Because our house was built in the early 1900s by poor people, it is insulated with about a week’s worth of the newspapers of the day. (It is amazing how much of the front page news back then was dedicated to ships sinking, something that probably affected absolutely no one in this mountain town. Although I suppose it is no stranger than us obsessing over an airliner crashing in the Indian Ocean today.) This “insulation” means that our house gets extremely cold in the winter, which also means that, sometimes, our pipes get extremely frozen, and burst. “Luckily,” our ancient house also came equipped with a gigantic hole in the floor, courtesy of a floor furnace that no longer exists. Most of the time this hole is covered up, but occasionally, when we need to get under the house (say when a pipe bursts, for instance), we open it up. Which is what happened just the other night. Which is why I felt compelled to give my son, Clyde, fair warning. (The hole is located right outside his bedroom door.)
“Clyde!” I shouted. “Don’t fall in the hole!”
I expected agreement. I expected him to make an appearance, to check things out. (Who doesn’t enjoy looking at a hole?) What I didn’t expect was for him to shout back in annoyance, “What hole?”
After thinking about it for a second, I answered with, “Well, any hole, actually. But in particular, this hole.”
“Fine,” he replied, obviously annoyed at being interrupted in his quest to save the post-apocalyptic online world by my efforts to save his pre-apocalyptic real life. (Or at least his shins.) By the time he finally came out of his lair the pipe had been fixed, the hole covered up, and (most of) the mud that accompanies such a repair cleaned up. As such, there was almost no evidence a repair—and the subsequent hole—had ever existed in the first place. Which was why I found it rather odd when Clyde brought up the hole the very next day.
“I am trying, you know,” he said, apropos of nothing. (We were driving down the road and I was busy trying to find a radio station that was not playing any Adele.)
“What?” I asked, at almost the exact same time Adele breathed out her first “Hello.”
“Not to fall in the hole,” Clyde said, as if the intervening 24 hours between the pipe bursting and now had never happened.
“O-kay…?” I helpfully replied.
“I know, alright? School is important, grades are important…I don’t need you randomly shouting at me to get it”
I thought for a minute, and then it hit me. “Do you think I was telling you not to fall into a metaphorical hole?” I asked.
He looked at me like I was crazy. “Well, yeah. Isn’t that what you meant?”
I laughed. “No. I was speaking literally. About the very real hole in our very real living room.”
“Oh,” was his only reply.
“But while we’re on the subject of grades, and holes…”
And that’s when Clyde reached forward and turned up the volume on the radio. “I love this song, don’t you? I think it’s Adele.”
And that was the end of that conversation. Maybe having him fall in the hole wouldn’t have been such a bad thing after all—at least that way he would have had to stay in one place while I nagged.