Small Blessings

Sometimes things that at first seem bad turn out okay. In this case it has caused Number One Son a little pain, but I think what he is getting will more than offset that.

A couple of weeks ago, he came downstairs earlier than I anticipated. He waited a minute I guess to be sure that I had my composure, and then turned to face me so that I could see full-face the damage to his bottom lip, which had a gaping scar and was swollen to at least twice its normal size.


The story was that the night before, after he had crawled into bed, he had been tussling with Soldier Son's big dog. I had just taken Tank to the vet a day or two earlier, so I knew he weighed about 70 pounds, more than half what I guess Number One Son weighs. The play had escalated to the point that Tank had taken on the attitude he uses when he plays with the Alpha Bitch; the difference is apparently that the Alpha Bitch's skin  is much tougher the Number One Son's, so hers is not as likely to puncture,  tear, and bleed. Number One Son's, obviously, is.

Number One Son moped around the house for a day out or two, nursing his wounded lip and feeling sorry for himself, especially since he didn't see his pizza delivery customers tipping very generously the guy with the swollen, scarred lip. But he soldiered on, doing the job in spite of himself.

So I was a little surprised a couple of days later when he slunk downstairs and turned to face me with a nasty scrape on his left cheek, just below the eye. "How did you get that?" I asked him.

"That's not the worst of it," he said. "Look at my tooth."

Sure enough, half the left front tooth was broken off. Of course, that's also the side where his lip was busted. So now the left side of his face had a scrape the size of a tennis ball, a broken tooth, a swollen lip, and a nasty gash. He was a sight. And he still had to deliver pizzas.

"What did you do this time?" I asked him.

"I was roughhousing with a friend."

"Who?" I guessed a couple of names. At first, he didn't want to tell me, but finally he admitted it was Shrek, the kid who had lived with us for a while not too long ago. "How did he do that?" I asked. Knowing Shrek, I didn't figure he meant to hurt my son. but I wouldn't be too surprised if he's close to twice my kid's  weight.

Sure enough, the guys had been tussling, the testosterone had kicked in, and weight had apparently overcome strength. And Number One Son looked like something the cat dragged in. Aside from not having any kind of medical or dental insurance to take care of the damage to his body, Number One Son was not too hopeful about his tips that night.

I offered him a deal. I've had a bunch of jobs I've needed help with ever since he moved in here, but his enthusiasm for them has been, to put it mildly, low. This time I had a bit of a carrot: I'm okay financially, and I could more likely afford dental work than he can. I shudder to think of the cost of a cap for that tooth, especially since I know the dentist will see the condition of his other teeth. But I think he shudders to think of going through life with a broken tooth.

I had found a deal on a really cheap greenhouse that happened to be in my garage at the time. I had already told him that his Mother's Day gift to me was going to be to assemble my greenhouse. But now I had that carrot: I was (and still am) willing to credit him at $10 an hour to do some of the chores around the house until he earns enough to pay at least most of the cost of the cap—but if and only if he would get started on them during the next week. I didn't plan to count any part of assembling the greenhouse as credit toward the new tooth, but of course I had no idea how long "greenhouse assembly" takes.

The next week, I had to be away from home on business, and I told him the deal would only work if he got started while I was gone. I didn't hold my breath, so I was happily surprised about the middle of the week when I got a photo text message from him. Not only did I see the frame assembled on the greenhouse, but the message came early in the afternoon. That had to mean not only that he had been working on my project, but also that he had not slept two-thirds of the day away. I was pretty impressed!

A day or two later, I got another snapshot, this time of the greenhouse with the sides put together. I replied immediately—and truthfully—that I was excited and could hardly wait to get home to see what he had done.

I was able to get away early enough Friday afternoon to get home well before dark. I was thinking so much about getting there in time to see the greenhouse (and I really needed to go to the potty) that I almost didn't notice the wrought iron fish tank stand at the front edge of my parking space in the garage. Fortunately, I did see it,and it was just far enough out of the way that I didn't knock it down.

Number One Son hadn't told me that he had also started another project. I've had the old fish tank stand since shortly after I married, and over the years it has collected enough rust that it has occasionally needed to be sanded and repainted. The sanding and painting part hasn't happened for too long a time now, and since the dogs somehow managed to crack the fish tank (which was, fortunately, empty at the time), it seemed like a good idea to repaint the stand before I installed the new tank. I had asked Number One Son some time ago to check with body shop that had a sandblaster to see if they could strip it down for us, but so far he hadn't done anything about that.

