Of mice and men

I grasped the tiny mouse mummy by the tail, between thumb and forefinger, and dislodged him gently from his final resting place. This happened to be folded over a fan blade in the hood overhanging the kitchen stove, so there was a distinct 90 degree crease in his midsection. Still, he was dessicated and featherlight and otherwise as straight as a piece of balsa wood, and if I’d been so inclined, I could have amused myself trying to balance him tail-first on the tip of my finger.

My reaction wasn’t a macabre juggling act, though, and so instead I pitched him without ceremony into the toilet, flushed, and returned to the stove where I flipped the “on” switch for the hood fan and heard it hum to life for the first time in at least six months. And noted again the amusing, sometimes infuriating, and ultimately bedeviling differences between men and women.

I’m no expert on the subject. Philosophers, writers, poets, artists, psychologists, Dr. Phil, Dr. Ruth, and the guy who wrote “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” have all run with the ball on the subject from the time “woolly mammoth with assorted greens” was on the dinner menu.

What had me laughing and grateful on this day, though, was the simple fact that no matter what problem I may be facing, and what machinations I may be thinking through to solve it, the reaction from the men in my life has usually been… “let’s open ’er up.” And so there’s where we’ll start…

The question, posed over coffee one morning to the man in my life, was simple and straightforward. “So what do you think would be involved in replacing the hood fan over the stove?”

The fan hadn’t worked for at least a half a year, perhaps longer. One day it worked as well and dependably as it had for every day of the previous twenty five years. And then one day it just stopped. Not a snap, not a sizzle, not a groan. Just stopped. Leaving me to try to cook very carefully without spilling anything on the burners, because the resulting smoke had no place to go except out the kitchen window or the rest of the house. And with the cold weather setting in, opening the window over the sink and fanning the smoke out with a dish towel was getting old.

So the question was legit. My instinctive response when something old gets broke is to figure out where to buy a new one. So the questions followed in quick succession: What do these things cost? Could I pick one up at Menards or would I have to go to an appliance store and shop for one? Would installing it be fairly simple? Would I need an electrician to put it in? What, basically, would the job it take?”

The answer was a laconic “well, about an afternoon and a whole lot of swearing.” But first, of course, there was the inevitable “let’s take a look.”

We looked. Peered around at the dimensions, tried to figure where the air logically vented out, studied how it was attached to the wall. Visions of installation costs, a strange electrician in my kitchen, possibly a new stove to match the hood fan as long as I was out shopping, and how to finance it all, danced in my head.

Then, the inevitable words, “let’s open ’er up” came out, and I stood back as the testosterone in the room took charge. In about fifteen seconds the metal screen was off the fan, the unfortunate mouse came into view, the intractable obstacle was removed, and the fan was up and running again.

And I was suddenly reminded of a similar scene a few months before, involving a broken vacuum cleaner. An older upright model had quit working one day, and rather than look into getting it repaired right before company showed up for Thanksgiving dinner, I drove to a nearby Kohl’s and bought a new one. It worked just fine for about a year, until the day I accidentally drove it over a sock in the laundry room while my attention was diverted elsewhere, and the smell of burning rubber and other drastic things mechanical brought me back to earth. The death of the machine was sudden. One moment it sucked stuff off the floor, and the next it did not.

I pondered yet another shopping trip in the coming weeks, as the leavings from the long-haired cat and the co-dependent retriever started to collect in the corners. But I happened to mention it in passing to that self-same man in my life not long after, and one night he showed up with a bottle of wine and his tool kit.

“Let’s take a look,” he said, and he patiently undid the bottom of the vacuum cleaner. “The belt’s broken,” he pointed out. An impromptu, immediate trip to Wal-Mart up the street turned up a replacement belt for a few bucks. It looked like a giant rubber band. Not exactly rocket science. By the end of the evening the machine was up and running and sucking down cat fluff again.

And I was truly amazed. My awareness of the fundamental differences between us had dated back to the birth of my sons. Up until that point, I had kinda, sorta bought into the theory that if you give kids of different sexes the same upbringing and the same influences, they grow up with pretty much the same impulses and reactions and priorities. That was until my older son was about two. At bedtime by that age, my daughters had been content to cuddle in my arms while I read them a story as The Sandman finally caught up with them. For my son it was different. I was a tall object to be scaled, a peak to be conquered. Not content to simply be held, he fasted all four limbs around me like a starfish clinging to a rock, every inch of body language wordlessly staking a primordial, possessive claim of “this is MINE.” And if that wasn’t enough, one night he rested his cheek against the sweater I wore, deemed it too scratchy, and imperiously directed, “I want you be SOFT!!” Okaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy………….

I have been slowly getting initiated into some of the basics of “the man zone.” Due entirely to the patient influence of a certain guy I know, I can now tell the difference between a hex wrench and a hammer, a putty knife and a pliers. And the importance of keeping the chain on your chain saw well-oiled lest it otherwise start “grabbing” while you’re out cutting logs.

In fact, just a couple of months ago, I decided to personally take a screwdriver to that first broken vacuum cleaner sitting in the basement and check out a theory. Sure enough, it had stopped working because it had…a broken belt. A two-dollar replacement later, and I’ve now got two working machines, one for each floor of the house.

My first impulse, faced with a broken appliance, broken machine, broken anything, is still to start over, and start shopping. It’s in my nature, it’s in my genes, and the phrase “let’s open ’er up” just generally doesn’t fit anywhere in my vocabulary.

But recently on my trips out to the garage I’ve been looking with a mixture of sorrow and regret at the old canister vacuum which predated the other two, and just quit working one day. It sits, rusted now and covered with dust, waiting for a day when I’ve got the energy to lift it into the garbage can and set it out with the rest of the trash. Part of me keeps thinking about it lately, wondering if it was consigned prematurely to the dustbin of history because all it suffered from was “a broken belt” and I had simply lacked a more masculine gene of deconstruction and mechanical optimism.

I don’t think I really want to know.