Handy Man

Husband can fix anything.

Apparently as a child, he had a fondness for taking apart various electronics in his house and reassembling them.  His parents didn't always notice - though they caught him in the act of taking apart the phone one time. 

The slow progress of the Buick restoration notwithstanding, Husband is really incredible.  For example, there was awhile during law school when my car wouldn't start.  Husband went out and tried starting it a few times, came back in and read the Internet for fifteen minutes, went back outside, and I heard the car start.

Liz:  How did you do that?  What did you do?

Husband:  Well, the solenoid is getting jammed when the engine cools off and so you just need to knock on it a bit to get it to start.

Liz:  The what?  Where?

Husband showed me in the engine where to knock and gave me a screwdriver to knock it with until we could get it fixed.  So I had a week or two where I felt very cool and mechanically inclined; if I was going to drive someone and my car wouldn't start, I'd just casually remark, "Oh, it's probably just the solenoid, let me take care of that," grab the screwdriver, pop the hood, and handle it.  No one could ever see that I was literally just banging on a piece of the engine with the screwdriver, so I looked cool.

Aside:  I used to play the excellent video game The Sims* all of the time, and occasionally they would need to fix an item in their house, and the way they would do so would be to wham on the item with a hammer.  So you'd see the Sim sitting there, just banging the screen of her TV with a hammer for a few hours of her time, and then her TV would be fixed.  Based on this and my experience with the solenoid, the only way I know how to fix anything is to wham on it with some sort of blunt tool.  

A week later, Husband took the car into the shop.  He came back not very long later.

Liz:  Did they fix it?

Husband:  They wanted A THOUSAND DOLLARS to fix it.

Liz:  Is my car worth a thousand dollars?

Husband:  No.

Liz:  What are we going to do?

Husband:  I'm going to fix it.

Husband went on Amazon.com, bought a part for $45, and two days later spent twenty minutes installing it.  The car was fixed perfectly.

When we hired a monthly  housecleaner in our old house on a trial basis because we were living in squalor (in my defense, I was commuting for three hours a day) and she proceeded to yank our entire showerhead out of the wall in the process of cleaning the shower (?!?!????) and Husband found water literally leaking into the wall, he was able to fix the problem with the pipes until a plumber could get out the next day.  

In our new house, Husband installed a dimmer switch when I wanted one for the chandelier in the family room - a chandelier which he had wired in after I bought it on craigslist.  He installed the new oven.  He crawled under the house to figure out why a few boards in the dining room floor were squeaking  and reinforced the subfloor so they wouldn't.  He replaced the rain gutter on the front of the house (because the old one only went 30% of the way across the roof, and then stopped abruptly, creating a fountainous stream of water shooting out over the porch).  He installed a proper downspout.  

He also makes a mean pie.

Blackberry.  From scratch.  I know, too dreamy.

In short, Husband is entirely the functional adult I will probably never be, and I am so thankful that my best friend just happens to also be the most competent person I know.

*  The Sims was the first video game ever to sell more copies to women than to men.  It was also the best selling video game ever for a long time (until, I think, one of the Calls of Duty finally bumped it).  Not a coincidence.

Functionally hitched

For someone who talks a big game about not being a functional adult, I do have one impressive qualification of the mature: Husband and I have been married almost half a decade. Though it’s far more a reflection of his infinite patience than anything I do - he still puts up with me even though I’m a screwup - it’s still pretty good. Compared to, say, famous celebrities, we have been through:

• 14 Bradley Cooper / Jennifer Esposito marriages
• 16 Nicholas Cage / Lisa Marie Presley marriages
• 31 Kim Kardashian / Kris Humphries marriages
• 191 Dennis Rodman / Carmen Electra marriages
• 718 Britney Spears / Jason Alexander marriages

(thanks, Time Magazine, for this helpful information!  Way to be a serious news source covering the Issues of the Day!)

You might think comparing your marriage length to celebrities isn’t fair; it’s like laughing at a dachshund for not being able to reach something on a high shelf. But lawyers generally aren’t all that much better at lasting marriages, so I still think some credit is due - I haven’t yet nitpicked Husband to distraction, so that counts for something!

Now lest you begin to think I’m going to have to retitle my blog to Smug Mature Person Brags About Her Marriage, let me state immediately that the very fact of our marriage was seen by many as Highly Irresponsible. Because we got married young, son - not stereotypes-of-the-Deep-South young, but young enough that the minister who hitched us felt the need to comment during the ceremony that he had worried about us because we were so young.

Everyone thought we were CRAZY. Which had its upsides: none of our friends had ever been to a wedding before, so there was no wedding-planning pressure and they were all just really excited to come celebrate. (And, bless its digital heart, Pinterest hadn’t been invented yet, for which I am so thankful.)

We weren’t old enough to be ridiculously set in our ways, and we didn’t each already have a bunch of nice furniture that conflicted. The main thing we had duplicates of was spices, and somehow we have yet to shake this? Like how much dried tarragon does one household need?

Everyone was, of course, correct that we were crazy. But one great thing about getting married young is you get to work on your timing. Because my conclusion about marriage is that it’s like a comedy routine. Actually, it’s not like a comedy routine. It is a comedy routine. And the longer you’re together, the more you get your timing right.

We have a couple of routines we do, really without thinking about it. For example, there are the ones where I’m the straight man and it’s Wacky Husband Doing Wacky Things. So I roll my eyes about [Topic] and set him up for the good punch lines. This one is usually about his unending car restoration or fondness for old trains and rusty buckets or whatever. But then we’ll switch at other times: he’s the patient exasperated one and I’m the wacky linedancer/overemotional suitcase packer/ indignant moviewatcher objecting to legal inaccuracies in the film.

I think a lot of couples do this: you know each other’s stories and so you can either get bored by them or you can take the fun option and inhabit them. You learn where the slow spots are and help your esposo steer through them; you make it funnier by providing a contrast, or a pseudo-conflict, or a commentator. And you get better at it with time - we leave ‘em in stitches, Husband and me. (Sometimes we even make them laugh! Wait, no, too soon for an actual stitches joke?)

Though I wonder sometimes if unmarried people think married people spend their times alone with each other rolling their eyes at each other and exchanging barbs. Like they live in this horrible, real-life version of the parents’ marriage from Home Improvement.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’ll tell you this: when it’s just us, we are often just laughing at the squirrels in our yard. You guys, those squirrels are hilarious. The eye rolls are all for your benefit. Just like my inexplicable wedding-planning pins on Pinterest: just because I’m never having a wedding again doesn’t mean I won’t pin for your wedding. You’re welcome.