Sometime while I was gone, however, he talked to a friend's dad who also has a body shop. The dad lent him a couple of tools that helped him knock the bigger pieces of rust off the iron and had recommended good old hand sanding for the rest of it; Number One Son obviously had put in some time at that. It wasn't looking great yet, but it was a whole lot better than the last time I had seen it. And it meant that he had been out of bed and moving while I was gone.

The greenhouse saga clearly isn't over with. The greenhouse is standing and looks pretty good, but the land in the back slopes, and I'm afraid that's going to affect the way the door opens and closes, so were going to have to do something about leveling it and giving it some sort of foundation. I think we've pretty much agreed that standing it on garden timbers and filling the inside with pea gravel will just about make me happy. We cruised the hardware store yesterday and came out with wire brushes and paint for the fish tank stand and some ideas for landscape timber and pea gravel. And I conceded that Number One Son had contributed more than his share in constructing the greenhouse, so the time he spends on the foundation will all count toward his new tooth.

Yesterday afternoon he was back at Shrek's house. Broken tooth or not, Shrek is still his friend. And Number One Son is on a mission: he needs a truck to haul timbers and pea gravel, and Shrek has a truck that has needed some repair. Since Number One Son has some training as a mechanic, he fixed the truck, and now Shrek can help with the hauling. It probably won't hurt Shrek to help with the loading, either.

I'm happy to see my little greenhouse standing in the backyard, and I'm happy to see the progress coming along on the fish tank stand, but most of all, I'm happy to see Number One Son grinning. I think he's pretty proud of what he's done, and I think he's proud of himself for getting up and getting moving.

I'm proud of him, too.

Angels watching over me

When I was a little kid, Mother was my sister Susan Rene's Girl Scout troop leader, and the group often met in the big living room of the house where we grew up. I was supposed to stay in my room/out of the way during troop meetings, but of course I frequently sneaked down the hall to stand in the doorway and listen to what was going on.

Mother loved to sing—she and Daddy used to sing away the miles as we traveled, and I remember looking out through the back window of the station wagon many nights to the melody of their Shine on Silvery Moon and other songs from their familiar repertoire—and singing was often a part of the Scout meetings. By the time I was big enough to be aware of what they were singing, the girls were singing melodic rounds of White Coral Bells, the tripping air of An English Country Garden, the solemn Peace of the River, and the descant of Angels Watching over Me.

I loved listening to the songs, whether as the Girl Scouts sang them in our living room or as my sisters harmonized as they went about housekeeping or as we gobbled up miles on family trips. I'm the tone-deaf one in the family who got kicked out of the school choir in the fifth grade, but I squawked along the best I could and thoroughly enjoyed the music in our home.

I started first grade the year our Girl Scout council bought a little chunk of land just outside of town and built a camp so those of us growing up here could adventure into the out of doors. A few years before she died, Mother told me that the real story behind the camp's name was that Daddy had picked it out, campaigned for it in his quiet way, and made it stick.

Daddy had picked our little town to establish his glass business a couple of years before I was born because he liked the friendliness of the community, which was symbiotic with the atmosphere of the college just down the road. At that time, the college was small, all male, and all military, and students greeted each other and visitors with a single word: Howdy. Daddy liked that message enough to think it fit as the name of the new Girl Scout facility, and from the early days when the site team was clearing out spaces for campsites, it became known as Camp Howdy.

Three decades later when my Darling Daughter was a Brownie scout, Camp Howdy had grown by a few acres and had modernized substantially, but when I returned there with her as a day camp unit leader, I found that feet that had run those trails for 10 years in my childhood could still find their way around camp without a map. Most of the camp sites had running water and picnic tables by then, and most had some sort of preparation area for cooking, but the main trails and camp sites were pretty much the same.

Best of all, the woods rang continually with music. In the years that I was away, singing had become at least as big a part of the day camp experience as anything else was, and the only real "competition" in camp was to see which unit sang the most on the trails, as observed by collection of trinkets from camp staff as campers moved through camp. The music had changed substantially over the years, but whenever I have found myself alone on the trails—which has been pretty often during almost two decades as the leader of the aide-in-training unit—I find myself going back to the old songs I remember from my own camping days.

