My father was a preoccupied man. As a teenager, I glimpsed him gesturing to himself frequently rehashing some other conversation in his head, cerebrally focused upon eliciting another outcome, if only in his own mind.

One evening at hotel motel, on a business trip, he walked out of his room onto the patio, clad only in his boxer shorts and a white t-shirt, inadvertently locking himself out of his room. He had no choice but to walk to the front desk in his underwear, the cheap kind in which the flap REFUSED to stay in place, and ask to be let into his room. Many people would require, days, weeks, maybe even years to recover from the embarrassment, but not my father…He was actually pleased with himself.

By the end of the week he shared the escapade with the family, the clerk at the post office, the staff at the drugstore, the manager of the hardware store, the old men at church, and a few of the old ladies.

Being able to laugh at yourself doesn’t come easily for everyone. It seems like the more expensive the moron moment the more time must pass before the incident becomes humorous, which brings us to last month’s water heater incident.

Due to an unrelated flooding incident in the basement, we had to move the water heater away from the wall, so the the wall could be sealed with this insanely blue waterproofing compound that dries like plastic and has the application consistency of placenta. You don’t intimidate an eighty gallon water heater into moving away from the wall by flashing the old stink eye and shoving it with your hip. You need to drain it, or mostly drain it.

Tank style water heaters have two heating elements, one in the top of the tank and one in the bottom. To avoid burning out the elements during the draining process, you must turn off the power going to the water heater. BH turned off the breaker and we proceeded to drain the tank, after several false starts due to sediment in the tank, we drained enough water to allow us to shove it away from the wall, and I mean a strong arm grunting shove. Success. Briefly.

Within an hour the problem became evident. The water temperature peaked at sixty-eight degrees. BH thinks the shoving method flexed the top element, and broke it off. Worried we might not be able to get it replaced that day, we take quick showers. OMFG! The quickest shower I have ever taken. As I tried locating body parts that took refuge during the freeze, Better Half negotiates with plumbers and home improvement stores.

The good news was we were getting a water heater installed that day, the bad news was it was going to cost as much as the camera, BH wanted. So, he gave me the details, and I balked.

I wanted a tankless, I thought we wanted a tankless, and I assumed when the beast in the basement died, we would replace it with a tankless. The tankless takes a week, he said. And we need an electrician to install a breaker to handle the amperage, he said. But we have three 220 dryer plugs in the basement, surely there’s a breaker that’ll handle it. We go to the basement to investigate the breaker situation, and that’s when we discover the snippet of information that turns BH into a whirling dervish of profanity.

Constructed as a duplex, converted into a single family, and later renovated with an addition, our house has three separate electrical panels, in different locations. The breaker BH turned off to drain the water heater was not the right one, even though it had the words “water heater” penciled next to it. One of the other electrical panels also had an entry for “water heater”. BH sulked because, he should have checked the other panels to be sure before we murdered drained the tank.

I dropped the whole tankless whining bit and tried to console him to no avail. Secretly, I was laughing, not at him, but relating to the situation, because the same thing would have happened to me if I had been the one to instigate moving the tank.

******

Later, we are having dinner with his brother and sister-in-law and the conversation turns to cameras. It seems my SIL wore out her SLR and had to replace it. They were discussing features and when the subject came to cost, I quipped, “Oh BH got a water heater instead”. I did that passive aggressive thing partners do to each other bringing up a sore subject in front of otherwise innocent bystanders. I didn’t mean it to be all passive aggressive, I thought I was being clever, then I cringed, because BH was not ready to laugh about it yet.

He starts explaining the situation in a very detailed fashion, beginning with the basement flood. When he reaches the part about the water heater, I ask if I can finish the story, and he allows me. I tell them the water heater developed kidney stones, so we performed dialysis, unsuccessfully. All of which was true, but I omitted the details about frying the element. It wasn’t important.

It’s been a month and he’s starting to snicker about it a little. But that thing that happened in San Francisco ten years ago, still isn’t funny to him. Maybe when he’s eligible for social security?

Last week, we received two thank you notes via snail mail and the contrast between them was striking. One was for a wedding gift and the other for a funeral flower.

