Temporary fixes, absurd contortions

There are many things in our home that don’t work quite right, so everyday tasks take longer than they should, or require that certain arcane rituals be performed. This device needs to be jiggled just so; that one needs to be pushed and twisted simultaneously. This one can only be operated with great force, but there is another that must be handled with extreme care, lest it disintegrate completely.

A few years ago, people started referring to complicated undertakings as having “a lot of moving parts.” The figurative meaning, near as I can figure, has something to do with an enterprise being vulnerable to multiple possible combinations of small delays or failures. But the literal meaning is also an apt description of our physical interaction with the world.

We homo sapiens are known to be fond of our tools and contraptions. I simply cannot keep all of mine in proper working order. Let’s just say it’s not a strong component in my skill set. In our household, we continue to break stuff faster than I can repair it, so there’s always a temporary fix – a new accommodation to be made, a new incantation to learn. As the maintenance deficit grows, the unwritten book of domestic sorcery gets longer and weirder.

For a long time, our oven door could only be opened if you held the lower left corner in, or else it would come off its hinges entirely. That was a good little stove. I think it was an Enterprise, made in Sackville, N.B. We found it in the classified ads, paid the asking price of $60, and removed it from longtime storage in a barn in the Annapolis Valley. Took a lot of SOS pads to clean off all the bird crap, but it worked like a charm – probably for 10 years or so, until the door issue. Since finding parts for a decades-old range was out of the question (especially in the pre-internet age), we got used to it.

Amazing how something like that becomes automatic – “muscle memory,” as they say. If I only had one hand free, I could balance on my right foot and use my left to secure the lower corner of the door while I opened it to put something in the oven. (I liked to think that this offered some of the benefits of yoga.) However, we too often ended up with uninitiated house guests yanking the door off, so we eventually sprung for a new stove.

We opted for electronic ignition, thinking to avoid wasting propane on standing pilots. But the ignitors were temperamental from the beginning, and eventually you could only get the oven to ignite if you turned on one of the top burners – another handy trick for guests to learn.

More recently, the oven door became finicky, and then it seized. You might think our industrial society would have mastered this technology by now, but apparently not. Oven doors, it turns out, are prone to failure. I messed with it for a while, then fell into despair and started browsing Kijiji for Cold-War-era gas ranges. (I mean the 20th-century Cold War, not the new one.)

My 14-year-old took matters into his own hands. (In addition to having a technical interest in solving this kind of problem, he has a vested interest in our capacity to produce baked goods.) He went at the oven door with a chainsaw file, and created a little groove where the hinge was getting hung up. Works okay now, if you’re gentle with it. At the moment, only three of the four top burners are functional. Turns out, three is usually enough. And we keep a box of matches handy to light them when necessary. No big deal.

*****

If you have an appliance problem, there’s a small chance you will find a solution on the internet, but you will, for certain, find legions of other people who share your frustrations with today’s shoddy appliances. Collective outrage seems to be the basis for a great many virtual “communities.” It’s a small comfort, but we cling to it.

I inherited a Cold-War-era washing machine, and for quite a few years it was perfectly adequate. We eventually replaced it with a model that belonged to the first generation of front-loading machines made for the North American market. It offered the promised advantages of using less water and eliminating most of that water in the turbo-charged spin cycle – but it soon succumbed to various mechanical problems. Our local repair guy, who is a straight shooter, told us we should accept the fact that we are living in the age of badly engineered and cheaply made appliances – so we should just fork over the dough for extended warranties.

This is why we still have the old toaster we found up in the loft. It’s not one of those fancy pop-up models; you have to manually flip your half-toasted bread when one side is done. That smoky smell does not mean you’re having a seizure; it means you wandered away to get another cup of coffee, or started talking back at someone on the radio, and now your toast is toast – figuratively speaking. This is the wisdom of the ancient toaster. I like to think that it promotes mindfulness.

(Inattentive toasting reveals the true nature of second-rate bread, which burns especially quickly due to its high sugar content. But if you put a slice of good pumpernickel in there, you’ve got time to run out and get the newspaper – and in the time it takes to toast the other side, you can read the newspaper, such as it is.)

This toaster has a certain tinny, Depression-era quality, but with so few moving parts, it has lasted well. It takes one of those standard two-prong cords that used to be common for electric kettles as well as toasters. On one occasion, years ago, I bought a replacement cord at the hardware store – but when that cord gave out, I couldn’t find another one locally. Fortunately, I was able to get one from Michael Sheafe, who runs a home-based business in New York City called Toaster Central.

Sheafe is a vendor at the Sunday market at 77th and Columbus, just west of Central Park, but he also does a lot of mail-order business. Mostly he sells refurbished vintage toasters, including some that are truly beautiful, but he offers one new model, made by the Polytron Corporation in Elkhart, Indiana. It’s a 14-pound brute, with the aesthetic character of a Hummer, and it costs $285, but evidently it is proving popular with consumers who believe in the buy-American principle. They are doing their part to Make Appliances Great Again, I guess.

*****

Big-city life might not be your cup of tea, or mine either, but only a large population centre can support a usefully eccentric business like Toaster Central. Or like Danny’s Vacuum, a little shop on St. Clair Street in Toronto, where, in addition to repairing all makes and models, the owner makes replacement hoses with various fittings. When I asked Danny if he might have one that would be compatible with our old Hoover (another multi-generational appliance), he gave me the option of several different lengths.

We should be grateful for these people who devote themselves to seemingly obscure pursuits – people who fill a little niche of expertise. And this is true also for endeavours that are not immediately useful to us.

I’m thinking of the Dalhousie University researchers who just discovered two new microscopic organisms. In addition to being new to science, these single-cell species are the first known representatives of a major evolutionary group – the hemimastigotes – which is above the level of a kingdom. This means they reside on their own branch of the tree of life, and have evolved independently for more than a billion years.

“There’s nothing we know that’s closely related to them,” said Dr. Alastair Simpson, the Dal biology professor who was interviewed by the CBC. He gave due credit to his graduate student Yana Eglit, who found the microbes in a soil sample she took from the Five Bridge Lakes Wilderness Area (a 20,000-acre block of Crown land on the Chebucto Peninsula, designated for conservation in 2011).

And to his credit, Dr. Simpson refrained from making some condescending remark when he was asked whether these critters present a human health hazard. (The question is hardly surprising, given our society’s germaphobic tendencies.)

“No,” he replied good-naturedly. “Just to be super-clear, most microbes are not dangerous to people at all. They are hugely important parts of the ecosystem of the earth. Many of them are either photosynthesizing, like plants do, or eating each other – eating other microbes. Down at the microscopic level, there’s a whole ecosystem that is churning away very fast, and it’s tremendously important for how the planet runs. On land, the new energy comes from plants, but if you go to the ocean, the new energy comes from microbes. The reason there is food for fish to eat is because microbes are doing microbe things.”

How amazing it is that we know so much, and yet so little. To say that the natural world “has a lot of moving parts” would not just be an understatement; it would be an erroneously mechanistic way of characterizing biological systems.

Yet we address imperiled species by means of checklists, and take action only in the face of immediate crises for those that appeal to the naked eye. Rather than protecting biodiversity, we seek the token gesture, the trade-off, the work-around. Very soon, we should recognize that we cannot continue jury-rigging our home, making it a more fragile and temperamental place where nothing functions quite the way it’s supposed to. DL