No doorhanging

Dear diary,

A broken home is defined as “a family in which the parents are divorced or separated.” A broken house is just a shack that’s falling apart. I have the latter. I highly recommend the former. As they say, the grass always looks more appealing on the other side of the fence that divides your life from your neighbor’s life: He whose parents divorced when he was young, like Jesus, tends to be against divorce; and he whose begetters stayed together such that not even death could part them, like Yours Truly, will be a champion of free love.

But on the issue of house repair, the most recent project that I attempted was replacing a door. Specifically the service door that goes from the garage to the kitchen. I bought a steel exterior slab that came pre-hung in a wooden frame; yet, since our motor coach is not roomy enough to transport such a large item, we rented a truck; then, to take advantage of this extra space, we ended up purchasing many additional items that are oversize or unwieldy, like floorboards and sinks and vanities and ceiling fans (etc.) — all the things that eventually need to be replaced on our house — and we stuffed all this junk into the truck along with the door.

Well of course I couldn’t complete all these renovations at once — I don’t possess eight tentacles that can operate separate power tools simultaneously; no, I only possess two tentacles, for I am but a squidling who cannot multitask. Thus a lot of the building supplies had to wait for me to attend to them; and this service door was one of the last to be dealt with.

So yesterday I cut the cardboard packaging away from the outside of the new frame and prepared to remove the existing door from the rough opening. But then I stopped mid-prep, for an idea struck me:

“Dear sweetheart,” I shouted into the house, “will you come out here and help test this new door, to make sure it works before I install it?”

And my sweetheart said “Sure!” So we each held a side of the frame, and I removed the nails that were holding the door shut (they nailed the door to the frame so that it didn’t swing open during shipping), and then I opened and closed the door a few times. I expected the slab to glide in and out of the frame fairly easily; but it was stubborn to close, and then the frame began to feel wobbly in our hands; and I glanced at the bottom and noticed that the sill was jutting oddly from one of the lower corners. At a closer look, I realized that half of the bottom board was not even connected!

So we set the door down on its face, and I fetched a tape measure and assessed the length of each of the sides of the frame: it turned out that one side was a full inch shorter than the other! So that’s why the frame had failed to hold together: there was no ‘there’ there — no substance for the fasteners to fasten to. Upon further inspection, I found a trinity of brazen staples lodged into the wood underneath the sill but securing no further matter: lo, something had been made consubstantial with nothing. It was as if some Grand Unifying Force had attempted to connect X to Y, with X (the wood) standing for Mary’s firstborn Jesus — a real human being — and Y (the void) standing for his absent father Jehovah — an unreal God. What I’m trying to say is that, if this door’s threshold were to grow a functional mouth, it could lip-synch in earnest along with Edmund from King Lear, when he boasts (or complains):

. . . Fut! I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing.

So my sweetheart telephoned the place where we originally bought the door and explained the situation, and the clerk on the line said that even tho the item is more than a year old now, as long as we kept our receipt, they’ll make an exchange. So what I anticipate happening is that we’ll go to the trouble of renting another truck and hauling the defective door to the store; yet, when we get it inside, the manager who happens to be working that day will say:

“I don’t know which clerk you talked to or why they told you to come back here and bother us, but they were wrong: there’s no way I can allow you to return that ugly door. We will neither refund your money nor give you credit nor swap for an equivalent. Please leave, before I call the police.”

The reason for this prediction of mine is twofold:

1. We forgot to write down the name and number of the employee who advised us.
2. Nothing ever works out in my life.