A Beautiful Day

Yesterday morning started beautiful. Ordinary, ordinary as could be. Beautiful and ordinary. Thirty minutes on the treadmill, speed 2.8, incline 7, something over a mile slightly “uphill.” My plan for the morning: read psalms appointed in Lectionary B for the summer and see if they have anything to do with the Old Testament lessons to which they were meant to respond. And, oh, incidentally, a drain pipe was stopped up in Linda’s bathroom upstairs and we had not been able to open it. She called Whitehead to send a plumber, he came instantly, worked at it forty-five minutes, unclogged it with a plumber’s snake and was on his way. A few minutes later as I grabbed a BCP from the trunk of my car, Linda shouted out the back door, “Water is pouring through the dining room ceiling.”

Slam went the trunk lid, “Call the plumber back,” yells I, running upstairs to turn off all the water supply lines.

During WWII this house, which began with one bathroom when my grandparents built it in 1912-1913, was converted into four apartments; three more bathrooms were installed, two of them upstairs. The offending bathroom is over the dining room. As water poured from the ceiling and down the center chandelier, we began sopping up and moving furniture. The mess in the dining room was incredible, horrendous.

The Whitehead Plumbing construction team spent the rest of the day with us. They tore off two layers of ceiling sheetrock and cut out the tongue in groove ceiling to take down the dining room ceiling and get to the problem: the seventy year old cast iron drain pipe had given out, crumbled.

John gave me the insurance company’s phone number to call, and the insurance folks were Johnny on the Spot, coming out to inspect and get repairs lined up, and taking away for immediate attention a rug that was spoiled. They are unbelievable, and I will never again complain about my home insurance premium.

Everything’s relative to where one is in life, isn’t it. At five o’clock, half a matzoh cracker with a thin slice of swiss cheese, with a glass of Louis M. Martini cabernet sauvignon, Sonoma County 2009. For supper, green beans and a bit of salmon. Yesterday was extraordinary and not at all dull -- all in all, A Beautiful Day.

This is a big house, and the sealing off of the dining room with workers trudging in and out still leaves plenty of rooms where one can sit quietly and study. The framers of Lectionary B did a poor job matching psalms for us to read, or sing, or chant in response to the summer Bible stories about Samuel and Saul and David and Solomon.

Life Is Good. The plumbers will return this morning to resume work in the dining room ceiling replacing all the plumbing into and out of Linda's bathroom. The insurance adjuster will be back to plan restoration of the dining room. My Laughing Place is still there. Linda and I are alive and well and looking forward to another beautiful day. And it's time for my walk.

TW+