“This Thing is So Sturdy, You Could Do Gymnastics From It” – Tom

My brother-in-law Tom is a handy guy. We constantly maintain a list of “Honey Do’s” for him for whenever he comes down to visit. We weren’t sure at the time why Holly married him, but he quickly showed his usefulness, especially after Dad got sick.

This past weekend, Holly and Tom came down to visit and, unfortunately for Tom, do a bunch of things around the ol’place. Tom fixed the downspout on the front porch that had fallen off during a wind storm a couple of weeks ago; he fixed and re-hung the bird feeder; he replaced light bulbs in the bathroom; he (sort of) fixed the grandfather clock in my bedroom – I say sort of because it’ll only run for 10 minutes… he’s going to mail me the instruction book; he shored up the front flower beds so the mulch doesn’t overflow onto the sidewalk. He’s just a handy dude. Now Holly, Mom and I weren’t just sitting on the veranda sipping mint juleps, though, we were mowing and weed-eating the lawn, shoveling tree crumbs, hauling top soil and planting grass seed. We ALL earned that dinner at the Feed Mill on Saturday night!

However, turns out that there is someone (something ?) that is handier than Tom. I’ll call him Rocky. Yesterday afternoon, mom calls me at work to tell me that Winifred had been acting really odd – sitting up on the top tier of her kitty tower staring out the window. So mom got up to investigate and saw Rocky, a big ol’raccoon, working his way into the birdfeeder. Let me interject here that this birdfeeder is one that Tom got us at Lowe’s last summer/fall, and it’s supposed to be non-bird-proof. That is, when a squirrel, or other non-bird, gets on it, the critter’s weight is supposed to make this metal thing drop and prevent it from getting any of the munchies. We’ve had issues with this birdfeeder – I don’t know if it is non-bird related, but it’s spent more time in our laundry room than it has spent hanging this past winter. So Winifred and the birds were pleased to see it back up this weekend. Tom was their hero.

But Rocky set his masked gaze on those munchies. Well, mom tried her best. She nabbed a broom and ran Rocky off yesterday afternoon. (Although she later said that she shouldn’t have bothered and just nabbed the camera for a picture!) But then she had a meeting to go to. So I came home. I watered the grass seed, checking and the bird feeder was hanging quite securely in Winifred’s window. Sunset came and my farm begged for my attention, so that was the last I thought about the bird feeder.

Until this morning... As I awoke and stumbled past the window to my bathroom to attempt to wash the funk out of my eyes in a half-hearted attempt to humanize myself, all seemed normal. I saw young Mr. Gizmo lolling orgasmicly in the sunshine on Winifred’s tower, but something was out of whack. I peered closer to the window, trying to see without letting too much of that eyeball-searing sunlight into my eyes. The bird feeder was down. I had to laugh. In my mind’s eye, I envision a future with Tom continuing to come down and working, Elmer Fudd-like, to raccoon-proof the bird-feeder. Or even better, like in one of my favorite Married with Children episodes “Wabbit Season” from 1990, when Al is ordered by the doctor to take up a relaxing hobby, so he plants a vegetable garden (singing to the theme from Bonanza as follows… “dum da da dum da da dum dum .. Vegetable Garden! Dum da da dum da da dum dum dum Corn!!”), but a bunny wabbit, er.. rabbit starts eating Al’s veggies, it becomes a war of wills: Bundy vs. Bunny, and the episode ends with Al blowing the garden, and himself, up with dynamite, and the bunny hopping around the wreckage.