He had a hammer in his hand
Kate Harrigan
These signs of an early spring are making me nervous. A couple of years ago, in a fit of nostalgia for a genuine old Chicago neighborhood I never knew, I bought a bungalow. Unspoiled by such tasteless “improvements” as double-hung windows, I fell in love. But as the snow melts, peeling paint and rickety downspouts serve as ugly reminders of the responsibilities of home ownership.
Fortunately, I have my father’s hammer. I also know, by heart, Harrigan’s Law of Home Repair, “If it can’t be fixed with a hammer, it can’t be fixed.”I once watched my father repair a painting – not the frame, the painting itself – with a hammer. But that was only a mild fit of madness compared to the waterfall incident.When I was a kid, we had one of those theme rooms in the basement – the theme, in the case of our suburban spilt level, was nautical. Fishing nets hung from the walls, lobster traps served as coffee tables, buoys hung in the corners of the room. If they had made televisions in the shape of lighthouses, my father would have bought one. So when he saw a waterfall advertised in the back of a magazine, he had to have one. Never mind that a waterfall makes no geographical sense in a New England seaside motif – it was wet and he would have one. But not the puny little thing advertised in the magazine. He wanted a really big waterfall and he would build it himself.First thing the next morning, Dad tore off to the hardware store – plenty of time to plan the project on the way. When he returned, he was followed by a delivery truck hauling about a quarter ton of copper sheet metal. Tossing a charge receipt for an outrageous amount of money on the kitchen counter, he warned everyone to stay out of the family room and headed downstairs. My mother sighed.For hours, the sound of a hammer beating sheet metal drifted up the stairs, accompanied by the language Dad had learned from his own father, another leader in the home-improvement field. It was a long afternoon, filled with the kind of trepidation mixed with glee that accompanied most of my father’s major projects.By evening it was done. My father may not have been good, but he was fast.The thing was huge, hideous and bizarre. It occupied the entire back wall of the family room. A gleaming copper pond, the sides pounded up to form walls, the corners reminiscent of the hospital corners on a 5-year-old’s self-made bed, sat on the family room floor. A smaller pool was cantilevered from the wall about five feet above the main pool, and a chute, also constructed of crudely shaped copper sheeting, ran from the upper body of water to the lower. In his only concession to aesthetics, my father had glued multicolored goldfish bowl gravel to the floor of the chute.A hole had been drilled through the foundation of the house. Pipes carried the water off and a pump rumbled somewhere out in the backyard. The water actually was circulating and my father beamed.Mom and I stared, then started to laugh. For once, my father’s sense of humor deserted him. Grumbling that all it needed was a few finishing touches, he grabbed the Visa card and headed back out.When he returned, he was lugging two plastic bags filled with goldfish – the big, fat ones with the bug-out eyes. We all trooped back downstairs and Dad slit open the bags and triumphantly poured the fish into the lower pool.They looked quite pretty for a minute, as they managed a lap or two of the pool before being sucked into the pump’s vortex. Goldfish gills and goldfish guts spit out of the pipe feeding the upper pool, the gore sliding down the gravel-encrusted chute to make another grim circuit.“Take it down, Dear,” Mom said with a sigh.I know I should do something about those gutters, but what I’m thinking is, I’d really like one of those walk-in closets with the little built-in drawers for jewelry and socks, and all sorts of fancy shelves and boxes for sweaters. This sort of thing can be purchased, of course, but I want something really big. And I already have the hammer.Published in The Regional News
Feb. 18, 1999
