Tucson, Arizona

I'm in my father's house, having just (mostly) weathered a crisis-in waiting.

Sure, I knocked over a beverage glass as I got up to leave the restaurant last night, ice and liquid crashing to the floor and spreading in multiple directions. Yes, I spilled orange juice on myself and the table while lifting a glass at brunch. Of course, my father thinks I'm a physical incompetent, but this is nothing new.

Still, it's my first full day here and I don't want to rile my father to an explosive level too soon, so, it was unsettling to me when he arrived home earlier than expected, just as I was searching for an implement to unstuff the toilet. (It's gotta be the toilet -- I didn't do anything wrong).

Since I didn't want any visual clues to lead him to investigate the area, I had to stick my hand in the bowl and remove the excess tissue there just after I'd taken a shower. Then I had to sop up the liquid that had fallen from the tissue.

Finally, I had to lower the lid on the overfull bowl and hope this wouldn't be a sign of something amiss. Fortunately, he was in a hurry, so we left before anything could catch his attention.

Now I'm back and he's off to an appointment with his skin doctor. (Tucson, he tells me [proudly?], is the skin cancer capital of the US.)

A little while ago, I saw a family picture I didn't think I'd seen before and thought I looked terrible in it, so I took it off the wall to examine it (meaning me) more closely. When I tried to put it back, the hanging apparatus came out of the wall and just vanished.

I looked all around and got down on my knees several times to examine the floor -- even rubbing my hand across its shoe-trodden yuchiness -- but could find nothing. So, my explosion-prone father would be coming home to find his klutz of a sonny-boy had both screwed up his wall and stopped up his toilet less than 24 hours after arrival. (Not good for a 75-year old guy who who'd just had a cheesey omelet and fried potatoes for breakfast. I was already starting to think, "I've killed my father.")

Fortunately, he was not due back for a couple of hours, so I went to the (other) bathroom, where I noticed I'd used too much paper as I was about to flush and again had to dip my hands into a watery waste receptacle, this time to make sure I didn't impede the plumbing of the entire house. (Two flushes. Success! Phew.)

At some point, I refortified myself with "Special K wirh Red Berries" (eaten right out of the box, it now occurs to me, with my toilet-clearing hand), but whether it was Kellogg's flakes (not to mention berries) that helped me or not, the fact remains that I finally thought to look behind the picture below the one I'd undone and there I found it -- the "hanging thing" which had eluded me. (And when I went to get it, I feared for a moment that I would end up knocking this picture down as well.)

Somewhat relieved, my eyes focused better as I rescanned the floor and there it was, no, there it wasn't, wait -- there it is -- The Nail. (You know -- for putting the hanging apparatus on).

I placed the nail in a hole in (more or less) the right position on the wall. There was another hole above it, which may have been the proper hole, but it looked like it could no longer accommodate the apparatus. (Oops.)

Then I put the hanging thing on the nail, and the picture on the hanging thing and - voila! -- my father's pictorial tableaux was (apparently) whole again.

Fortunately, the deteriorated upper hole was hidden by the picture frame. (Hopefully, my father has aged into sufficient forgetfulness to not immediately notice the thing is -- maybe -- lower than it used to be.)

Ahh. My first morning in the old west.

Now, it's one o'clock -- the prime of the day -- and I'm ready to really explore this corner of cowboy country.

Somewhere, I gotta find a plunger to unstuff the toilet.

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11 January, 2007 @ 21:25 GMT
http://blogs.chortle.co.uk/andrewjlederer