It’s sad, but I’m allergic to anything resembling home improvement.

Our bathroom fan still shrieks like a wounded tree shredder since the day we moved in. Theoretically, I guess I could install a new one, but the sheer idea fouls up my digestive tract. So my temporary fix: I never flip it on, not on purpose anyway. And I always make it a point to warn guests about it upon arrival, out of common courtesy and in case they don’t prefer being startled to death while carrying a full bladder. 

It’s not that I’m apathetic about this handicap. I admit that sometimes I feel like half a man. Plus, a certain romantic aura surrounds the thought of having the ability to replace your own gutters. I daydream all the time about living in pastoral settings, where I repair fences, wield a grease gun, and curse the groundhogs for tearing up the foundation. But whenever a real call of duty emerges, such as confronting the running toilet in the guest bathroom, I fall apart. I grow anxious and listless all at once, for which the only real remedy is a nap.    

Occasionally, on those rare days I wake up packed with blind confidence, I look for ways to beat my phobia of the hammer and nail. I searched the Web once for conferences that  teach grown men how to be capable. I’m not sure what I was envisioning – a sort of Boy Scouts for an older crowd, maybe? So I Googled ”man camp.” This directed me to a website that scarred me for life. These men clearly had different goals than I did. Afterward, I was disturbed so roundly, I showered twice and vowed to never again stray farther than Homedepot.com.    

I can’t even work a mousetrap. I mean I can physically. I have hands that work and stuff. But I’m scared to death to set it. I’m always afraid of losing a finger. So once, when we had a mouse in the garage, I sent Jess to the store to find a friendlier mousetrap, one that made setting it feel less like I were diffusing a bomb with unmarked wires.

So Jess brought home a modern-day plastic mousetrap that was like a spring-loaded clamp with tiny teeth on the outer rim but hollow inside minus the trigger, where the bait went. To set it, you simply pinched the back, which locked the jaws in place. Wonderful! All threats of amputating myself had been eliminated.

However, I started seriously questioning the productivity of the trap. It didn’t look like it carried much force. I even tested it with a butter knife. It snapped shut swiftly but more gently than I like for a death device. At first I wondered whether the trap was supposed to kill the mouse or just hold it captive, like a sort of PETA trap. But the directions mentioned nothing about taking survivors. So I figured it for the real thing. The mousetrap people must know what they’re doing. Why sell one that was useless? So I used peanut butter for bait and put it in the garage.        

One morning, a few days later, I checked to see if I’d caught anything. The trap was nowhere in sight. It wasn’t along the wall, not under the cars. Perplexed, I walked the perimeter and found it at the far end, beside a microscopic gap between the floor and the garage door. The trap had been sprung and appeared to have been in a terrible crash. A quarter of it had been chewed away. At first, one might have thought that the caught mouse had become live bait for a yet larger more ferocious creature, particularly one that feasts regularly on livestock. If so, where was it? And was I next?

I used a broomstick to open the trap. It coughed up a tiny tree bud. It was as if the mouse, after chewing its body out to freedom, had left me a tiny present, thanking me for using such a stupid trap. But a closer examination showed the tree bud was actually a paw. 

I felt slightly sick. I wanted to kill the rodent, not torture it. But no matter how much I wanted it not to be so, all evidence pointed to the fact that I was a major accomplice in this mouse being forced to gnaw off its hand. The brunt of the blame I lay on the brain-damaged mousetrap people. Sure, I kept my fingers, but a poor mouse out there somewhere had just earned the new nickname Lefty.

I may never be handy. And I must accept this and move on. It could be worse; I could pretend I was handy, like the mousetrap people who make useless traps. It’s obvious these people are in denial. And as a result of their reckless neglect, there is probably a whole generation of mice that can’t stand up straight. And that is messed up.

Categories: Life
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