Plumber, he's not!

​Well, I have survived Tom’s first week of retirement.  Everyone kept asking me what we were going to do when he retired, and I had to respond with the “I have no clue.  Tom doesn’t even know what he’s going to do!”  I was cautiously optimistic this was going to be a good thing, but I have to be honest, Tom and I have successfully made it through 23 years of marriage while not spending a ton of time together.  Oh, we do everything together after work hours, but in our lives, there has been a lot of work, hours that went into the evenings frequently, raising children and doing all their activities, just rushing through our days like we were on fire.  So thinking about Tom having all this time on his hands and possibly being home in my hair when I’m trying to work was met with a bit of apprehension.
 
We left for the beach a few days after Christmas.  We were redoing the bathrooms in our condo down there when Hurricane Matthew hit, and the workers that were supposed to put the new vanity tops in had to do more important things, so these vanity tops had been sitting in this condo in boxes since October, and the floors and custom shower and other things were completed but the old tops were still on the vanities, and I needed to paint, etc.  So we took off to try to accomplish this work ourselves. 
 
When we get the new vanity top out for the master, we set it on the vanity, and the pipes don’t line up right anymore for the drain.  So Tom (who has never done this before) sets out to try to do this Lego puzzle called plumbing.  He goes to Lowe’s and gets what he thinks he needs, crawls under the sink, lays there for not a small amount of time studying the situation, then realizes he needs more than he got from Lowe’s, so back he goes.  This takes up one afternoon and evening.  The next morning, he realizes he needs different things, so he goes back again.  Now, each trip to Lowe’s is 20 minutes one way, so it’s not a quick and easy thing.  By the end of that day, we had been to Lowe’s three times, the last time at like 8:00 p.m. when he’s saying that he just wants to get this over with by this second day.  I didn’t participate a whole lot other than to go back and peruse him laying on his back under this sink, telling me what didn’t line up, studying what he needed to do to make it line up.
 
The last trip to Lowe’s, I had surveyed the pipe situation and sort of knew what we were looking for (I thought!), so we both go.  We stand there in that plumbing aisle and look at these HUNDREDS of boxes of white pvc parts.  There were couplers, reducers, flexible pipe (which we bought to use and later read on the tag it was only for landscape outside work – RATS!)  There were bushings (I had always wondered what a bushing was – and still couldn’t figure it out even with one in my hand.)  My dad had always talked about “putting a bushing on” and I would just act like I knew what he was talking about.  Anyway, we stand there, exhausted, with this plumbing puzzle fresh in our minds until we actually had the parts in our hands, and we ponder and study and ponder and study.  Part of the problem was that we had to bend to reach the pipe coming in from the wall, and at one point, Tom had the parts all lined up to meet that metal pipe part, and when he grabbed ahold of it to move it toward his new creation, it broke off and literally fell apart in his hands.  Which means then that that pipe has to be replaced as well.
 
Long story short, the three trips that day and two the previous day did not do the trick.  The next day had two more trips.  At the end of the day, he had learned the use of plumber’s glue and putty and tape and how all these pvc parts fit together and what you have to do to not make it leak.  It was an ORDEAL!  The other vanity just matched up and it was a five-minute deal.  I have to brag on him – in all of this on-his-back work, he did not complain a bit.  He wasn’t all stressed like he would have been before, when time was always such a pressure because you didn’t have enough.  He just went with the flow (or should I say “the leak”) and got the job done.  I’m thinking I could like this retirement thing ….
 
As I thought about what an ordeal this project was and whether it would have been such an ordeal for someone who started out knowing what they were doing, I began to think of how God has to piece us together when we get off the right path, how when we have twisted and turned and broken ourselves into a million pieces, he knows just the right glue to make us whole again.  I was just listening to Governor Rick Scott on the news talking about the attack yesterday, and he said, “For me, it’s my faith that gets me through.  I just have to pray to get the answers I need.”  And I thought what a perfect testimony that was in the midst of unspeakable evil and carnage.  If we would just keep on the path we know to be right, we won’t end up being such a pain for those around us and such a job for God to keep putting back together.  And God is easier to get to than Lowe’s!  Stay warm and love those around you…our days together are not guaranteed.

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