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Just about the whole trip to Maine that Saturday, all four and a half hours of it, was an exercise in me trying to maintain my patience and keeping my mouth shut. (Neither of these are small tasks.)
I just knew that this was an episode in futility, and a wonderful waste of a perfectly good weekend.
Being on Interstate 495 in Massachusetts didn’t help either. It never does. I-495 was designed by demons with third grade educations (I’m sorry. That’s offensive to third graders everywhere!), and driven by idiots. (Present company excluded, of course.)
Never, never, NEVER in all of the thousands of trips that I’ve taken from Connecticut to Maine has it ever been clear sailing along the 55-mile stretch of tar that is Interstate 495! It is a foregone conclusion that you will come to a COMPLETE STANDSTILL on that road at least once during your trip. I mean, you will literally stop in the middle of the highway. No forward motion whatsoever. People in the car next to you will be able to read whatever is printed on the sides of your tires as easily as they read a newspaper. DEAD FREAKING STOP, no matter what time of day or night it is!
Just the very thought of that series of numbers, 4-9-5, is enough to send chills down this man’s spine and turn his legs to jelly.
Anyway, somehow or other, I managed to keep my thoughts to myself as Mary Ellen and I headed to Maine like a couple of Don Quixotes pursuing our impossible quest. As we drove along, one of my father’s favorite sayings kept running through my head – "This is just another golden opportunity to keep your freaking mouth shut!"
And I only slipped up once. During our seventy-third, lock-em-up dead stop on (shudder) I-495, I muttered, "I’ll spend all day today, Saturday, driving to Maine, all day tomorrow driving back, and then on Monday, I get to go to work again without having a weekend." I did. I said it out loud. I said it to instill guilt in Mary Ellen whose idea it was to come to Maine this weekend and fix the electrical problem in our tenant’s apartment.
The guilt trip didn’t work. It never does. Mary Ellen and I both knew that she hadn’t twisted my arm to come to Maine this weekend. She merely suggested it, and I said "Sure." But hell, man! What self-respecting husband is going to blame himself for his own misery?
Anyway, as I said, Mary Ellen didn’t take the guilt. She just looked over at me and said in the sweetest tones imaginable, "I’m SO SORRY that you’re upset, Honey!"
I HATE IT when she’s so FREAKING understanding!
I just knew when we got to Maine, we wouldn’t find the GFI socket that was causing my tenant to lose the power in half of her electrical sockets! I just KNEW it! I mean, if our neighbor Jimmy couldn’t find it after searching for two nights and then a licensed electrician couldn’t find it, how in the hell did Mary Ellen expect the two of us to find it?
Besides, the electrician said that he would be back on Monday to look for it. Yes, he did say that it would take him a while to hunt it down (At $80 an hour), and if he couldn’t find it, he would have to partially rewire the apartment. I knew that would be expensive. I didn’t care. I just knew that what we were doing was a complete and total waste of time. We would come to Maine, preempting the ENTIRE weekend, and then end up paying the stupid electrician anyway!
***
Well, we got there.
After we unloaded our stuff in our own house on the premises, Mary Ellen and I walked over to Joan’s apartment. Jimmy joined us there, and we proceeded to spend the next two hours looking for the offending, stupid, made-in-Hell GFI socket.
Of course, we had no luck.
We were ready to call it quits when Mary Ellen called out from the bathroom, "Jim, Jimmy? Could you guys come here for a moment?" Jimmy and I both looked at each other, rolled our eyes, shrugged our shoulders, and followed Mary Ellen’s voice into the bathroom.
As we entered, she pointed up to the ceiling. "What’s that?"
Over the toilet, the suspended ceiling had a small hatchway cut out of it.
"How should I know?" I said testily.
"Well," Mary Ellen said, sweetly ignoring my bad mood, "Could the GPS thingy be up there?"
"Mary Ellen," I stated, trying to remain calm and condescending at the same time, "GFI sockets are always situated near water sources. They are safety devices that break the circuit when they get wet to stop people from getting electrocuted. They are usually installed in bathrooms or kitchens next to sinks. Why would somebody put one up above the ceiling?"
She shrugged. "Could we at least check?"
Again, I rolled my eyes. Then I stood up on the toilet, lifted one end of the hatchway panel and peered into the gloom of the attic crawl-space. Nothing.
"Happy?" I asked as I climbed off the toilet, wiping pink fiberglass insulation off my sleeve.
She smiled, shrugged and said, "Thank you, Honey."
The three of us then decided to walk through the whole apartment one more time.
Again, nothing.
As we were about to FINALLY give up the ghost, Mary Ellen walked back into the bathroom and said, "Could we look up there just one more time?"
I flashed her an incredulous look.
"Please?"Â she asked with her winning smile.
This time, it was Jimmy who climbed up on the toilet seat. He lifted the hatchway panel. Then he found the GFI socket attached to one of the rafters, tripped the switch…and instantly brought live power back to all of the dead electrical sockets in the place.
"Can you believe that?" Jimmy asked as we tested the once-dead sockets and found them full of electricity.
Forgetting my irritation of the close past, I kissed my wife and thanked her for her patience with me. I then looked over at Jimmy and said, "If you had boobs, I’d kiss you too."
The rest of the afternoon was spent with all of us sitting out on the back lawn sipping rum-and-Cokes and watching the sun set on Casco Bay.
That night, Mary Ellen and I went into Freeport (home of the famed yuppie haven, L.L. Bean’s) and ate buffalo burgers and drank Black Fly Stouts at Gritty McDuff’s Brew Pub.
It ended up being a wonderful weekend.
Mary Ellen had just saved us thousands of dollars. When we told the electrician about it, he said that he NEVER would have found the GFI up there. He would have ended up re-wiring the place, and that would equal big bucks.
As I lay in bed that night, I looked over at Mary Ellen sleeping next to me. She is the most incredible in person I have ever known in my whole life. I love her so much, and she loves me with every fiber of her being.
I know I'm the luckiest man in the whole world.
Glad your weekend went from bleak to bright!
