…all held together by tension
Two days ago, an exhausted Greyfox said, “I’ll take it easy tomorrow.” That was yesterday he meant, but yesterday three huge boxes of knives arrived at the Willow post office. He woke Doug early, after the kid had gotten only about 3 hours’ sleep, and hauled his drowsy hulk into town to schlep the boxes and spare the old fart’s hernia, which he had aggravated with the last previous knife shipment.
When I went to bed last night, earplugs firmly in place, head under the covers to shut out the light, he was still checking invoices, sorting and labeling cartons, putting away stock–here in the “front room”, our bedroom, where the woodstove, both PS2s, his TV/VCR and this computer are, along with most of the rest of our life. He was already exhausted and I’d heard him say that he’d relax and take it easy today since he hadn’t done it that day. At the time, Doug was wrapping up what he’d been writing here, preparing to move to the PS2 when I left it to go to bed. I don’t know what time he went down, but he hasn’t gotten up yet.
I slept through the night last night for the first time in weeks. I’ve been going on from three to five hours of sleep most nights lately. It’s part of the “fibro” thing, ME/CFIDS, this damned disease. Sleeping ’round the clock is a rare thing for me to do, but I was down from eleven to eleven and pretty groggy when I awoke this morning, even groggier than my usual early morning state, which is very much so.
When I raised a hand and gave a little wave to Greyfox (who had turned in his chair at the foot of the bed when I spoke to him), and reached up to work out my earplugs, the words with which he greeted me were, “Will you pick up that phone and tell me if you hear a dial tone?” Sure, no prob… the arm I snaked out from under the covers to reach for the phone didn’t even encounter the expected chill. The interior temp was quite warm by our standards in winter, around 50°F. It’s now up to about 23° outside, but windy enough to make it feel a lot colder if you’re out in it.
The phone by the bed was dead., just as was this other instrument beside the monitor. That meant that Greyfox couldn’t call in his order for NA supplies, couldn’t check his email or his Xanga comments. Immediately we started discussing what to do. Getting on the cell phone to call the phone company wouldn’t work for a couple of reasons. First, we’re in a dead area, cell-wise, here. Coverage is lousy out here in the boonies. More importantly, until we determined whether it was our problem or the phone company’s, we couldn’t take any action to fix it.
Our phone co-op gives us members the option of owning, installing and maintaining our own phones and interior wiring, at a much reduced rate over that they charge when they do all of that. Being the self-sufficient sort and usually short of money, I have always opted to do it myself, and so did Mark who lived here before us and still owns this land my trailer sits on. I told Greyfox, again, for at least the sixth or seventh time since we’ve had periodic outages before, that our first step could be to take a phone out and plug it into the test jack on the pole beside the house and see if the wires coming into it were hot, or he could walk to the neighbor and see if there was a general local outage.
Since the snow around there is deep, having been augmented by stuff shoveled from the roof, he opted for the walk first. He was gone a while, of course, having stopped to schmooze with Walt and Lori. When he got back, he reported that they had a dial tone. I started to get up and suit up to go out and check the wiring at the pole, but he stopped me. It wasn’t entirely chivalrous, but also uncharacteristically practical of him. He and Doug (and I, when I think that far ahead) have been trying to take care of me, to prevent my getting overly fatigued or chilled. A partially functioning wife and mom in here is better than one that doesn’t work at all and only lies abed and whimpers while gasping for air.
So, I explained to him what he was looking for and how to test the phone. He went out first with screwdrivers to open the box, and left the phone inside for some unspecified reason. Then he came back for an icepick since the box was iced shut, being in the drip-space for the icicles that form at the edge of the roof. He got it open and came back in and reported that there was a broken green wire visible. That much of what he said made sense to me, but as for the rest of it, we encountered language problems. My vocabulary includes such words as flange, terminal, knurled and such… technical or mechanical terms. His vocabulary includes terms such as “thingie”, “floop” (or the noun-form, “flooper”) and a host of other non-words that often fail to convey much meaning when he is speaking to me. Doing any mechanical task by remote control through him is fraught with frustration, although similar work with Doug usually goes without a hitch.