Sunday afternoon was not quite one of those days. I volunteered more years ago than I can remember to serve on the site team that takes care of the camp, which mostly means that from time to time I volunteer to go out and head up a group of university students who are willing to help us clean up and care for the camp. My assignment Sunday was to take a crew of them down into the depths of the camp, where earlier volunteers had defined a new spot for a fire pit and had started trimming undergrowth to open up spaces for gravel-covered tent pads.

Our job was to drag out deadwood around the perimeter of the site, knock out and clean up the area where the old fire pit was, and set the landscape bricks for the new pit. I had everybody in the group stop on the way to the site to pick up a couple of bricks and one or another of several tools we would need. Three of the kids volunteered for the fire pit job, and I set the other four to pulling out deadwood. I clipped away enough yaupon to get the deadwood crew to work, then left them to it so the others could get the fire pit started.

I showed the pit builders how to use the tools they'd need to make the circle the right size and to level the bricks on the gentle slope of the site, then went back over to help with the deadwood. I had acquired a cool new pair of loppers a couple of weeks before, and I was eager to see if they did the job I wanted them to do. Besides, the girls on that crew were moving at a snail's pace, and we'd never finish the job if they didn't have more help.

So much scrabble was on the ground that I didn't need the clippers; I picked up armloads of wood and hauled them out to the trail where two of the girls were carrying them in small loads up to the parking area where next week's crew will mulch them or load them off to a burn pile. On one trip into the woods, I felt something pull at my pocket and made a mental note to be sure the car keys were safe in the bottom of it. I had driven my soldier son's car because mine was running on fumes and his needs to have the fluids stirred up from time to time, and losing his keys while he's stationed in Afghanistan might not be my best move. I keep an assortment of store cards and a little pill box on a small ring that snaps onto my key ring, and I stopped on the way back into the woods to be sure the hook was snapped firmly onto my belt loop.

When our 4-hour service time was over, my crew and I had hauled enough bricks to get the fire pit to its full complement of 60, knocked out the old fire pit and moved its old railroad ties across an old trail to slow erosion, and created a fairly prodigious stack of deadwood for mulching. We gathered up our tools and trudged back to the parking area where the site team leader had brownies, oranges, and soft drinks for the kids. I visited briefly with the rest of the team about what we had accomplished and what's next on the plans, then headed off to the car and home.

Except that the car keys were not so much in my pocket. The ring with the store cards and cold medicine was still hooked on my belt loop, but the keys were not there, not in my pocket, not with the sweatshirt I had peeled off and set aside, no place.

I called back to the team leader that I had lost the keys and had to go to the unit to look for them, and all three of them men agreed to hop in the ATV and go with me. When we got to the site, the guys piled out and asked where I thought they should look. I swept my arm in a large arc and said, "There." From where we stood, I had worked over a swath of land probably 30 feet wide and maybe 100 feet long; the keys could have been anywhere.

They all nodded along and seemed to agree in unison that they needed to check out the quality of work on the new fire pit. I stomped into the nearest area we had cleared of deadwood and tried to figure out where I would go from there. I had beat my way through underbrush and vines in an arc from about 15 away in one direction to maybe 40 feet in the other, and that kind of work—bending, stooping, ducking through the scrub—was the most likely place for the keys to jump from my pockets. I decided to start on the near side, ducked under a yaupon bush, and stopped: the oddly symmetrical shape a few inches from my feet couldn't have been anything but the remote control for the keys.

I couldn't help but grin as I bent down to pick them up and heard the echo of the songs in the living room from so many years ago: all night, all day, angels watching over me!

Sweet spring

After a goofy-cold winter, I'm a little surprised to see spring leaping out at me, but as I walked back toward the house from picking up this morning's paper, I noticed a cheerful little row of white, bell-shaped blossoms peeking out from my somewhat disorderly front flowerbed.

Like a lot of other plants in my front yard, these babies have a history. The liriope and monkey grass that define my planting spaces started in the backyard of mother and daddy's best friends in Houston. The springeri fern has burgeoned from a tiny root I swiped from the first apartment I lived in after I married. Most of the amaryllises are probably great-grandchildren of the house where I grew up, and the daylilies are from one or the other of my sisters or from one of mother's cousins who brought daylilies to cheer her during the months when we knew she was dying.

