At some point in life, if you're like most people, you quit doing things.
Not big things, necessarily, though you may quit those as well. Little stuff. Changing your own oil. Mowing your own grass. Most household repairs, particularly if they involve ladders, electricity or any combination thereof.
And, by the way, any combination of a ladder and electricity is not a good idea. And even having to say that is kind of scary.
For most of us, there tends to come a point when we do the mental cost-benefit analysis and decide, yeah, need to call the handyman or draft one of the kids, cause this "fixing things" stuff is cutting into our "not sweating like a pig while bashing our knuckles with tools we can barely operate" time.
If you're smart, you can do a combo Mr. Chips-Tom Sawyer deal and try to convince your offspring the reason they, not you, are dragging years of gunk from the gutters of the house is they're learning valuable lessons about hard work and the sense of accomplishment they'll get from a job well done.
And that might actually stick for a little bit. At least until they start to point out you appear to have learned it's really valuable to have hard work done by someone else, and there appears to be a real sense of accomplishment derived from not having to stand on a ladder in a 20-mile-an-hour wind and slight rain.
That's when you realize the kids may have been paying a little too much attention to your wife.
Then there are the moments you quit doing things because, well, frankly, you're not very good at them. Like when you try most plumbing repairs or to make your own pizza, complete with the part where you throw the dough in the air.
That really looks easy when they do it in the restaurants. It also looks like their ceilings might be a little taller than the ones in your kitchen.
Of course, it doesn't even have to be that big a deal. Sometimes little things reinforce the gnawing suspicion that maybe it's time to call in a professional, or at least check out YouTube. Like when you discover the reason your smoke alarm is still beeping is you managed to replace the dead battery with another equally dead battery. I mean, you'd think they'd put expiration dates on those. Which ... they do.
Also, many of us have also reached the point in our lives where we just don't have as much to prove and are under no obligation to rise to someone else's level of expectation. Particularly when that someone has a garage full of tools and some actual knowledge about how to use them.
So, no, I don't change my own brakes. I also don't cut my own hair and wouldn't think of removing my own appendix or going all Tom Hanks on a damaged molar. There are trained professionals for those sorts of things. Who am I to cut in on their territory?
Which doesn't explain why I spent a large part of Saturday putting together a trampoline.
OK, a qualifier here. A trampoline is basically composed a circle of metal tubes, fabric and a bunch of springs. If more people actually wanted one, some smart guy would build a robot that could put them together.
I've probably assembled, disassembled and reassembled a trampoline about a dozen times in my life. That doesn't count the number of times I've had to go back and take the whole thing apart to fix something I messed up while putting it together. Though it probably should. Which makes me the expert at building a trampoline the wrong way. So I've got that going for me.
And the chances of me actually using the trampoline I put together are about as great as those of me leaping on it from the second story of my house.
But, my granddaughter just loves it. Just like she seemed to like the chocolate and butterscotch chip cookies I baked (next time I bake cookies will be the second). Which is to say she's probably not old enough to understand the effort, but old enough to appreciate it.
So, yes, I've reached the point in my life where there are a lot of things I won't do for myself. But I've got the scraped knuckles and cookie-sheet induced burns to prove I won't quit doing them for the right someone else.
Commentary on 11/04/2016