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Key points
- The family hammer is shown in its original setting, 64 years later.
- The author fails to inherit any handyman skills.
- Author tackles a major fishpond cleaning job. And fails.
“Max can’t hammer a nail in straight,” my mother often said about Dad. Despite my father being a well-known math educator and author of over 60 textbooks, my genetic fate did not include a chapter on hammering. In fact, the hammer depicted here was hung on our garage wall in 1956; I took the photo in 2020, when we sold the house. The hammer had never moved.
As I grew older, I noticed something utterly mystifying: Although a couple of my Jewish friends actually were master builders, it was my Gentile male friends who seemingly emerged as adults already knowing how to construct absolutely anything, no matter what their chosen career—meaning, not carpentry.
Case in point: My college friend B. went straight from pre-med, to med school, did all the additional years to become an OB/GYN, internships, residencies, started his hospital practice immediately, often did 24-hour shifts to deliver the night-owl babies, and managed to get married and have four kids during all of that.
Visiting him some decades later, he casually showed me an entire addition he had single-handedly added to his house. Foundation, hardwood floor, walls, windows, roofing, electric lines, the whole nine yards. When in the world did he acquire those skills? I found this anomaly over and over again. My Gentile friends seemed to spring forth from the womb wearing a toolbelt, and their first word was not “Mama,” but “Sawzall.”
However, when I was praising B.’s work, he felt compelled to confess that he did manage to fall off a ladder and break his wrist during the project, yet still performed two C-sections the next morning, putting a sterile Hefty bag over his cast.
My college roommate, D. was similarly blessed, although I must reveal that he has been replacing his roof for 17 years at this point, and mentions it in every email.
It was my good fortune to befriend the legendary Martyfixit of Santa Cruz, who would one day talk me through dozens of jobs, me with a phone balanced on my neck, my head at a 90° angle to keep it in place, as he would dictate, “Now use a Phillips head and loosen that screw just a quarter turn to the left, and pull out the ½” pipe you should see. Okay, call me from the hardware and plumbing aisle at Home Depot, where you need to get a few 3” molly screws and some pipe dope.” Thanks to Martyfixit's mentorship, I slowly began to do certain complex things on my own, like hang a picture or change the plastic cover plate on a wall socket, and I always came out feeling like a real man.
Thus, it was with little-to-no trepidation that I decided to tackle the Great Pond Job of ’23. I had miraculously created a 4’ x 12’ fish pond some seven years earlier, complete with a submersible pump, a hidden filter, and a secret entry to a waterfall, surrounded by store-bought, flat rocks. (From the rock store.)
Recently, however, the pump began getting clogged every day, halting the whole waterfall operation, requiring me to unplug it, lift it out, and power wash the muck and slime off that was accumulating daily. This process would yield, at best, another 24 hours of waterfall.
Without reaching out to any of my handyman consultants, I knew I had to clean out the bottom of the pond while retaining at least 75 percent of the water for its long-established ecosystem. My idea was to purchase an inflatable kiddie pool, pump the water into it, transfer the 21 fish using a net, then deep clean the bottom of the pond.
The pool did not come with a pump to inflate it, but I found a YouTube video showing how to cut the end off a plastic bottle, tape it over a hair dryer set to “cool,” and let it rip. It worked.
Before beginning the job, my wife, let’s call her Shari, because that’s her name, was concerned about my 23 open leg wounds (don’t ask) being exposed to flesh-eating bacteria in the pond which would likely cause me to lose a few limbs, induce sepsis, and kill me.
Surrendering to her wisdom, I replaced my shorts with long pants, tucked them into winter snow boots, then put each leg into a Hefty bag that she securely fastened with duct tape around my ankles and thighs. (If nothing else, I felt ready to perform a C-section.)
Long story short, within seven minutes I was completely drenched from head to toe, and she later texted: “Note to self: duct-taped Hefty bags not fully waterproof.” I wound up completing the job in my underwear, somehow dodging the sepsis bullet.
Problem: turns out the kiddie pool could only hold perhaps 1/8th of the pond water, so change of plan. Rather than doing a complete transfer, I entered the pond as it was, perhaps a foot lower than usual, and reached down to blindly pull out whatever I could with my hands. I got quite a haul of what professional landscapers generally refer to as “glop.” The fish were a bit frantic.
Result: I put everything back together, turned it on, saw a gushing waterfall, cleaned everything up, and felt gratified after seven hours of labor. Alas, the following morning, the waterfall was once again a mere trickle. As before, I unplugged, removed, and power washed the fresh slime from the pump, and it worked fine for another 24 hours.
And that, my friends, is how the son of a guy who couldn’t hammer a nail in straight, does a handyman job. Psychologists call this syndrome a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”
(My brother, a psychologist, told me to add that last bit.)
