As a result, we ran out of the Ready. As a result of running out of the Ready, the charmingly wonky pull-chain toilet in the powder room has not worked since we moved in, because we never seemed to have enough of the Ready to fix it. As my Gentle Readers may recall, we moved in last June.
I haven't made an issue of it, since the house had three full baths and so to whine about the powder room toilet would have been what my teenage son elegantly terms "A Dick Move." However.
The However is, we're about to have guests. Lots of guests. International guests. (Okay, they're my uncle, my aunt, and my cousin, and, being family, they will probably be kindly and forgiving of such small flaws as toilets that don't do what toilets are supposed to do,and they are actually coming from Canada. But that's international, isn't it?) And there are other guests besides the International Guests. There is the Transcontinental Guest. (My brother is coming from Sacramento.) And there's the Southern Lady Guest, winging in from famously Gracious Charleston. (Well - technically - she's my father's cousin once removed, and she actually lives in a steel town 45 minutes away from Charleston, and speaks with a truly fascinating accent that combines the German inflections of her childhood with more than forty years spent living in South Carolina, heavily seasoned with 20 years spent living in Queens before that. Hmm. Maybe I should re-categorize her as an International Guest.)
The reason for all these Guests is that my mother is turning - well, another year older - this weekend. It's one of those landmark birthdays, and so we are having a party, and the Relatives are coming. So naturally, I want the house to look nice. And naturally, I want to be able to take down the piece of 8 1/2" x 11" paper bearing the legend scrawled in black Sharpie:
Out of Order!
Do Not Use!!!
Water's Turned Off!
And so, Gentle Readers, the quaint and entirely useless pull-chain toilet with the charmingly dated brass fittings and the flush tank the hovered above the head of the sitter like an especially large and cumbersome Sword of Damocles had to go. But not yet.
Not yet - because first my Dear Husband decided to have a go at repairing it. It was a noble effort, and it was, indeed, Dear of him. But after five hours of labor, two trips to the Home Depot, and an awful lot of cursing, he finally had to admit defeat. I wish I had been a better sport about the fact that, in the process of his being such a Dear, the freshly-painted walls of the powder room got rather scratched and dented and no longer look quite so freshly painted as they did before he was Dear. But as I say, I was hoping that the house would look nice for the Relatives.
In any event, he deconstructed the old toilet and put it outside to await the coming of the Carting Man on Thursday, who I hope will remove it, as it looks rather awful sitting on a stump next to the driveway and would fool no one into thinking it was merely us being Witty and Artistic. The party is on Saturday, so if the Carting Man balks on Thursday (and who could blame him if he did?) I will have to think of something else. Fortunately, there is an unattended dumpster that I know of behind the local Starbucks.
After the deportation of the Old Toilet, we got back in the car and made a third trip to the Home Depot, a store I am heartily sick of, and whose door I never, no not once, darkened in those dear dead days beyond recall when I lived on the tenth floor in a Manhattan building that had a super. As I write this, it occurs to me that in the 34 years that I lived in Manhattan, I never once had occasion to buy a toilet, either.
But times have changed, and not necessarily for the better, or at least that's how it feels when you are comparison-shopping in the toilet aisle and you realize that it's come to this, and that there's hardly any point in comparison-shopping anyway because you know good and well that what you're really looking for is the cheapest toilet, because all the rest of the money that you thought you were going to spend on getting highlights and a trim so you'd look nice at the party is actually going to be handed over to the local handyman who already installed the dishwasher you found on Craigslist last week, and who was clearly thinking the entire time he fiddled with the hoses and gaskets and doohickeys under the ugly brick-red kitchen sink that the former homeowner had inexplicably installed - on purpose! - that City People are idiots for not being able to install their own dishwashers.
So now we have a new toilet, and it works, and I can hold my head high when the Relatives are here, and not shame my mother on her birthday. And I only wish we had a little extra cash, because I'd really love to do something about that ugly red sink.
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