These little white guys are from the backyard of the aunt who lived in town until a few years ago. Auntie's husband, my dad's brother, had been daddy's business partner when they first moved here more than six decades ago, and she lived in the only house I ever remember as hers until Margaret Joan and her husband shipped Auntie off to the nursing home a couple of years before she died.

For a couple of years before that, I tried to do the Good Samaritan thing (although that has never come as easily for me as it has my sisters) and pop in to visit Auntie from time to time. Once or twice, she needed help with yardwork, so once I mowed the lawn for her and other times I helped water or move or otherwise tend the plants that so eagerly grew on her back porch.

The little guys in question—I have no idea what they are called or where to look to find out—grew in a little clump about halfway from the back porch to the vegetable garden that had gone for years untended. Most of the time, the clump just looked like a stray clump of liriope or some grasslike kin, but in early spring, it tossed up a sprinkling of small, bell-shaped flowers with little green dots on each of its tiny "petals," if they could be called that.

When Margaret Joan moved Auntie into the nursing home, I went by the house and collected what I could of the pot plants and dug up a few ground plants that I figured would never be missed. I'm sure I could have taken the whole clump of white guys, but instead I scooped up a small clump and tossed them into the truck.

When I got them home, I planted them in a few places around my yard to see if I could find somewhere where they could grow. At Auntie's house, they sat in full, open sun; my yard doesn't understand that term. I remember putting maybe one clump in the front yard, in the sunniest spot I could find, and two or three other clumps in the back yard. They managed to poke up in a place or two, but I don't remember much more than that.

After Soldier Son's dog Tank moved in with me a couple of years ago, I lost all hope of anything surviving anywhere in the backyard except a small flower bed that I preserved by putting a fence around it. I have a vague recollection of digging up a clump of the white guys from a flower bed I had begun around a tree that died a couple of years later. Since I didn't have much hope for blooming plants in the shady front yard, I didn't bother to remember where I might have moved it.

Apparently, I broke it down into a dozen or so little clumps in the front bed, because that's how many were sparkling up at me this morning. I was glad to see the little starscape and to smile as I remembered my diminutive Auntie with the bright green thumb.

Weird dream

I had a very strange dream the other night. 

When it began, I was the door of my friend Alyssa’s house, a tiny place where Alyssa lived alone. As my friend welcomed me in the front door, I was fascinated by one heavily-textured, rich-milk-chocolate-brown wall, dominated by the image of a large cross sculpted into the texturing mud.  What I would normally have considered oppressive or weird somehow made the whole wall feel like a work of art. 

The room was sparsely furnished: a chair, a loveseat, a couple of end tables. A lamp turned on near the chair where Alyssa was seated lent the room its warmth and dignity. The few knickknacks on the tables and a small bookshelf were all spotless.

Through an open door, I could see the dining room. Its cinnamon red walls extended the sense of warmth and art from the living room, although in contrast living room, they had a linen texture. Beyond the dining room, the bright white kitchen invited conversation and friendship.

In the kitchen, I drifted mentally back to the days when Alyssa and I had been friends. We sat next to each other in Ms. Gatlin’s fifth grade classroom. That was the year our school was bulging so much that they had divided the cafeteria into two classrooms, leaving only enough room for students to file in along the temporary wall and back out through the serving line with their trays.

I had always taken my lunch to school, so for most of my years, I took a shortcut through the milk line instead of the lunch line, but that year we were all stuck in one line together. We all filed in along the temporary wall, out through the serving line, and back to our classrooms and our desks. Ms. Gatlin  allowed us to talk quietly that I desk as we ate, and Alyssa and I used the time to laugh about things as simple as my blue vinyl kaboodle kit lunch box.

In retrospect, I wonder why Alyssa and I were not also after school friends. I was not one to make friends, and that was the year Mattel introduced the 0dd Ogg, with its catchy little jingle that I heard probably more than I deserved. Alyssa was gorgeous and tall and already beginning to “blossom,” as my mother said, making her a target for a lot of impudent fifth-grade boys. I don't know that we ever talked about it, but I think she was rather embarrassed. If we had nothing else in common, we both were the targets of childish teasing.

But after school, I was as much a mole then as I am now. I would go home, grab a snack, ride my bike, and maybe visit a friend who lived a couple of houses away. The five o'clock train whistle was the signal to come home for supper, maybe a TV show, homework, and bed. By junior high school, Alyssa often accompanied the school choir on the piano, and I suspect her afternoons in the fifth grade involved a lot of practice. Somehow I can't imagine her running home, playing, or riding a bike, although it's entirely possible that she did.

