I practically crushed the bulb with my bare hands when I heard that. “Are you shitting me? Forty-five dollars? For a frigging lightbulb? Are you high or do you just hate money? I could buy groceries for the week with forty-five bucks! For two of these bulbs, I could pay for a week of landscaping! Forty-five dollars is insane!”
Mac steadied himself against the garage. “Can you stop shaking the ladder, please? We need it, it will last, end of story. My dad always says buy cheap, buy twice. This may not sound like a great idea now, but when we have five full years of a clear, cost-effective lighting solution, you’ll thank me.”
I snorted. “Yeah, talk to me in five years about that.”
“Hand it up, please; I’m ready for it.” I did and then he screwed the Hope diamond of lightbulbs into the socket.“Okay, now go into the garage and flip the switch.”
What I thought was,
What I said was, “Got it.”
I entered the garage, located the yellowed switch plate, and flipped the first switch on the right. “Done.”
I walked back out as Mac called to me, “Mia! Flip the switch!”
“I did.”
“Clearly you didn’t, because the light’s still off. You must have hit the wrong switch.”
“No, I did the one on the far right. You probably just have a bum bulb.”
With a tad more condescension than I’d deem appropriate, Mac said, “Mia, Home Depot doesn’t sell defective forty-five-dollar bulbs. Now please get back in there and flip all the switches.”
So I did. . and nothing happened.
Mac didn’t believe me, so he got down from the ladder and kept trying all the switches himself. “I don’t get it,” he said, and then he snapped his fingers. “Oh, wait. I figured it out. This fixture has got to be thirty years old. I’m sure that’s the problem. I’m going back to the Depot to buy a nice new wall-mount outdoor lantern. I’ll be back soon.”
“What about the lawn?” I asked, trailing behind him.
“I’ll do it as soon as I’m done with this,” he promised, and I mentally braced myself for the inevitable arrival of the “You Need to Either Mow or Buy a Goat” petition.
Another hour and a half went by before Mac finally returned with a new lantern. “What do you think?” he asked, proudly displaying the two-hundred-and-thirty-dollar Beaumont fruitwood fixture.
“I think you should try a regular bulb before you go to all the effort of installing a new lantern. My way costs four dollars. Your way costs, so far, two hundred and seventy-five bucks. Not including labor.”
“I’m not having this discussion with you,” he fumed, stalking off toward the garage. So I went back to my office to work.146 From my vantage point, I observed him burning all the available daylight in trying to get his fancy new light/lantern combination to work.
Yesterday he spent his morning installing a new switch that cost only four dollars but took three hours. After this bit of fecklessness, he replaced the whole junction box with zero success, and today he plans on rewiring the whole garage.
You know what? I’m just going to mow the lawn myself.
I change into old sneakers, cutoff sweatpants, and an ancient sorority T-shirt, stick in my earbuds, and select my sounds-of-the-nineties playlist as I plod down to the garage. I glower at the lantern and it’s all I can do not to throw a couple of landscaping rocks at it.
We inherited a lawn mower with the house, and like everything else here, it’s completely antiquated. Mac cleaned the blade and filled it with gas and he says it works, but considering it looks like a prop from the movie
I bend across the rusty motor and give the toggle dealie a tentative yank. I don’t want to pull too hard, because I feel like the rope will break. Nothing happens, so I pull harder. The engine sputters to life and then dies, so I probably have no choice but to tug harder. I yank the toggle with all my might and the mower roars to life. And I do mean roar. Even with my iPod up full blast, I can’t make out a single word Alanis Morissette is singing, so I turn it off. I don’t need to hear her to understand exactly how ironic this whole situation is. I do leave the earbuds in to protect my hearing.
Cutting the grass isn’t as hard as I anticipated, because this mower surprisingly has one of the self-propelling features. I thought I’d have to push this aging bucket of bolts like Sisyphus and his boulder, but really it’s more a matter of steering. What’s frustrating is that the grass is so long that I have to empty the bag every five minutes.
Also, apparently since we no longer have landscapers, we no longer have people who are paid to pick up dog crap. I retrieve what I can see, but due to the height of the grass, most of those treasures are hidden. Every time I run over poop, the pile explodes into tiny shards that spray me in the legs. I figure the tetanus shot I had last month will protect me from any doody-borne pathogens, so I keep going.
By the time I complete this chore, I’ve filled six brown paper landscaping bags, and now I have to haul them all the way up to the curb for pickup.
I’d ask for Mac’s help, but he’s taken off for the Depot
By the time I finish the job, I stink and I’m itchy and I’m coated with sweat and grass clippings and dog poop, plus I’m pretty much dyed green from the knees down. I put everything away in the garage and find myself entertaining very unhappy thoughts every time I glance at the dead light fixture.
Then, like Wile E. Coyote or Elmer Fudd, I get a lightbulb of an idea.
I dash back to the house, grab a cheap floodlight bulb, and hoof it back to the garage. I gingerly set the ladder against the garage and, with much trepidation, begin to climb. I’ve nestled the bulb in my cleavage for safekeeping. Once I’m at the top, I unscrew the fixture, take out the new bulb, and screw in the one from my shirt.
I scurry back down the ladder and hit the switch and… in the words of Clark W. Griswold. .
Initially I’m thrilled the lamp finally works, but then I add up the expense and opportunity costs we racked up because Mac wouldn’t listen to me and I begin to seethe.
I’m still standing in front of the garage when Mac pulls up. “Hey, I fixed it! It’s working! I guess the wires righted themselves somehow.”
I pull the forty-five-dollar bulb out of my shirt and silently point to it.
“So the bulb was the problem from the get-go? Huh. Well, hand it over. I’m going to take it back to Home Depot and give them a piece of my mind,” Mac huffs.
Then I take the pricey bulb and fling it against the closed garage door with all of my time-wasted, fecal- matter-splattered might. Because of its odd construction, I don’t get the same satisfaction of shattering, say, a fluorescent bulb, but it fractures enough to truly be good and broken.
“There,” I say. “Saved you a trip.”
I look down at my hands hovering over my keyboard and I will them to move.
Nothing.
No response.
My fingers are as immobile as a couple of teamsters on a coffee break.
I wonder if writer’s block used to feel more devastating back when people wrote on typewriters. A blinking cursor on an empty Word document is bad enough, but then I imagine how much worse it would be to have a whole empty sheet of paper in front of me, with a ream of pristine pages sitting undisturbed in a box on my desk, taunting me with the sheer volume of incomplete work. I bet there’d be something satisfying about a wire trash can full of balledup pages, though. At least then I’d have a visual measure of having tried. Right now all I have is a blank screen.
I’m desperate to get this damn novel finished. I’m so close, but I can’t pull it all together because my ending
