Raise your hand if you’ve ever gone through a phase where it seems like everything is breaking. You can’t see me, but my hand is in the air. It all started with a vehicle repair but since then I feel like every other day I’m learning about some new broken thing.
The 11-year-old informed me he was goofing around with the pocket door in the study and broke it. The good news was he didn’t so much break it as knock it off track. The bad news was the 14-year-old, in his attempt to rescue his younger brother’s life that was surely now forfeit for breaking Dad’s door, managed to actually break the door fixing it.
Then started the saga of cracked stepping stones. Shortly after we moved in, I made a path of 16” x 16” stepping stones along one side of the backyard. For almost 10 years these stepping stones have done exactly what they were intended to do: be stepped on.
They have gone through a decade’s worth of young boys who have had the opportunity to crack or otherwise break them and held up just fine. Until three weeks ago. A boy used a stepping stone as the flat surface on which to smack a large rock against a smaller rock and cracked the stepping stone.
These stones aren’t expensive but this drives me crazy. Why, why must the rock hammering occur on top of one of the few rocks we DON’T want hammered? Then another one was discovered cracked. Then another.
Of course, no one knows anything about this, other than that it was definitely not them and was definitely probably (fill in the blank with their next youngest sibling).
In the midst of the mystery of the spontaneously cracking stepping stones the dishwasher decided to quit. Well, not quit in the sense it stopped working but quit in the sense of not holding in the water while in the wash cycle. And that’s a pretty important feature that I’m looking for in a dishwasher.
I’m not sure I can blame the boys for the dishwasher failure (I’ll do my best) like some of the other recent things, but during this phase of breakdowns I learned of one thing I know none of the boys will dare to break.
Several of the boys got out the boardgame Life and were setting it up. In the midst of setting it up they discovered the spinner piece was either broken or missing. Instantly they came and interrupted my wife and me to report the game of Life spinner was missing – and it was like this when they got it out and they definitely did not lose it.
I was struck by the absolute seriousness with which they treated the situation and how it was of great importance that they were not even suspected of having broken the spinner.
After informing them we had two spinners, the one missing the little arrow that they were holding and a new one they didn’t have out right now, my wife shed some light on the curious situation.
She said, years ago, some boys lost the spinning piece to the original Life game she had when she was a kid. She made such a big deal about this and went through so much trouble replacing the piece that the boys wouldn’t dare even being suspected of breaking or losing the piece. Thus the earnest rush to clear their names at the outset and set the record straight that the spinner was already missing.
I’m equal parts impressed and mystified by the power not losing the spinner to the boardgame holds over the boys. Now, if only I could transfer some of that power to not cracking my stepping stones …
Harris and his wife live in Pflugerville with their seven children. Please email comments or suggestions for future columns to thoughtsforcaleb@gmail.com.