By sixth grade, I'm sure we annoyed a lot of our classmates. The sixth grade homeroom teacher like spelling bees, and Alyssa and I were good at them. I can't remember if we had spelling bees in the fifth grade, but Friday afternoons in sixth grade were spelling bee time. I don't remember how the spelling bees started every Friday, except that the whole class stood along the chalkboard and Mr. Newman started with the weekly spelling list. Two or three or four of our classmates went down on every round; I suspect the most of those didn't want to participate, and some who stayed up longer probably just wished the contest would end. Mr. Newman would work his way backward from the list of the week to the beginning of the school year as long as anyone was still up and spelling.

I loved the spelling bees; spelling was one thing that made me feel like a winner, and I didn't have many. I think Alyssa liked them, too, because she usually was the other one left, and she probably beat me as often as I beat her. I remember clearly that the last word of the last spelling bee was “mustache," but I don't remember which of us spelled it right, so I suspect it must have been Alyssa.

In my dream, we walked together from the kitchen, through the small "master" bedroom and into the remaining bedroom/sunroom. I remember the master bedroom being an earth tone shade of green, and I remember the sunroom having almost a wall of windows, a French door, and a cheery feel, but I drifted back into deep sleep before I really saw any details.

I've sometimes wondered if a time will ever come when I might ask an old friend how she remembers those times half a century ago. As I woke up the next morning, I realized how much I would like to know Alyssa’s side of my memories. But I know that can never happen.

I never saw Alyssa much after sixth grade. Partly, I think that's because she got shuffled off into the “smart kids” group in junior high, while my math grades pushed me back to probably the “second tier." I always thought of her fondly when I heard that she had played for a school performance, and I assume that she was aware of my work on the school newspaper. But I don't remember sharing another class with her, and I don't recall whether she was in pep squad with me.

Alyssa married not long after we got out of high school and had a baby within a year or so. The last news I remember hearing of her was that she had taken a ride on her young nephew's new motorcycle. He had turned too fast on loose gravel, and she had been thrown off and died.

We were not yet 20.

My kind of kid

The tv turned on this afternoon to some story about a preposterous birthday party for a grade-school kid (8? 9?) with a marvelous ending.

I came in on something like, "Princess dress for the birthday girl, $750; rented castle, $20,000; birthday cake, $2,300...." I wasn't paying enough attention to get the whole list, but the punch line was that the total ticket was something over $32,000.

I was rolling my eyes when I caught the camera panning to a purple bird—part of the birthday cake? a piñata?—that had played a pivotal role in the party. I have no clue what the whole story was, but the purple bird was supposed to have been blue...

I feel really bad for whoever was responsible for the bird, because I'm sure they not only didn't get paid but also probably got ripped—and, at those prices, probably sued for ruining the "little princess's" birthday party. Because from the time she spotted the purple bird, the princess was distraught, her makeup rolled down her face (yes, the tot had on mascara to go with the princess dress), and the party was pretty well over with.

Get a clue, parents: it's a kid's birthday party, and with any luck, she'll live to have another one.

I'm guessing the price tag of this one was about 32 grand more than what it should have been.

I'm halfway sorry the kid's party was so disappointing for her, but I'm thrilled that the parents got what they so richly deserved—and you can take that any way you want to!

Where are those brownies when you need them?

This past weekend afforded a lovely opportunity for my siblings to get together, with clear, mild weather following a couple of weeks of cold mush. My sisters and I spent most of our time working jigsaw puzzles, which gives us time to visit over an otherwise mindless but satisfying task. I figure any challenge is good for our brains at this age, and jigsaw puzzles put us head to head around a small table where we can visit as we play.

Friday night and Saturday were lovely, but Sunday would have been nicer if I hadn't known I had a rather large puddle of doggie puke to clean up when I got home. The out-of-towners in our crowd left around 1 with the last puzzle unfinished, so Margaret Joan and I huddled over the table for a couple of hours more to finish it up.

Shortly after we finished, I left her house and ran a couple of errands, then came home to several loads of laundry and the doggie puke. I put away my purchases, played a bit with the dogs, and shuffled laundry a bit, then I dragged out the carpet cleaner to see if I could do any more damage to the floor.