I kept starting to get up and dressed and he kept stopping me and going back out to look again and come back in and tell me what he saw. We eventually agreed that the thing to do was to reconnect that green wire, but there was a problem. What was left was too short. He wanted to splice it with some different wire. I said we would need to solder such a splice, that the lines carried data transmissions and a simple, corrosion-prone, taped splice wouldn’t do for very long. I suggested that he pull that “cable-type-thingie” that disappeared down into the snow, to see if he could get enough slack to reattach the existing wire. That worked. It had probably been the weight of the snow pushing it down that broke the wire in the first place.
We didn’t know immediately that it had worked, though, because when he started the whole job the first thing I’d done in here was to unplug the main phone line from the jack, so he’d have that phone to take out and test the lines. He came back in, lifted the handset on the second instrument here by the computer, and found it dead. I was distracted at the time, and didn’t immediately snap to the whole system’s having been unplugged, so he went back out and fiddled with his new connection again.
What had me distracted was a table lamp I was trying to put back together. In order to reach the jack where the main phone line was plugged in, I’d had to move the orange footlocker (remember that, Sarah?) that was standing on end in the corner serving as my bedside table. While I was at it, I’d decided to do a little household task I’d been putting off. It’s a complicated switch of four lamps, so that the big one that is now on Doug’s bedside table will be by Greyfox’s chair in here and the small one that is now on the “rock shelf” where we keep our gem and mineral collection will be in Doug’s room. Lamp A moves to position D, lamp D goes into position B, lamp B goes in position C, which lets me put lamp C in position A, which is the reason for the whole switch.
Lamp C has a nice pleated shade that matches the one on the new hanging lamp I recently acquired for five bucks at a thrift shop, which now hangs over Greyfox’s chair. It seemed to me to make sense to put the matching one nearby, especially since Doug would prefer the more reachable little one that is now on the rock shelf, but we couldn’t just switch the one from beside Greyfox’s chair to the rock shelf because it’s too tall and the ceiling too short. And so, the tall one goes beside my bed so the shorter one from there can go on the rock shelf so Doug can have his little one so he can reach it to turn off the light at night… if you’re gonna get it you’ve gotten it by now and if not, who cares?
When I went to move the tall lamp to my (new) bedside table (having decided to put the footlocker beside Greyfox’s chair and stack two little side tables (one of which has been in the way ever since he closed down his roadside stand for the season) behind the bed to make it unnecessary to move furniture to reach the phone jack, and to give me more book shelf space back there, as I was placing it on the table, it broke. It had been put together in a slipshod fashion, so that the harp and shade were held on only by a few threads at the bottom of the socket device. Those threads were worn, and the top snapped off and no amount of my effort could get it to stay on reliably, durably. The threads would catch, but any little jarring would make it pop off and the shade would be askew again.
I looked it over and saw that the lamp was held together by a flat round knurled nut at the top, just underneath the bottom section of the harp. All I had to do was take that off, loosen the nut at the bottom of the rod that holds the whole thing together to make a few more turns of thread available at top, put the harp-bottom underneath the nut… no prob. So, with the lamp unplugged, I started working on that while Greyfox was outside fixing the phone wires.
When I got the nut unscrewed the whole device fell apart, of course. What had seemed a solid object disintegrated into a collection of disparate pieces. That nut had been screwed on really tight, and what flashed into my mind was that the whole thing was held together by tension. It was an amusing thought that seemed to me to apply equally well to our family life, and I resolved to share it with Greyfox when he got back inside.
As I was finishing my successful reassembly of the lamp, Greyfox got back in from his last trip out to re-repair the connection that hadn’t seemed to work the first time because we’d neglected to plug in the line in here. I plugged in the phone since I was in that corner anyway, and he plugged in my reassembled lamp for me. I shared my little insight about things held together by tension, and he gave an odd little laugh and said he could relate to that. As I cleaned up the mess on my bed, I said I hoped I wouldn’t find any spare parts I’d forgotten to install when I reassembled the lamp. Then I found one: the lock washer from under that nut whose tension holds the whole together, the washer intended to keep the nut from working loose, the little piece meant to maintain the essential tension.
As I stood there holding it up for Greyfox to see, he looked from me to the lamp and back and said that I’d probably put it down somewhere with the intention of using it if the lamp worked itself apart, but that I’d forget where I put it and then I’d be…. But by then I had already dropped the lock washer into the southeast corner of the little box that holds my small hand tools on my jewelry work table. If I ever forget where it is, and need it, I can ask you. You’ll remember, won’t you?
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