have slipped through the railings of my crib and galumphed willy-nilly into the bedroom wall, immediately mulching the right hemisphere of my developing infant brain into a hazy, klutzy clutterbuck of spatial non-recognition.

My hands are cinder blocks. I get tangled up in cordless phones. My Mr. Bean-level ability to make the wrong call, whenever I have a 50-50 chance of being right about which part goes where, is off the charts. Especially early in you’re-on-your-own-Buster-Brown household improvement projects when it REALLY MATTERS.

But hey.

Like the song says, we are all just prisoners here of our own devices (including Robertson screwdrivers and those obdurate ratchet and socket sets that, once removed from their plastic cases, can never be coaxed back into their proper slots within). And so, as a special Mother’s Day respite for both sides of MacGruberesque marriages like my own, here’s a Top 10 list of fraught excuses for botched jobs by the Swiss Army strife set. May they come in handy some day under appropriately disastrous circumstances:

10. It’s unique, I tell you. Who else do you know with a toiler-paper roll holder directly under the sink?

9. That goof at Home Hardware must have given me the wrong parts. Again! Where do they find those kids?

8. Gee, it looked pretty simple on YouTube.

7. They must have included the wrong manual. How’s your Mandarin?

6. No, not ruined. Interactive.

5. That loud crash? Just testing whether Einstein’s photoelectric effect would stand up to a random gravity check.

4. It’s a minimalist approach. We don’t need these extra bolts and screws. Probably.

3. What if we combined the untapped potential of duct tape with an immersive escape room experience ... honey? Are you crying?

2. But I didn’t break it. I liberated it. It’s an emotional-support performance art piece now.

1. Two words, babe: feng shui.