The note from the bride and groom was unusual. It was a photo of the happy couple, post wedding, beaming in the back of a limo, with Thank You and the name of happy couple imprinted on the right side. On the back of the photo, “Sorry, you couldn’t make it to the wedding” signed Bride & Groom.

The other note, regarding the bereavement, was handwritten on a folding card. The message was poignant, personal and articulate. I saved it for a reference of how to say things that are difficult to say.

The messages were the same, but the messengers were generations apart.

For those who can’t read the low resolution text as interpreted by my crappy cell phone camera it reads:

Venereal Diseases • Aids Testing
Immigration Physicals • Viagra
Preganancy Test • DNA Paternity Test
Premarital Blood Testing
Drug Screening • Passport Photos

Who says the recession killed the entreprenual spirit? Personally I find comfort in knowing I have the convenience of one stop shopping the next time I need my passport photo and a paternity test.

In the rare instance natural phenomenon catches me all uninhibited and full of wonder my vocabulary digresses to that of my nine-year-old self. I’m both slightly embarrassed and relieved there are simple things that still impress me, not that weather is uncomplicated, but it remains beyond the influence of ordinary individuals. It never snowed much when I was a child, and more than one holiday season was spent with air conditioning humming in the background almost but not completely drowned out by my mother’s cosmopolitan taste in new age christmas music.

With snow and ice, Saturday morning’s power outage didn’t come as as a surprise. We were fortunate with a small gas heater in the master sitting room and a gas range, we could have functioned for a few days if the power company hadn’t been prepared to clean up fallen trees and restore power so quickly.

There is this unexplainable instinct that afflicts some. It’s akin to the uncontrollable desire to slow your automobile when you approach a car wreck. People claim it’s in the interest of safety, and while that is true, they also seem unable to turn their stares away from the accident and toward the officers directing traffic. They want to confirm people are okay and their help is either needed or not, but the deeper part of humanity that pulls them in like magnetic force, is simply the desire to know. It’s almost incontrollable.

My grandfather and my father-in-law were both that way. Genuinely concerned about the parties involved but completely driven by curiosity.

So Saturday morning, sans electricity and sans common sense, my partner declared we should see if it were possible to reach the local coffee house for caffeine and carbohydrate refreshment. Fine. It’s so much easier to gloat in person than on the phone, and coffee would be a nice bonus, if I’m wrong.

We made it out of the driveway, but not much further. Somebody needs new tires. I mentioned we have a second car with better tires and four wheel drive, so we coasted back into the driveway and changed cars. A smarter decision, but not as smart as staying home would have been….but I know his curiosity is driving him and he simply must know, because it is who he is. We proceed without incident, unless you consider the absence of electricity at the coffee house an incident.

Returning home,I see kids with sleds testing out snowy banks and iced driveways and my inner voice is telling me to offer them cash for a go at a steep hill. I am hungry for it, but my adult self asks if I want to break my thirty-five year streak of avoiding the chiropractor. There’s a part of me that doesn’t listen, but as I reach for the door handle, a different voice reminds me my uncoordinated self would be viewed over and over on youtube.

We were drinking coffee and sharing a pastry. Compared to the grey sky and the misty drizzle outside, everything in the coffee house warm and fuzzy, if you can call a store full of strangers in a the city warm and fuzzy. After several failed attempts at conversation, we drifted apart directing our attentions to separate things as people who spend many hours together do.

He studied the map on the wall, and pointed out places of interest (to him) and shared some of the same stories he has before, either to me or at me. I took to people watching, observing various postures, styles of dress, and beverage choices. The room was filled with interactions, some direct, most indirect, people like me watching without revealing they are paying attention.

I get the same sense of these strangers I’ve had of other strangers. It doesn’t matter what city, bar, coffee house, an airport, or museum, I always find myself feeling like the people I’m observing have it together, in all the ways I do not. I know I’m seeing a flash in the pan, a single moment from their lives, certainly not an adequate amount of time to entitle me to any level of judgement (as if we can ever know anyone that well or long enough to know all of them), but I can’t help myself jumping to the conclusion, they know who they are and they have life figured out.