It’s the day after Thanksgiving at the house of my brother-in-law on Mercer Island. I’m helping him and my nephew put up the outside Christmas lights.
“I’ll go inside,” he says, “and come out the upstairs window so I can string the upper row of lights. You guys can run three strings across the front down here. The other end, down at the garage, has to be a female end.”
Each strand of lights has a male end and a female end. Any electrician can tell you why they’re called that. So can any anatomy student. We get a ladder and a screwdriver and go to the garage end of the house, taking care to start with a female end, the way he told us.
First thing, the ladder sinks one leg deep into the flower bed. It doesn’t do this till Kevin is halfway up the ladder. He falls into the rhododendron bush and demands to know why I didn’t hold the ladder for him. “I did,” I tell him, “but it got away from me. I’m sorry.”
Kevin apologizes for yelling at me. His father is an honorable lawyer and has taught him to respect his elders. I am almost four times as old as Kevin. That’s why he’s on the ladder and I’m down in the flower bed holding it.
He gets ready to go up the ladder again. This time we anchor all four legs in the bark dust down below. “How are you guys doing down there?” calls Dale, who is half done with the upstairs lights.”
“Coming along,” we yell back, unwilling to admit we haven’t started yet.
We roll along pretty well, plugging one string into another, until we get to the end and ask Dale where we’re supposed to plug in the last string. “Down at the other end, by the garage,” he tells us, leaning over the rain gutter almost upside down, inspecting our handiwork.
“How are we supposed to do that?” I ask quietly. “That’s a female end down there. Have you got a double male adapter?”
“Don’t need it,” he tries to explain. “We run an extension cord out the garage door with two female receptacles. You were supposed to run the second string with the male plug at the other end.”
Everybody is starting to get just a little testy, but we’re all still smiling. “You didn’t tell us that,” says Kevin.
“Don’t you remember how we did it last year and the year before?” Dale asks Kevin.
“Hey, guys, no problem. We can just turn them around and string them the other way.”
We’re just about to do that, two of us on the ladder and the third leaning down from upstairs, when three old ladies walk by and start talking about us. Loudly.
“Looks like a committee putting up Christmas lights.”
“You don’t know the half of it, ma’am. We have to take them down and string them the other way.”
“Why? What difference does it make?”
“Well, it depends on whether you want to plug them in.”
“Oh, well, have a nice day.”
“Yes, ma’am, you, too. You have a nice day.”
We finally get the lights hung and plugged in, and two strings don’t light up. It takes a while to find a Phillips screwdriver so we can take apart the plug and check the fuse, which of course has been blown and has to be replaced.
Dale thinks he stashed some last year, but a 20-minute search does not disclose even one. We all pile into his Mercedes (he’s a very reputable lawyer) and go on an expedition to the other end of the island, hoping to find a hardware store that sells fuses for Christmas lights.
Unless we want to leave the island, our choices are True-Value and Rite-Aid. We try True-Value first, assuming they will have a broader selection. They have about 1,000 fuses, but they all seem to be automobile fuses, not suitable for Christmas lights. Dale and I keep putting on and taking off our glasses, peering at the faint inscriptions on the ends of the fuses, looking like Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in Grumpy Old Men.
It does not occur to us to ask a salesperson for help. It does not occur to any salesperson to ask us if we need help. It does occur to teen-aged Kevin to wonder why he is spending a perfectly good holiday afternoon in the company of two helpless old men, but he is too well brought-up to say so.
We abandon True-Value and go to Rite-Aid, where we find about 1,000 boxes of Christmas lights and 14 fuses, none of them the right size.
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