DOWN HOME:
Fatherhood can be a hairy deal
___"Daddy, our shower drain is plugged up--again," Lindsay reported the other day.
___When you're young and in love and you waltz around with twinkles in your eyes, nobody bothers to tell you about all the skills you'll need when the light of your life presents you with children.
___Like a basic understanding of plumbing, for example.
___This may be a gender-specific challenge, I readily acknowledge. Many boys today have hairstyles not a lot different than mine. (See photo above.) Well, OK, t
hey have hair all over their heads. But quarter-inch hair fibers don't clog drains.
___Our daughters, Lindsay and Molly, have voluminous, luxuriant locks, the likes of which I can only dream. Their hair is gorgeous. It swoops and swirls. It tumbles. It cascades. It's silky.
___And it falls out and clogs their shower drain faster than you can say, "Who's your plumber?"
___By now, we all know the drill: One of them announces their drain is clogged up, usually at dinner. After we clean off the table, I go out to the garage and get my screwdriver, climb the stairs to their bathroom, take off the metal stopper from their tub and clean the drain.
___I've excavated hairballs the size of a pretty decent Chihuahua.
___If I made Lindsay and Molly pay me plumber's wages every time I unclogged that drain, I could remodel their bathroom, which would be a time-saving undertaking. I've given this some thought, and I've determined the perfect design for teenage girls' bathroom.
___First, you would build the shower above a large grate that sits directly over a 24-inch drainpipe. Dolly Parton could drop one of her wigs down there, and it wouldn't ripple.
___You'd also install a feeder line for the toilet paper, which you'd buy in five-mile roles and store on a spool in the garage, next to the forklift you would use to haul it from the truck.
___You'd build in a vacuum with super-suction vents around the room, with infrared sorters. Turn that sucker on, and it would pull everything off the floor. Cloth articles would go to the dirty-clothes hamper; paper, hair or items of unknown origin would fly into the garbage.
___The sink would be Teflon--easy to clean. The heated mirror never would fog over. The digital alarm on the back of the door would remind each girl when her time is up.
___Of course, if our girls had the "perfect" bathroom, they wouldn't need me nearly so much. So, instead, they have a dad who knows how to fish hairballs out of the drain and usually carries a couple of rolls of toilet paper up there when he goes, just for good measure.
___And you know what? As I gripe about hairballs, I thank God for the girls who put them there. When the hairballs are gone, the girls will be, too. I'll take a little hassle for the blessings of fatherhood.
The Baptist Standard
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