June 4, 2001
DOWN HOME: Is a bolt in
an in-basket a sign of a loose screw?
___Somebody deposited a bolt in my in-basket.
___This is not good.
MARV KNOX
Editor
___Bolts are not designed for in-baskets.
___Bolts are supposed to grip diligently in the places bolts go, holding things together. Like bridges and lawnmowers and airplanes. And desks.
___That's where, I'm afraid, this bolt should be. Somewhere in my desk.
___We recently remodeled around the office, and I traded up on desks. My old desk had seen better days. For the past couple of years, I often used my letter opener to pry open the top two drawers on the right-hand side.
___So, in the shifting of furniture, I got a "new" desk--only 4 years old. We'll probably donate my old desk to a worthy cause. Like a landfill.
___But now I'm waiting for something to fall out of my desk. When someone finds a bolt on the floor, sooner or later, someone also is going to find a bigger piece of whatever the bolt used to hold together.
___The worst case of extra-boltness I ever experienced happened the first time I put a swingset together. This was years ago, before Molly was born, when my grandfather, Popo, sent money for Lindsay's first birthday. We decided to buy her a swingset.
___We bought it at a large department store, and the display sign included those dreadful words dads learn to loathe: "Some assembly required."
___We brought the swingset home, and I unpacked the crate in the carport. I laid all the big pieces in the backyard and placed all the little pieces on a slab of cardboard on the patio.
___Then I started following the directions, written by an engineer unfamiliar with the English language. Giving up on directions, I started "reading" the little pictures, which looked like blown-up versions of the swingset.
___If a part had a hole in it, I stuck a bolt or a screw or a chain or a thingamajig in it. A few befuddling hours later, a swingset--two swings, a glider, a see-saw and a slide--glistened in the middle of the backyard.
___And I still had a medium-sized zip-lock bag full of small parts. Including bolts. So, before we ever gently placed tiny Lindsay on the swing, her 165-pound daddy put his full weight on every movable part. Nothing came crashing down. We finally decided the guy who put the parts in the crate couldn't understand the directions any better than I did. So, he threw in handfuls of extra parts, just to be safe.
___Sometimes I think about that swingset, particularly when I'm trying to raise children, build a marriage and live the kind of life the Lord wants. Most of the time, I feel like I've got a bag of "parts" left over, but I'm not sure whether I'm the one who threw them all in for good measure or the one who can't figure out what to do with all of them. Probably I'm both.
___Thankfully, our heavenly Father built this swingset called life. It's as sturdy and sure as it is entertaining and exciting. Even with a bolt in my in-basket.
___
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