BRATTLEBORO — Of all the pieces of advice I've been able to pass along to my young son, few are as practical as this one: If your mouth involuntarily opens whenever you perform a manual task (as his often does), don't become a plumber.
I learned this after my wife tried passing 11½ pounds of vegetable peelings down our kitchen drain. I had explained a few times before that just because we had a garbage disposal didn't mean she should use it. The plumbing in our rickety old house barely channeled water, never mind potatoes.
Venturing down into the basement to try to fix the clog came naturally to me, as it might someday to my son. I come from a long line of men who try to fix things best repaired by other people who know what they're doing. I gave those genes to the boy, just as my father gave them to me.
My father also gave me the plumber's snake that I carried down into the basement that fateful day. The snake was rusty enough to have been given to him by his father. The snake did not come with instructions, which took me off the hook for any extra damage I might have caused with this huge metal thing and its sharp hook.
Even if the snake had come with instructions, I wouldn't have read them. I learned from watching my father that a tool's instructions came in handy only after I broke the tool, because then I'd know where to send it to get fixed.
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When I was a kid, I learned a lot while holding the flashlight or fetching things for my father as he worked around the house. I learned how to paint a window so it would never, ever open again. I learned how to hold a circular saw so I wouldn't completely cut through its power cord. I learned how to replace electrical outlets left-handed, which is how you need to replace them when you leave the power on and then shock your right hand into complete paralysis.
The day my father gave me his plumber's snake was a day my mother must have celebrated.
As wistful as he was handing this coiled strip of metal to me, my mother knew the handing-off-of-the-torch meant she could start calling professional help, even if only for plumbing. I'm surprised she never sent me a thank-you note. Now she just needs to get my father to hand over his propane torch before he burns down the house.
Whenever I work with an unfamiliar tool, I try to work by myself. I feel incompetent enough just holding something I don't know how to use; witnesses would just make me feel dumber. (Yes, there's a urinal joke here somewhere.) So, even though I like to teach my son skills, and when I ask him to help me with things he's always game, when the plumbing stopped working, something told me to leave him upstairs.
The decision turned out to be one of the best I made that day.
* * *
Whenever my son works with his hands, his mouth pops open and his tongue starts working overtime. It swoops and curls, exploring gums, cheeks, and teeth. I even videotaped it once, close up, as he worked on a puzzle. When I showed the tape to friends they became transfixed, as if watching a birth. One even suggested that the tape would make better teenage blackmail than a naked-baby photo. I thought that was funny, but my wife vetoed the idea for good reasons I won't share here.
That afternoon I learned one important difference between me and a licensed plumber.
A licensed plumber knows how far you can safely unscrew a plug that holds back 11½ pounds of peelings and the 92 gallons of water my wife tried using to unclog the drain. Asking my son to hold the flashlight - mouth open, tongue swirling as he pointed it at the ceiling and then the floor, no, over here, yes, keep it right there on that pipe - would have put him at serious risk of drowning. I was lucky I turned my head when the torrent hit. As it was, I ended up picking a chunk of carrot out of my ear an hour later.
A friend stopped by with very fortunate timing. He held the flashlight and manned buckets while I figured out how to work the snake. The clog gone, I sloshed up the steps, victorious in battle, covered in my enemy's guts, and hailed by my wife as a hero.
My son stepped into the kitchen, took one look at the food splashed all over me, and gave me a sincere, “Good job.” In his eyes I still looked like a man who knew how to fix things.