Bum Plumbing & More Ford & Elvis Too, But Not the One You Think

Much excitement here at the house today. Not the kind of excitement I like, but it did keep me busy for a while. Early in the morning, I took a shower, and the drain quit draining. Suspecting a gross agglomeration of hair, I poked around for that, but that didn’t seem to be it. I applied a plunger, and pretty soon water started seeping from the base of the nearby toilet. The should have tipped me off that something serious was lurking out of sight in the pipes, but I mopped up the leakage with some towels, and threw them in the washing machine – which is in the laundry room next to the small bathroom with the leak – and set them to wash.

A few minutes later water was leaking out from the base of the toilet, up from shower drain, and in from under the washing machine. I shut off all the water to the house, and I needed nearly all of the rest of the dry towels in the house, plus some floor mats, to soak up the new leaks. Time to call a plumber.

A plumbing duo came in mid-afternoon. They removed the toilet from the floor and rodded the sewer line, a noisy process involving a variety of cool-looking pro plumbing tools. Lilly was astonished that a toilet could actually be removed from the floor. Admittedly, it isn’t something you see every day, or would want to. For a time, the boss plumber said, they had trouble rodding the necessary length of pipe, and he speculated that digging might be necessary to fix the problem. A prospect of serious money loss loomed over me for a time.

But the duo got through to the blockage, and restored water flow out of the house. (Whatever flows in must flow out.) The $235 I paid seemed entirely worth it, compared with how bad it could have been. What caused the blockage? The boss plumber said he wasn’t entirely sure, just that it was unblocked.

After posting last night, a few more bits of significa about President Ford occurred to me. For instance, I noticed that by dying on December 26, Ford did so on the same date as Harry Truman, who passed away in 1972 at 88. The only other president to die in December was George Washington, who was a few weeks short of living to see 1800, dying on December 14, 1799, at Mt. Vernon. Cause of death was pneumonia, though I’ve long understood that medical bleeding didn’t do him any good in his last days.

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams famously died on the same day, July 4, 1826, an exceeding patriotic gesture, if you asked me. Less well known is that James Monroe also picked Independence Day to check out, though five years later, in 1831.

Longevity has also earned Ford the number-two spot when it comes to length of survival after a presidential term of office has ended. Ford left office on January 20, 1977, almost 30 years ago. Herbert Hoover lived quite a long time after being ejected from office, 31 years and 231 days, longer than any other president so far, and long enough, I hope, to outlive most of the unfair blame he got for the Depression. John Adams lived 25 years and 125 days after leaving office, but lately Jimmy Carter passed him and will be out off office 26 years next month, thus holding the number-three spot.

Argh, tempus fugit. I remember January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated, fairly well. Saw part of the event on a TV in the lobby of a dorm; that night, I saw Elvis Costello and Squeeze in concert at one of the Vanderbilt’s acoustically crummy venues.