Garbage disposal drama

In the afternoon we left Grandpa alone for a couple hours, and Mom and I went off on a thrift store jamboree. There’s a seedy strip mall over at Fairview and Five Mile that has a Saver’s, a “4-Vets,” and an Idaho Youth Ranch (the latter the most common of the state’s secondhand stores); there’s a K-Mart too, and a beauty college, but we didn’t go in those.

I concentrated on the books, Mom on the gewgaws. We started at Idaho Youth Ranch, which proved the best of the three, and I finished before Mom and went on to the next alone. After that she felt a little rushed. But I can only take a store for so long, and then I must escape that particular collection of consumer detritus, because even though I sort of like a civilization devoted to consumption I sort of don’t.

Later, I went to the grocery store alone because Mom was tired. Only after I got there, to the Fred Meyer’s, did I realize I had come at five pm on a Friday evening. Many people placed their shopping carts in my way, and while I strove to control my irritation I didn’t hesitate to mutter imprecations under and sometimes over my breath.  

Mom made macaroni and cheese for dinner, with a side dish of green beans flavored with bacon and vinegar. She asked Grandpa if he liked it, and he said he did. I ate two platefuls.

In the midst of making dinner, Mom had accidentally dumped half the macaroni into the left side of the sink and it had slipped down into the garbage disposal. She called me in to the kitchen, and we surreptitiously ran the disposal….

That side of the sink has been backing up, and I thought the disposal didn’t work. But earlier in the day, Grandpa had enlisted me to solve the problem. It seems he’s dealt with it before…. He was annoyed that he couldn’t take care of it himself, but the task required kneeling down and reaching under the sink, and he can’t do that. He got Mom involved too….

She was placed to one side, ready with a bowl of ice cubes; I was directed to clear out under the sink and get ready to plug in the disposal. (So, it’s not broken but simply unplugged. Grandpa said there’s a short, and that’s why it’s not plugged in and in regular use.) When he was ready, he told me to plug it in, Mom to flip the switch on beside the sink. “Now. Pour in the ice cubes,” he said. “Pour ‘em in.” They crunched loudly, while I waited, my head under the sink, my hand on the plug…. “All right,” Grandpa said after a minute or two, “that should do it.” I pulled the plug.

Another example of how things work around the house—sort of, but not really….

So later, after the macaroni mishap, Mom figured we could re-create the solution. But it didn’t turn out that way. At first it had seemed to work, the macaroni disappeared and the water drained, but later, after I’d done the dinner dishes, Mom used the sink and suddenly both drains started backing up with black, noxious smelling water. She called me in from the living room where I was watching SportsCenter.

Grandpa had gone to his room for the night, so we had some time to try to figure out what to do…. We tried the garbage disposal a third time, but that just made it worse—more black water bubbled up into the sink…. I said, “Let’s just let it sit for a while and see what happens,” but that didn’t work either…. I went in search of a plunger, and after scouring the house found a small one in the garage. First, I used a cup to empty the sinks, dumping the water into a pot, the pot several times in the backyard…. I was just beginning to wield the plunger when Grandpa came into the dining room, pushing his walker before him. He didn’t see what I was doing, and I nonchalantly put down the plunger and moved away from the sink.

I didn’t want him to see the problem. In part because he might have one of his outbursts about people messing around with things that they weren’t supposed to mess around with. In part because I knew there was a good chance he’d keep me up all night working on the problem. It was already after eleven.

Mom got up from the table in what I thought was an overly brisk and obviously guilty manner. She moved to put herself between Grandpa and the sink as he shuffled into the kitchen. He said he was hungry. “I can get you something,” Mom said, sliding to one side and then the other to block his view. They settled on a sandwich, and he sat down at the table.

I went back to the living room, figuring it was out of my hands now. Either he noticed or he didn’t.

He didn’t. Mom kept him away from the sink, fed him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk, and eventually he returned to his room…. I returned to the kitchen to try the plunger, but it didn’t work. I was relegated to hoping the problem would go away by morning.

Back in his room, Grandpa watched a Tarzan movie, the volume full blast. There had been a Turner Movie Channel Tarzan marathon, one 1930s film after another all day long, and Grandpa had been taking in bits on and off. I watched a few minutes here and there too, and I must say Jane was rather sexy, the sexual tension between her and Tarzan often striking. At one such moment, though, Cheetah undermined the possibilities for action by pushing a baby deer on a log out into the lagoon, where a giant crocodile came zooming in for a snack. Tarzan had to abandon Jane—they were in a pre-coital clinch—and leap into the water and wrestle the crocodile. He stabbed it with his knife numerous times till it went limp and floated to the bottom. Maybe a bit of transference, or would it be sublimation?

thrift store purchases