I can do that. It’s been my battle cry all my life. If something needs to be done and I don’t know how to do it, then let the learning begin! It’s a great challenge to learn how to do something you know nothing about, and trust me, I know nothing about most things. That has meant a lot of learning over the years.
At first I learned from my parents, then it was books, next other professionals, and now, finally, it’s the computer and YouTube. It’s been those videos on how to do stuff that has caused my current predicament. But let’s start this story at the beginning, on an old familiar street not so far away called Flamingo.
During those seven years growing up on Flamingo Street, I learned about construction from my dad. He taught me how to use hammers, nails, drills, and handsaws. Dad never let me or my three brothers use his Skilsaw. He said it was too dangerous and he didn’t want to come home to one of us missing an arm or leg.
Looking back at all of our mishaps, he was probably right. Because of his early teaching, there hasn’t been a construction project I’ve been afraid to tackle over the years, and it gave me the confidence to say, “I can do that.”
It was the same confidence that helped me learn about plumbing during the Great Snowstorm of ’82. During the winter that year, temperatures plunged and stayed below freezing for 10 days. The finally rising temperatures brought a much-needed thaw to our town and something else: broken water pipes under our house.
I called a plumber, crawled under the house, and spent the next week learning how to cut, piece together, and solder copper pipes. Now whenever any plumbing needs to be fixed, I can do that.
Years later, while attending Briarwood High School, home of the Mighty Buccaneers, I thought the best way to be noticed was to become a magician.
After reading numerous books on card trickery, illusions, and slight of hand, I read a book about the most famous magician of all: Harry Houdini. The book went into great detail about some of his best escapes. One was hanging upside down by his ankles suspended 30 feet above a downtown street while trying to escape from a straitjacket. As spectacular as the straight jacket trick was, his most famous escape was an underwater torture cell. After reading about both of these, I said, “One day, I can do that.”
While in college I did indeed build my version of Houdini’s water torture cell and called it The Octagon. I also hung upside down while attempting an escape from a genuine straitjacket. Suspended 30 feet over a crowd with a burning rope tied around my ankles, I had only five minutes to escape before the rope broke and I plunged to the ground.
I learned something important from both of these experiences: a Houdini I was not. Still, I didn’t let a near drowning event or falling 30 feet headfirst and ending up in a hospital emergency room with a collapsed right lung derail my “I can do that” attitude.
With the help from how-to books, friends, and now YouTube, there’s not much I am unwilling to try. So when it came to rebuilding our back deck, I said, “I can do that.” I sat down at the computer, watched 20 short “how-to” videos about deck building and proclaimed myself an expert! To say The Wife had her doubts about my construction abilities would be an understatement.
When I told her that I had already collected a materials list and was headed out to the giant hardware store with the orange roof, she looked worried. She asked if I really thought I could rebuild our deck by myself. I confidently replied, “I can do that.”
That’s when she reminded me about a few proclamations from my past. How the “I can do that” suddenly turned into “Oops, I guess I really can’t.” She asked how, with a bad hip and a bad shoulder, I was going to lift all that heavy lumber, dig footings, mix concrete, tear up the old deck boards, screw down new ones, and install railings.
I’m not as young as I used to be and healing from an injury would take much longer. Besides, who’d babysit our two granddaughters when I was recovering from surgery and going to months of physical therapy? Wouldn’t it be a much better idea, at my age, simply to write a check, let someone else do all the work, then take The Wife out to a nice romantic dinner?
I thought about it for a moment, looked at her and smiled, “I can do that.”
[Rick Ryckeley has been writing stories since 2001. To read more of Rick’s stories, visit his blog: storiesbyrick.wordpress.com.]
