Adventures With Home Repair

Today I got home from work to find Dad and Fran standing in the kitchen over the carcass of our faulty stereo.



This stereo used to work perfectly well. It played Cd's and the radio beautifully. Then our very active nephew moved in with us and in an unguarded moment, decided that it would be a great idea to eject the Cd tray and try to hang from it.






It snapped and ended it's life half extended out from the front of the Cd player, unable to be pushed in or pulled out, effectively trapping six Cd's inside it's handicapped body. That happened a year and a half ago and since then it has inhabited a counter in the kitchen looking for all the world like an evil face sticking out it's drawer tongue at us and mocking our efforts when we periodically take the drawer in our hands and violently push and pull the drawer just in case it's only been joking all this time!


It sat on this counter, relegated to channelling NPR on a daily basis, resenting our resentment towards it's handicap . . . until today!


Often, when Dad visits, he likes to pick projects to accomplish while he's here. They make him feel useful and that if he wants to take a nap later, he can because he's gotten something done. Once he built us a counter and desk. At the very least, he sharpens our knives:





But today, he had apparently decided to take on the stereo as his fixer-upper project du jour! And by the time I got home, it was clear that this project was personal. The stereo sat partially dismembered, it's innards strewn across the counter.





So far the dissection had yielded several Cd's but the drawer remained stubbornly jammed despite being fully revealed. It continued to bang into a molded metal piece that sat in the midst of the track where it appeared to have always sat. The only evidence we had that it might not have always been there was our vague memory that the drawer used to roll smoothly in and out, accepting and playing our beautiful music at whim.



As we stood and gazed at it, willing it to heal before our eyes, Anne walked in with her friend, Stephen, her friend from college, who she had just picked up at the airport.





Stephen has never visited us before and is reportedly fascinated by the traffic circles, forests and the ocean. He was raised in suburban Ohio and is now in law school in Chicago. Stephen had also taken a course in circuits and electronics so he was greeted by open arms!



He began to examine the stereo. Fran seemed sceptical that he could do any good.


Ultimately, she turned out to be right.





Anne decided to let Stephen settle in. She showed him around the house and introduced him to everyone. The only person that Stephen had already met was Sara, who had visited Anne when she was at school.






Sara was sleeping on the futon. She is very sick because she claims to be allergic to mom and dad's house. She has a firm belief that she is being infected by people-dander. Apparently Gess and Clara are shedding again.


Stephen, amongst other things, such as being a male, a disliker of Guinness, a lover of cheese, a law student, is an Orthodox Jew. Apparently, this last characteristic of Stephen's gave my family pause. After Anne announced his need to eat only kosher food, there was a slight lull in the conversation followed by a loud rush of helpfulness designed to cover and make up for the lull. We would go shopping! What kind of meal would he like? How did he deal with this particular challenge? Maybe would should go out to eat! Many suggestions were made, through which Stephen had to raise his voice to protest loudly that this was not a problem that could not be easily solved. He dealt with it every day. He was very gracious about our offer to take him out to eat but explained that the only thing he could eat in restaurants generally were salads and he was perfectly fine making food for himself. He and Anne left for the store.


To be fair, we would have reacted similarly to any vegan, diabetic, suffer of Celiac's or Catholic on Friday who entered our kitchen. Different eaters make us nervous.


When they returned from the store with a large selection of kosher food, Stephen made himself a sandwich with lox, pine nut hummus and kosher cheddar cheese. Anne made herself chicken cordon bleu, a forbidden combination (we learned) of non-kosher chicken, dairy and ham. Mission accomplished! He and Anne then settled in to watch (and sing along to) Across the Universe.


To get back to the problem of the stereo, it died for good today, abandoned almost completely disassembled on the counter. It is temporarily replaced by it's lesser, uglier cousin. An old radio that can channel NPR nonetheless.