Houses

by Bradley Davidson

Houses, it turns out, are quite the mystery. Those structures most of us live in, that keep us dry and warm against the elements, that provide a place to hang our hats and an assortment of other collectable items, that watch an array of folks and generations parade over their thresholds, that possess the confidences of their inhabitants, those edifices of single families, all hold secrets of their own. At least mine does. I thought I knew all there was to know about my house having painted each room numerous times and the entire outside more than once, having added rooms and remodeled the kitchen and bathrooms, having laid tile and hardwood floors after digging out old tile and raising old floors. Walt Whitman once wrote “Houses and rooms are full of perfumes…” Well, they are full of much more. These buildings are three dimensional with their walls and windows and doors and roofs. And they possess the fourth dimension of time withstanding the passage of seasons and decades of history. Mine, however, I have recently surmised, also holds a fifth dimension.

This realization came about while I was doing some plumbing in one of the bathrooms. Among other things, I was trying to figure out why the sink wasn’t working right. It had drained slow for at least ten years but now was draining hardly at all. So, while I had the sink totally apart installing other items, I decided to investigate. All was clear to the wall, where the drain pipe disappeared into the mysterious insides of the wall. I poked things down the pipe as much as I could with little elucidation of the problem. I went to the roof and sent 20 feet of rotor router wire down the vent pipe. All was clear. The washing machine on the opposite side of the wall, in the garage, worked fine. The toilet flushed flawlessly. The shower did not flood. All seemed as it should be, but when I reassembled everything, the sink drained at a crawl. I disassembled, repeated and assembled with the same results.

Crazy is doing something over and over and expecting different results. I am not crazy, so I sat back, thought it through and came up with a hypothesis. Glossing over the facts and details as many politicians do, I theorized the inside of my wall, into which this drain pipe disappeared, no doubt, possessed a fifth dimension, a facet which is actually a portal to a parallel universe. Undoubtedly the clog in the pipe existed in this parallel universe.

A well-known fictitious detective once said, “We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” So, I sat satisfied that I had solved the mystery, however I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about it not being very adept at dealing with parallel universes. But it did answer so many questions, like where the heck is this blockage and why can’t I reach it with anything, where are those parallel universe sounding noises coming from, and what ever happened to all my son’s little missing dinosaurs, toy fish, Lego people and army men.

# # #