Mr. Fix-It Practices Home Repair

"Hey, Mum," says my son, "remember that weird single-serving coffee maker you gave me a while ago?” and of course I remembered it; it cost like $150 bucks.The way you get coffee out of this pricey gizmo is you stick in these small impregnated disks that look a little like diaphragms and cost like a buck apiece. Then there’s an almighty whirring noise and 30 second later out spurts the java into your favorite mug.I thought the kid would need a thing like this. He was just out of the College People Don’t Like To Name For Fear of Having Everybody Hate Them. I’m told they call it “dropping the H bomb” when you do this and like most nice normal kids, he does it very little.It’s not that Mike isn’t a great person; he is, as you can tell he is by the sweet mild look on his face as seen here a few winters ago holding our first grandbaby.He’s just a little .. strange; the kind of kid who thinks a T-shirt he imprinted himself with giant bloody-looking handprints all over it is just the thing not only to wear to the big Halloween party but who then insists I use this picture and not any other picture on the family Christmas card that year.I was pretty sure he couldn’t even make coffee on his own and a felt he would need some when he moved to New York mere months after graduation and was looking for a job.Turns out he used it for guests and not for himself. You know how the young are. “It’s such a cliché, ‘Oh here I am in my New York apartment drinking my coffee and surfing the net,’” he says to me. (Do you understand this? I don’t understand this but maybe that’s because my whole LIFE is a cliché.) Anyway so this other day as we four ate together he says, “I decided I needed coffee in my life again and so I pulled out that thing you gave me and opened the top to see if it needed cleaning. And out came all these exoskeletons. Insect parts, cockroach legs.”“Eeww!” we all cried. “What did you do?”“Well, shook it a little and more came out.”“Yeah And THEN what?”“I shook it again. I even held it upside down and they kept on coming.”“Mike, did you throw it away? “I hope you threw it away!” his two older sisters cried practically in unison.“Nah,” says Mike. “I filled the bathtub and submerged it.”“You put an electrical appliance in the tub?!” I said. “Then what? Did you get in there WITH it and plug it in?”No I just let it soak a while. Then I put it on my radiator to dry.”“And?”“And it works fine,” he said in his mild way and my first thought was “And THIS person is going to be caring of me in my old age?” But then maybe it’ll be OK after all. Because doesn’t everyone say God looks out for the simple-minded and the crazy? And isn’t that what’s protected ME all my life? ’cause one thing is sure-enough for sure: the apple just don’t fall too far from the tree.