OK, this is it. I am pulling out all the stops. My latest household catastrophe — details on that in a moment — has forced me to invoke St. Romedio of Hohenwart, the patron saint of reversing bad luck. A thousand years ago, he was on his way to visit a friend when a bear attacked and killed his horse. (I know, right? Don’t we all hate it when that happens?) Undeterred, Romedio tamed the bear and rode it the rest of the way to the friend’s house, making quite an entrance. Way to turn lemons into lemonade, Romedio!
In the same vein, I’m embracing the silver lining from last Wednesday’s calamity. It all started with a burst water main that flooded our street, backed up into our pipes, and blew out the old spigot in our front garden. Eleven hours later the neighborhood’s water service was restored, but our water had to remain off for another day until we could get someone to do an emergency repair on the gushing spigot.
And here’s where things began to go wrong.
The neighborhood repair man kindly replaced the old half-inch pipe with a new, improved three-quarter inch version. Our once-sedate water pressure suddenly became a torrent, roaring out of faucets and turning my hand-held European-style shower head in to a menace akin to the famous “Danger Vacuum” scene on the spaceship in Airplane II.
The water pressure also blew out the innards of one of our more capricious toilets, requiring another emergency visit from a different local plumber who — and here’s the silver lining — replaced all the faulty innards and restored it to proper functioning, a repair we’d been putting off for months.
I used to view disasters as disruptions derailing my life, but it’s become pretty obvious that they are my life. As the Buddhists say, “Obstacles do not block the path, they are the path.” Life is what we salvage from the wreckage of our plans.
Take Rich’s birthday last Saturday. The festivities began on a high note Friday evening with friends, cake, bubbly, and lots of laughter. So far, so good.
On Saturday Rich and I planned to kick up our heels at a barn dance in a town along the coast. We drove forty minutes through redwood forests and grassy planes to the village — only to find the hall closed and dark. Apparently the dance had been cancelled; we couldn’t even find anyone to ask. Bummer!
So we headed back, stopping at an old favorite roadhouse called the Paper Mill Creek Saloon. It had recently undergone renovations, and we hoped it hadn’t changed much since its wild heyday in the sixties, when the former biker bar became a hippy hangout for the likes of Jerry Garcia and Janis Joplin.
We found three people nursing beers at the bar, which appeared exactly the same minus decades of smoke and grime on the red walls and ceiling.
Rich and I sat down, ordered drafts, and joined in idle chatter with the couple next to us. When they got up and moved down to the far end of the bar, the bartender said, “They’re looking at the bullet hole Janis Joplin left in the bar.”
This I had to see.
As I peered at the angled gash in the side of the wooden bar (just behind Brian’s head in the photo), the guy who’d sat next to me explained, “They say she had the gun in her pocket, and it went off accidentally.”
“Could happen to anyone,” I replied. “A totally plausible story.”
“If you like stories, you should hear his,” he said, nodding at the bar’s other occupant, a bearded fellow who ducked his head and gave an aw-shucks grin. “Back in the eighties, he wanted to impress the bartendress. There was a horse tied up outside, so he went out, jumped on it, and rode it in here, all the way to the back wall and out again.”
“Bet that got her attention,” I said.
The bearded fellow’s grin broadened. “We dated for fifteen years.”
I was sorry I’d missed his grand equestrian entrance, and even sorrier that I was too young to overlap with Janis in the local dive bars. She would have been an entertaining neighbor and the kind of bad influence I’d have loved as a kid.
She’d lived quite closeby, and that very morning the plumber fixing our toilet had told us that when Janis died, her wake was held in my village, San Anselmo. In her will she left $2500 to cover the bar tab — big money in 1970 — at another favorite hangout, the now-defunct dive bar Lion’s Share. As you can imagine the ensuing party was one for the history books.
This is why Rich and I frequent dive bars, funky taverns, and offbeat roadside eateries — and why we talk to bartenders, bystanders, and the neighborhood plumbers. Everyone has stories to tell, if we just pay attention. As Jimmi Hendrix put it, “Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.”
A few years ago, our friend Joe decided to write his family history with the aid of a company that sent him weekly prompts for a year, inviting him to recount stories about his life and relatives. Question #1: “Do you have any notable ancestors?”
When I asked a friend this question, she instantly said, “No.”
I disagree! What about Adam and Eve? What about our common progenitors who came out of Africa two million years ago and migrated across continents, oceans, and land bridges to populate every part of the world?
We are the end result of 100,000 generations of forebears who were smart and/or lucky enough to survive astonishing perils long enough to pass their genes down to (eventually) you. I’d call that a series of notable accomplishments. We may not know the full details, but those folks certainly had some lively backstories.
Rich’s family, for instance, came over from Ireland with slender means and a robust determination to build better lives in New York. Left fatherless at the age of fourteen, Rich’s dad had to become the family breadwinner. Eventually he got a good job with an ad agency on Madison Avenue, where in the 1940s he coined the iconic slogan, “Everything’s better with Blue Bonnet on it.”
We cannot imagine what our lives would have been like without the surprising twists and turns taken along the way. Just look at St. Romedio. If that story about riding the bear — which I think we can all agree is totally believable — hadn’t made him famous, who would inspire me to find creative ways to ride out all the disasters in my own life? “Remember,” said the Dalai Lama, “that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.”
And now, having mentioned Airplane II earlier, I just had to share this classic movie moment…
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