The first part I cleaned doesn't see a lot of traffic, so I wasn't surprised when I didn't see much water coming back up into the collection bucket. The next part sees more traffic and had another, smaller puddle on it, but I didn't see much return water there, either. After a bit more "cleaning," I ran out of water in the dispenser, so I unlatched the collection tub to empty the pickup water and get a refill.

The container holds at least a half-gallon of water, but when I lifted it out of the vacuum, it contained only about a cup of pickup. I know it can't possibly pick up as much as it puts down, but my recollection from the last time I ran it was that it should pick up half or more of it. This wasn't anywhere close.

For some inexplicable reason, I decided to hold the bucket about eye-level to check it out. I suppose lifting it that high unlatched the lid, and the bucket dropped out of my hands, bounced on the edge of the bed, and landed upside-down on the carpet. Only a few drops got on the bed, and the skirt has already seen much better days, but this was the floor I was attempting—clearly somewhat unsuccessfully—to clean. This wasn't going well.

I grabbed a screwdriver and disassembled the return-water pathway, cleaned out a bit of stuck lint, and made sure it was as clean as I could get it before I screwed it back down. I still wasn't too happy with the return rate, but I figured my next best shot was to refill the tub and try again.

When I snapped the tub back onto the machine, I checked carefully to be sure I had it snapped firmly into place and then rolled it over the spilled water. Sure enough, the cleaner slurped it up just as designed. I rolled back over the worst of the parts I had already cleaned and watched it suck up water as if it had never had a problem. I was finally on a roll.

After several starts and stops and some special attention to the big puddle in the hallway, I had at least made a cursory pass over most of the "exposed" carpet in my room. I found out I couldn't run around in sock feet because the carpet was still wet enough to get my socks damp, but I felt as if I had done a reasonable job in the artificial light.

After I had been up long enough for the sun to rise, I got to see the work I had done by daylight.

It may be the best job I've done with that little cleaner yet!

A wrenching experience

The new consulting job I have taken on has caused me to spend a few nights in hotels lately, and Monday of this week was one of those nights.


I got to the hotel just about dark, which gave me time to go find dinner and get some work done on the computer before bedtime. I took a novel with me to dinner, so I lingered longer than I planned, but I still had plenty of time to spare before bedtime. I got back to the hotel, changed into jammies, and settled in.

I got out the laptop and located a wall socket, but the cord to the computer was definitely not going to go into that socket: I don't know how I did it, but I had managed to bend one prong of the plug to almost a 45° angle, and it wasn't going to go into any socket, not just the one in the "economy" hotel I'd picked for this trip.

Not a huge problem; I keep a "multipurpose tool"—one of those foldable wrenches that has an assortment of other tools tucked into its handles—out in my car, and it would be fine to fix my plug.

Except, of course, I was already in my jammies, and I didn't want to get dressed to go out to the car in about 30° weather.

I own a couple of housecoats, but I rarely wear them at home and I never pack them, so even running around in the hotel was a little iffy.

But my daughter has gotten a kick out of my pink trench coat for years, and since it's the warmest coat I own, I had it with me. Over my star-spangled pajama bottoms and tennis shoes, it would do.

I grabbed the car keys in case I had to go out to the car—which at least was parked really close to the hotel—and the power cord and headed to the lobby. I didn't see any signs of life around the front desk, but when I approached it, a voice from the room off to one side said, "Can I help you?"

"Do you have a wrench I could borrow?"

The little Asian man who had checked me in emerged from his room nodding. "Yes, yes," he said, "How can I help you?"

After I showed him the deformo plug, he reached into a drawer across from the desk and pulled out the Big Mac of Channel Lock pliers. Not exactly what I had had in mind, but certainly enough tool to fix a plug.

Without offering me the tool, he hooked it onto the prong and started to bend it back toward the center of the plug. But since he had gripped the prong near the plug, he completely missed the bend in it and started to bend the base off in the wrong direction. He figured out that he wasn't really fixing my problem, so he slid the pliers away from the plug a little and tried to squeeze enough to straighten the prong, but with no leverage, he really wasn't making much progress.

I watched about as long as I could stand it, then reached for the pliers. I moved them up on the prong enough to get the right leverage and straightened the prong with an easy bend. "Oh, I didn't want to break it!" he assured me as I handed back the pliers.

"And you did a good job!" I assured him. Didn't seem to know how to handle pliers, but hey—I got the plug fixed without having to go outside. Good enough for me.