Golden Means and Such

Although there are many things about our current home that I’ve learned to adjust to, (such as strange hallway acoustics that make it sound like you’re talking into a bucket) one of the house's quirks that remains outside the grasp of my adjustability is its inability to produce a consistently comfortable water temperature.

I should have had some idea when I first looked in the basement (what my wife refers to as “the archaeological dig” due to the multi-layered dugout earth floor) and set eyes on the tank of a water heater/furnace. It’ probably only a few hundred years old.

My showers were never super hot, but I began to agree that something was wrong when heating enough water for Lyric’s bath regularly required a kettle of hot water from the stove. It turns out that the temperature setting for hot water output was much too low, so says the maintenance man whom I finally coaxed out of a prolonged “vacation” to come look at my dinosaur fossil in the archaeological dig. Turning up the temp seems to do the trick – we’re able to have nice hot showers most of the time. It’s also much easier to burn your hands when washing dishes.

If you wash dishes by hand every day, you usually get to know the dynamics of the hot water output, how far to turn the faucet handle left or right in order to produce which temperature. I like to have the water nice and hot for rinsing dishes, right before the scald-skin-off-hands stage. But for some reason, this level of intimacy with my hot water heater eludes me (I think we need counseling) and I continue to be surprised by an inconsistent temperature of water, either to cold or too hot.

The same thing happens to me in the shower, which also seems to have a life of its own. Allow me to attempt description. First, it takes about a minute for the hot water to kick in at all so you let gallons and gallons of Mr. Cold rush down the drain until Miss Hot arrives with vengeance. So for another minute you try to convince Miss Hot to back off to a manageable level by adjusting and readjusting the little hand knob. At the moment when you feel you have finally reached that pristine little paradise of just-right-mmmm-hot shower temp, you jump in and realize that Miss Hot is trying to peel strips of skin off your back. I’ve finally come to realize that Mr. Cold and Miss Hot do not like to compromise. There is a specific point on the dial of the water knob that seems to be the dividing line between scalding and luke-warm with no middle ground. Only if I can turn the knob ever so slightly between these two states of reality do I sometimes find a compromise – but my joy is short-lived because in the midst of all this vascillating, there is a constant decline of water tempt overall of the dinosaur fossil’s willingness to keep up with Miss Hot’s output. (Mr. Dinosaur also needs counseling) So because of all these strained relationships, even a short five-minute shower (between attempts to find the right temp and then maintain it) requires dozens of water knob adjustments – a regular nightmare for an obsessive compulsive guy like me.

I’ve been thinking there must be a useful analogy here somewhere, and I think I’ve found it. Life is about finding balance, right? (the “golden mean” of Plato, or was it Aristotle?) Without the ability to balance out extremes – in this case hot and cold – discomfort and pain and difficulty results. And what greater example of the need for balance than the marriage? What an amazing idea, attempting to blend and mesh and fuse two entities who are stock full of the un-blend-able, the un-mesh-able, the non-fuse-able. One is a clean freak, the other finds that the path to enlightenment leads through a house scattered with randomly strewn objects. One is helpless and maimed without well-planned schedules, detailed lists and clear goals while the other enjoys floating about like jetsam and flotsam on troubled seas. One has their scrooge wound tightly, the other enjoys casual spending and finds receipts trifling. (You know who you are out there.)

So I like to think of myself as Mr. Cold and my wife as Miss Hot. She is goal-oriented and a visionary, a disciplined worker for the most part with a good grasp of the big picture. I tend to be oriented toward the nebulous and undefined, get absorbed in the details and constantly forget my wallet and keys while I am trying to suck the marrow out of life’s bones. Sometimes her hot is entirely essential, sometimes my cold is absolutely necessary.

She is the one who woke me up at age 18 by randomly walking up behind me and dumping Queen Ann’s Lace on my head (hot water), but I’m the one who’s kept her sane through residency (cold water). She’s the one who got me off my duff to start running again (hot water) but I’m the one who can mediate familial conflicts with cold water. Hands down, my life is better because of Miss Hot. She’s opened a world to me that I couldn’t have found just sitting around sucking on bones and I’ve opened a world to her that she couldn’t have found by chasing goals and checking off lists.

I suppose we could survive on our own (it’s impossible even to imagine that after seven years of marriage) but there are so many ways we can help each other – if we can find the elusive middle ground between scalding and luke-warm. If we can learn to use each other’s strengths at the appropriate times - learn to compromise just a bit for the task at hand - if we can blend our hot and cold – we can be dynamite.