The Elegant Solution

The Great Plotnik would like you to stare at that photo above and realize, as he does, how elegant a solution The Great Ducknik came up with. It looks so simple. It is not simple.

Of course Ducknik has many other, more traditionally spectacular talents. But lots of people are beautiful and lots of people are smart and lots of people are fabulous moms. How many of these, Plotnik asks you, could stare at that mechanism in the toilet tank (the one where as the tank fills with water after flushing, and the black ball begins to float until it gets high enough to trip the black lever on top, and then the lever flips upward, closing the valve which has been letting water into the tank through that white plastic tube, and thus the cycle is completed and the water stops rushing into the tank, except when it doesn't, when it stops working, always in the middle of the night, and the water does not shut off at all, but keeps running out that white plastic tube so it makes just enough noise that you think you can fall asleep again anyway, but you can't, so you shuffle into the bathroom, take the top off the tank, slam the blasted black lever with your finger, grumbling all the while, until the water stops) -- just stare at it, until she figured out not only what the problem was but had several ideas about how to fix it?

Plotnik could do the staring part. In fact, he DID do that. He owns power tools. He loves the fiction that he can fix anything that goes wrong and therefore he and Ducknik will never have to call an expensive electrician or butt-crack plumber.

The truth is Ducknik does all that. Plotnik can only do the stare part, not the figure-it-out part. He knew he could just buy a new mechanism for $40 bucks or so and spend two hours putting it in. He's done that before. But...it's only one little tiny plastic piece that wasn't working. Why not? He stared at the damned thing and couldn't figure out why it wasn't working or what to do with it.

Ducknik was already at the bat rack, putting on her helmet. Plotnik moved out of the way.

Ducknik realized right away that the three black prongs at the foot of the little black lever were supposed to revolve on a thin white plastic pin (no longer visible because it has been replaced by You Know Who), which was now obviously no longer functioning so the lever could not rotate on it. The pin was impossible to lubricate because it sits in a tiny cavity you can't get to unless you have fingers made out of -- well, copper wire. Hmm, copper wire.

Somehow Ducknik managed to bust the little plastic piece out and replace it with just the right length of copper wire (copper will not rust), on which the little black arm could now rotate, after the black ball rose just enough to activate it, after the water began rushing back into the tank after flushing. It looks so easy. It was SO hard to figure this out.

A little green electrical thingamabob finished it off. Plotnik doesn't know what it is doing there but he is sure there's a reason.

All those weddings he and Brother Jimmy Street played, two or three or sometimes four every weekend for a lot of years. All those toasts, all those Lionel Richie songs, all that I Will Love You Forever. Nobody EVER mentioned repairing a toilet tank mechanism or changing someone's flat tire or being willing to carefully trim the arugula or do a special wash or help the other person when they've spilled something stupid on the rug or take the time to find that lost ear ring or hurry down to Walgreen's for cough syrup or the million other things that people in relationships that have lasted do for each other.

But it's always all about the details, isn't it? Plotnik doesn't want to make too big a thing out of this but he has been flabbergasted for more than forty years and he is still flabbergasted this morning. How does she do it? How does she see these solutions? Where does this creativity in understanding how things work come from?

It's not from his family, that's for sure. And the good thing is the gene seems to pass from the mother to the children.