SOUTHWORDS

It was a delicate operation. The patient sat dejected on the floor, his “arm” dangling uselessly by his side. Just five minutes earlier, I had innocently slid the hose of my precious vacuum along the floor under the nightstand to suck up loose tumbleweeds of dog hair. Suddenly, the comforting whir of the motor was replaced by a death rattle.

“Help!” I screamed to my husband, J.P. But when I ran into the living room, I saw that he had on headphones, the protective gear worn by any baseball fan whose wife was doing loud chores. “I need you!”

“The Dodgers are playing the Padres.”

“This is an emergency!” I clenched my teeth.

Of all the vacuums I have ever owned, my 7-year-old, swivel-headed model is my favorite. We move together like Nureyev and Fonteyn, sweeping across the floor in artistic harmony.

I hauled the victim into the kitchen for triage. We peered down the dark hole of the hose and, even with the flashlight, couldn’t see anything.

“Can you think of something you might have vacuumed up that could be clear?”

Aha! I hadn’t seen the cap to my hairspray in weeks and, I confessed, it was clear.

“Congratulations,” J.P. said. “You have managed to vacuum up something that perfectly matches the diameter of the hose. That takes finesse.”

I had no time for clever remarks. “Let’s try this,” I said, handing over a steak knife. This tool remains one of my favorite commonsense solutions, useful for tasks well beyond its intended purpose. Never mind the scar I still bear on my left hand from the time, at 6 years old, I used one to pry a hardened collar of glue from my Elmer’s.

I held the hose steady while J.P. tried to jiggle the cap free, but the trusty knife did not work. We had no more luck with the screwdriver or the pliers, and the situation grew more dire with every attempt. Each tool we poked into the hose only pushed the cap even farther down, along with my heart.

“Why don’t we try the drill?” asked J.P.

For a normal person, the space between a crazy idea and better judgment is at least 30 seconds. Not for me. In my mind, this was pure genius. Why didn’t I think of it myself?

The cordless drill is J.P.’s most cherished tool, the equivalent of my vacuum. “Now, I don’t know how safe this is,” he warned. “You’re going to have to hold the hose perfectly still while I drill into the cap. If you move, the drill could damage the hose or worse, hit you. You sure you want to do this?”  

I dismissed the pesky notion that most deadly accidents happen in the home because I was as desperate as I was stupid. I held the hose, standing at arm’s length, in case J.P. slipped. And he drilled and drilled, rattling my bones with every thrust and parry. Still, the cap would not yield.

“This is going to take forever,” he said, glancing back at the Dodgers in the bottom of the seventh.

“What about The Monster?” I asked, in a wave of inspiration.

The Monster, a three-quarter inch drill bit, emerges from the toolbox only for special occasions, like when we needed to drill drainage holes in the discarded satellite dish we use for the seat in the swing we made for Tulsi, our bossy corgi.

“That could work,” J.P. said. “But we have to be very careful. You have to hold the hose, and you cannot move a muscle.”

I held on with both hands, shaking like an apprentice snake wrangler holding her first python. With one shove, that pesky cap shattered, spewing plastic shrapnel all over the kitchen. Hallelujah! We did it!

I plugged my vacuum back into the electrical outlet, and a quick flip of the on button confirmed that suction was fully restored. J.P. donned his headphones and planted himself in front of the television and I was happily vacuuming again, sucking up the shards of my sin.