Plumbing the Depths

On Thursday a VERY IMPORTANT PIPE broke under our house. OK, under our trailer. I called a plumber, who came and had the grace to look sheepish when he said, "I'm not crawling under there. Do you know what's under there?"

Well, yeah. It's the stuff that came out of the VERY IMPORTANT PIPE. And you're a plumber - I could tell when you bent over to look under the - uh - house. Aren't you supposed to deal with this - uh - stuff for a living?

So I hired a different guy to clean up the stuff under the house - let's call him Guy 2, and we won't mention Guy 1 again - and Guy 2 discovered that there is lots of other unmentionable stuff going on under there – more, that is, than just whatever came out of the VERY IMPORTANT PIPE. It's ugly down there, or so they tell me.

Guy 2 made sense, so I agreed to pay him a lot of money to make all of the stuff go away, permanently. Or as close to permanently as I care about. "How old are you now?" he asked.

Guy 2 also said he couldn’t really fix the problem until I hired a plumber to fix the pipe that was producing the stuff. You get the Catch 22 aspect of this story, do you not?

So I hired Guy 3 to fix the VERY IMPORTANT PIPE, which is where we started. I didn't tell him about the stuff. He’s a plumber; let him deal with it. He promises to come Monday morning, which is now tomorrow (unless this article takes longer to write than I expect).

Thursday to Monday was longer than I was willing to go without peeing except against a tree. Not to mention the Lady Who Would Not Be Caught Dead.  So we relocated to the Sunburst Inn, a lovely little beachfront place down the coast a bit. I tried to get the Displaced Persons’ Rate, but it was the weekend, and the oil crisis has not, apparently, driven prices down as far as the newspaper would have you believe.

But the Sunburst is nice, and it fronts on the oil-free Gulf of Mexico. It is easy to forget just how gorgeous the beaches are on the Gulf.

This story has a point – stay with me here.

So, we’re sitting on the beach last night – Saturday – and it’s 82 degrees and balmy, and the Gulf and the moon and Venus and Mars and some other celestial bodies are doing their hypnotically lovely thing. There is alcohol involved, of course, and in my alcohol-induced state of euphoria, I say to the Lady Who Would Not Be Caught Dead, “Isn’t this delightful?” The LWWNBCD just makes a rude digestive noise and goes on tuning me out.

Paradise is different things to different people.

Newt