The tool set goes back to when I was single and on my own. I owned a beat-up, but perfectly serviceable hammer that saw me through the
hanging and rehanging of all my pictures as I moved from apartment to apartment. When I married, my husband appropriated my little hammer and it disappeared. So I went out and bought myself a nice hammer. And that one also
disappeared. My husband, the Imelda Marcos of hammers, has billions of the critters in his workshop. There are none in the house, however, and that makes it difficult when it's raining or snowing or blizzarding outside to
go and get one. So I've resorted to using my meat tenderizer whenever I want to sink a nail into the wall.
And that's why when I was rearranging pictures in my son's room the other day I told him to run downstairs, look in
the drawer where I keep my big kitchen utensils and get the wooden mallet I use to tenderize meat. He may only be a kid, but even kids recognize the truly bizarre when it saunters up and taps them on the shoulder. He did as he was
told but gave me a quizzical look when he handed it to me.
"Are you going to tenderize some meat, Mom?" he asked.
"Nope," I said through a mouth full of nails, "I'm going to hammer a nail in the wall."
"Why don't you use a hammer?"
"I can't, son. Your father is a kleptomaniac who specializes in tools," I said, pounding a nail into the wall and leaving another series of dents in the side of my meat tenderizer. A few
minutes later I received a visit from his father.
"What have you been telling him?" the big one asked, jerking a thumb downstairs.
"The truth," I said, tersely, as I brushed past him. "Not only do you steal hammers,
I seem to remember a couple of screwdrivers I used to have...."
"So how does that make me a maniac and a fool?" he asked, puzzled look upon his countenance.
OK - maybe I shouldn't talk with a mouth full of nails.
But no matter how garbled the message, the truth is still there in all its unvarnished, unnailed glory: the score was me-0, him-2, and I was still using a meat tenderizer to put nails in the wall.
So, on Christmas morning
when we opened packages, I was handed a heavy, lead-colored case by my triumphant hubby. Inside was a nifty collection of tools: screwdrivers, a level, a pry bar and others, but mainly there was a beautiful, shiny hammer. He smiled
like a Cheshire cat and then took the tool box and put it in a closet in the laundry room. And there it sits, except for the half dozen times he's pulled it out and used the tools in it for small jobs around the house. It is, he
told me, extremely useful and he really likes it. I'm so glad for him.
Next year I'm going to buy my husband a new food processor -- a really fancy one that chops and dices and slices and lots of neat things. Oh, he doesn't
know how to cook, unless you count microwave popcorn. But I do. And I'll be happy to break it in for him.
It's the least I can do for the man who never met a hammer he didn't like.
