Month: November 2017

The Quick Fix

I wish I had a picture of the way I jerry-rigged this problem because some people might not believe what I’m about to tell you. But here goes anyway:

One of our kitchen   cabinets fell off the wall one night. I was standing right there so I caught it on the way down and pushed it back and yelled for my wife, Donna, to hand me an empty kerosene can.

[I was heating the house with kerosene back then and I always had several five-gallon cans sitting around, some full, some empty. Kerosene smelled bad and smoked up the ceilings sometimes but it was a lot cheaper than heating with electricity.]

Donna got me a kerosene can but it wasn’t tall enough so I asked her to hand me three or four soup cans. I wedged them between the top of kerosene can and the bottom on the cabinet and, presto, good as new.

I was really busy at work –I was a newspaper reporter– and didn’t have time to nail the cabinet back to the wall, or screw it, or whatever it was I needed to do. So I ended up leaving that empty kerosene can on top of Donna’s kitchen  counter for a pretty good while.

How long?

I don’t know exactly. Who remembers stuff like that?

But it’s not like I didn’t do anything. When the original soup cans started to rust and look bad I replaced them with new cans.

That, unfortunately, is a true story.

Postscript: Eventually we remodeled our kitchen.  Now if I could just find time to fix the storm door.

Coming Friday: Three Strikes Is All You Get

 

 

Handling Bad News

Long before we were given the official verdict, before we took our 18-month old son to North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill for a battery of tests, we knew.

The thoracic surgeon who had operated on Jack’s sunken chest [pectus excavatum] told my wife, Donna, and me that that was the reason Jack was so far behind. After the operation, he said, Jack would catch up with his twin brother, Mark.

But in our hearts we knew better.

Jack Stith
Jack Stith

I hated to give Dad the official verdict from the doctors in Chapel Hill. Not because he would take it hard. I hated to tell him because he wouldn’t take it all. He would scoff at the diagnosis.  I didn’t want hear that. It was time to play the cards we had been dealt.

I had often heard Dad brag — or maybe he was just giving thanks — that all of his grandchildren were perfect. No birth defects. But that won’t true now. His 13th grandchild had been hit by the bullet.

He and I were alone at the box shop, at Queen City Container in Charlotte, on a Saturday morning, when I told him, short and to the point: “The doctors in Chapel Hill say Jack is profoundly retarded.”

For a second or two he didn’t say anything. And then he said to me, “Everybody has a cross to bear and this is yours.”

That was it. He didn’t say another word, then or ever.

Coming Monday: The Quick Fix