These are excerpts from The Unhandyman – Misadventures in Fixing Things by Vince Staten
I had a stroller when I was a baby. I know this because I have a picture of Baby Vince in his stroller in the driveway. It’s a nice sturdy looking contraption, a big hunk of metal with four wheels that made it impossible to tip over. It was portable in the way that many things in the fifties were portable: it would fit in that big, giant trunk of your big, giant car.
I also had a crib and a car seat. The crib was portable if you had a couple of adult men in the house. And the car seat was the middle of the front bench, between my dad the driver and my mom the navigator, whose flying arm served as my seat belt. And actually it wasn’t a seat. I mostly stood up between my mom and dad when we took car trips.
See where this is heading?
The kids came into town last week and along with them came about two tons of portable baby equipment for the grandkids. There was the collapsible stroller with seven-point safety harness, dual shock absorbers, reclining seat, hand and foot brakes and washable non-toxic fabric seat. There was the collapsible crib with mesh the strength of high tensile steel and a guarantee in writing that baby can’t get his head through the mesh. And there was the car seat that will withstand a ten-megaton nuclear blast provided all the safety hooks are hooked and all the safety snaps snapped.
And no manual for any of this.
There was so much portable baby equipment that when the morning came for my wife and I to babysit, we just swapped cars with the young parents. Easier than moving any of the “portable” equipment.
Did I mention there was no manual?
“Do you know how to set up the stroller?” my wife asked.
“Isn’t it like an umbrella?” I replied.
“No umbrella I’ve ever seen.”
Piece of cake, I thought. I pulled it out of the trunk and pushed down. Perfect. She sat The Kid in the seat. The stroller collapsed around him. Start over.
There were all sorts of parts that looked like they would snap on other parts to make the stroller stand up. None of them did. The stroller collapsed around him again. A quick text to mom, who described a pedal on the right leg. Bingo. Stroller conquered.
But of course we didn’t need the stroller yet. That was just a test run. We were still standing in the driveway. We needed to put The Kid in the car seat.
That should be easy, I thought, as I climbed into the driver’s seat while my wife lifted The Kid into the car seat. Car seats have been around a long time.
“It won’t buckle.”
A quick look revealed that there were snaps but nothing to snap the snaps into. She hooked the snaps around each other. “Close enough. Drive safely.”
It’s harder to drive safely when someone tells you to drive safely than when you just drive.
We made it to the mall. And that’s when we discovered the other section of snaps. He was sitting on it.
The mall was uneventful – we had after all conquered the stroller – until The Kid grabbed a necklace at Penney’s, unbeknownst to the babysitters. Fortunately my wife noticed before we hit the shoplifting detectors, thereby saving him the shame of a felony while still a baby.
We got back home just in time for his nap.
I didn’t even consider trying to set up the portable crib.
He napped on a blanket on the floor.
Hey, a blanket on the floor was good enough for me when I was a kid and we were visiting my grandparents. Of course so was standing up in the middle of the car’s front seat.
Footnote: “Not every dad wants a Lowe’s gift card for Father’s Day. Quite a few of us – 40 percent according to the New York Times – can’t fix anything more complicated than a burned out light bulb. If I take an errant appliance apart and put it back together and it isn’t any worse, I consider that a triumph. So don’t disappoint the unhandy dad in your life this Father’s Day with a tool that he thinks is something to stir his coffee. Give him a book that says, ‘You are not alone,’ my book about home repair and despair.”
The Unhandyman is available on Amazon for $5.95. At that price you’ll have enough left to do the sensible thing next time you have a fix-it emergency: hire a real handyman.
Vince Staten is the author of 18 books, including the best-sellers “Can You Trust a Tomato in January?” (Simon & Schuster) and “Do Bald Men Get Half Price Haircuts?” (also Simon and Schuster). He has appeared on Late Night with David Letterman, The Today Show, NPR’s Morning Edition and Dateline NBC (back before you had to murder someone to get on the show). He was a long-time columnist for the Louisville Courier-Journal, the New York Daily News and the Kingsport Times-News.
