Piloting my Father

CHIP OF WISDOM:

Proverbs 19, Verse 27

"Stop listening to teaching that contradicts what you know is right."

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CHIPPED WISDOM:

(NB: In spite of what you might suspect from the smell of the first paragraph, this isn't a "Daddy Blog.")

My children went through a three or four month period where they slept clear through the night.  We'd put them down at 7:00 or 7:30 and it was smooth sailing all the way through the full 12 rounds of the clock.  This hasn't been the case for a long time.  Now, they awaken anywhere between 11:00pm and 4:00am, and they don't go back down without some, um, interventions which are provided by two bleary-eyed, sleep-stupid parents whose every small-hours movement is by this time mechanized and efficient.  This, for the moment, is how it goes.

Now you might think that two twenty-six-month-old bawling urchins (actually, it's usually just my daughter, but, as any savvy parent of twins will tell you: one up, both up) in the middle of the night sucketh thou heartily, last night, it turned out to be a good thing.  

My daughter announced her raspy Cock-a-Doodle-Doo at 3:31am and I threw the covers off and padded down the hall to her room, picked her Uppie Daddy, cuddled her, and brought her to her mother.  On my way back to our room, I noticed that my cremasteric muscles (girls, you may want to look that up) were in overdrive and that my leg hair was standing up on end.  I handed my daughter off to my wife and said, "Jesus, it's fucking cold."

"I know," she said, "what the fuck?"

We're so Shakespearean at that hour.  I scooped up my still-sleeping son, brought him into our room and immediately went downstairs to turn up the heat which, in the middle of a Nor'easter, was only set at 62.  That's dumb, I thought, turning the dial to the right.  

And.... nothing happened.  So I went to the basement, which felt like an igloo, and proceeded to engage in every Jewish man's worst nightmare, fiddling with unfamiliar things in the dead of winter that have no fewer than four warning stickers featuring the silhouette of a man reeling backwards as the result of an explosion.  

Yeah.  It's like that.  Bye-bye cremasteric muscles.  

After around twenty minutes, I put our children back down and said to my wife, "I need you downstairs with me."  I figured, if I was going to blow the place up, I at least wanted her to be with me when it happened.  You know, so there was no way the medical examiner could say I was trying to kill everybody by myself.  Together, she and I did troubleshooting.  We found hard-to-access panel doors.  We found the pilot light.  We debated about whether trying to light it would blow a crater in the earth and what size it might be.  At one point, she looked at me and said,

"Whose father should we call: yours or mine?"

We are, it's sad to admit, still of that age.  I briefly weighed the pros and cons of either option in my head, the doddering, cerebral psychiatrist who lives over 300 miles away, or the strapping, foreign soldier who lives practically down the street, I settled on a man who's twice been to desert combat, founded his own business, and once called my oldest sister a "FUCKING DICKHEAD!" for letting me play in the ocean as an eight-year-old when I had a cold.  Everyone on the beach that day within six miles of our location heard him.  

He came over at 4:30, because that's what he does.  He asked some asinine questions, because he makes sure to do that, too.  He was helpful in some respects, though he mostly reinforced what we already knew: we were fucked and had to call the emergency number for the heating company, which I did at around 5am.  Outside, it had already snowed approximately eight inches.

The guy on the other end of the phone was understandably unenthusiastic about receiving my call.  I get it-- the proudest prayer an on-call technician or service worker can make is,

"Dear Lord, make my phone silent tonight.  Let everybody out there work it out for themselves.  And let me have score some awesome head tonight and sleep the night away.  Amen."  

Unfortunately, for this guy, it was not to be.  I told him that, after around two hours of fucking around we managed to get the pilot light lit, but it would not stay on.  He said, "Well, sir, I just got up and it's snowing real bad, I mean, I'll get into the office and see if we can get somebody out to you some time today."

That, my friends, wasn't what I wanted to hear.

"Okay, well, I get that it's snowing and it's early but I have two two-year-olds in this house and they can't stay here like this, so you need to get out here.  This is an emergency.  That's why I called your emergency number."

"Sir," he said, his emphasis, not mine, "I will do what I can to get to you."

Ten minutes later, I threw my father out because he was starting to make me nuts.  My wife and I cuddled together under a blanket on the couch.  She fell instantly asleep.  I stared at the muted television watching endless coverage of the storm outside.  It's amazing how much people say the same thing over and over again and think they're doing a great job or something.  Anyway, at some point, my father texted me to ask if the heater was fixed.  I should have ignored his text, but I replied that I hadn't heard from the technician  again yet.  Then I got this:

"I'm sorry ..but at a time like 

that with babies don't Wai for 

ass hole ..t call u .. They r

Red necks illiterate ass holes"

I knew, at that exact moment, my father was calling the heating company and raising absolute fucking hell.  Funnily enough, less than five minutes later, the technician called me to report that his van was stuck in the snow.  I told him to be careful and to get here when he could.  As soon as I hung up, my father texted me again:

"I know u r nit answering..but

I got the head of [heating company's

name]. I'm bringing him to your house."

An hour later, after my father helped dig him out of a snow-bank, the technician was at our house.  He looked like a beat-down dog.  But, in twenty minutes, he had fixed our broken pilot tube and had our furnace a glow in beautiful blue flame.  He apologized multiple times for taking so long, I thanked him and sent him on his way.  Then, I texted my father and said he should call the heating company and apologize for his behavior which, I suspect, was less than gentlemanly.  He replied,

"Sure I'm going to clean his 

ass for A year."

Later that evening, my mother called to check in on all of us.  "Your father is killing me," she said, "I can't believe the way he was talking on the phone to that heating technician-- poor bastard.  I'm going to write a nice letter to the company."  I told her I was going to do the same.

"He just doesn't understand how to behave.  I guess we can never use them again to service our heater.  But you make sure you can save your relationship with the company."  

I'm thankful, at least, that one of them gets it, that one of them doesn't careen through the world with the bullish, uncontrolled entitlement of a beauty queen on steroids and PCP.  While there are a lot of aspects of my personality that I very much wish were different, I think my temperament is pretty well balanced, a nice mix of the aggressive and the passive.  I can turn it up when I need to, but mostly I try to facilitate and appease and negotiate and accept what I need to in order to keep moving along.  We were cold, but we weren't freezing to death.  The problem had to be fixed, and it was.  Did it take a long time?  Yes.  Did the guy maybe stop for a coffee before getting stuck and then coming to us?  I'm sure he did.  Do I begrudge him that?  Nope.  Because he's not a fire fighter or a cop or an EMT, and there was no stench of gas in the air.  Of course, any time the comfort, safety or stability of any one of his family members (even the FUCKING DICKHEAD) is threatened, my father becomes a frothing, rabid maniac who will eviscerate anybody who tries to minimize the situation by not immediately snapping to attention at the sound of his voice.  And I guess there's a part of me that certainly understands that, and maybe there's even even a blue-flamed glimmer inside me that likes that.  But it's sure lost them the good graces (and business) of more than a handful of plumbers, electricians, and HVAC guys over the decades.  It takes a technician who's willing to go chest-to-chest with him, and, in today's people-pleasing, litigious society, most companies won't back up a front-line guy who does that.  And I've done it my fair share of times, and it never has gotten me very far.  

Hmpf.  I guess this turned into a "Daddy Blog" after all-- just not the kind you were thinking.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go watch the Olympics and watch these athletes flex their cremasteric muscles.