Dec. 15: Plumbers and peanuts

 I knew a plumber once.

His name was Mr. Y and he and his family went to our church. Mr. Y's wife served as the church's secretary. For all I know, she still serves in that capacity. Mr. Y died a couple years ago. I didn't know him very well. I knew he was a decent family man who loved his church. 

Here is a memory I have of Mr. Y, which has nothing to do with plumbing: I was about eight or so and we were at a church bazaar. There was a fishing booth, which is to say a cardboard screen which some volunteers hid behind. The idea was that kids would come up to the booth with fishing rods (really sticks with strings with clothespins tied to one end) and dangle their rods over the booth. One of the volunteers would then attach a prize to that clothespin.

I saw that Mr. Y was the volunteer behind the cardboard screen. I dangled my rod over there and Mr. Y put a big plastic bag in my clothespin and gave it a tug. In the bag were a bunch of treats and a Berenstain Bears book. I hated the Berenstain Bears (I still do) but I kept that to myself. I thought that Mr. Y had personally picked that book for me and I didn't want to embarrass him.

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Mr. Y had three daughters; the two oldest ones had flaming red hair (Molly Ringwald eat your heart out.) My best friend was sweet on the oldest for a while and he even told me that they were dating, but he might have been lying about that. I was nervous around Mr. Y's oldest redheaded daughter because (a) I always thought she was so much older than me and (b) I knew she was really there to hang out with my best friend and that I was a third wheel. I always tried to find an excuse to leave when I was in the presence of my best friend and Mr. Y's oldest redheaded daughter and I think my best friend appreciated me for that.

But somehow, through a sequence of events completely unknown to me, I found myself alone in the arcade of the Haysboro Pool Hall with Mr. Y's oldest redheaded daughter, who may or may not have been the girlfriend of my best friend. I was 13 and so I said the only thing that a dorky 13-year-old would say to the beautiful redheaded daughter of Mr. Y the Catholic plumber in the arcade of the Haysboro Pool Hall, which was this: "Want to play a game of Gauntlet?"

"Sure," said Mr. Y's redheaded daughter. I put two quarters into Gauntlet - one for me and one for her - and I controlled Questor the Elf and she controlled Thyra the Valkyrie and together we made it to level 10. I realize that none of this makes sense to anyone who is not a member of Generation X. I also realize that, so far, very little of this note has anything to do with plumbing.

Mr. Y's redheaded daughter told me that I was sweet for ponying up 25 cents so she could play a nerdy fantasy game with me for about four minutes. I was embarrassed playing Gauntlet with Mr. Y's redheaded daughter who, my best friend told me, was a lovely supermodel and that all of the guys at our junior high school were jealous of him because he had such a beautiful girlfriend, who might have just been a really good friend of his. The reason I was embarrassed was that I thought I had forced the redheaded daughter of Mr. Y to demean herself by doing something nerdy, like play Gauntlet. I thought that she was the kind of person who would only do beautiful people activities like design clothes or listen to Duran Duran.

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See, I knew that Mr. Y was a plumber because he had a van that had his last name and the word "plumbing" on it. I didn't know very many people who announced their occupations like that. One Sunday, when I was serving as the altar boy, I saw Mr. Y and his family in the front pew. Mr. Y was singing a hymn about being raised up on eagles wings. His oldest daughter was not. She was probably thinking about Gauntlet. 

I looked around at the men in church and wondered what they all did for work. I knew my dad was in broadcasting. I knew Father Flannagan was a priest. I knew Mr. Y was in plumbing. But that's it. I had no idea what Mr. Thompson or Mr. Emmelkamp or Mr. Mason did and I thought it would be impolite for me to enquire. As such, I was thrilled that I knew what Mr. Y did because it wasn't my business what he did but I knew it anyway.

I was so thrilled with this knowledge that I started making plumbing comments around my best friend's quasi girlfriend/really good friend who was also the redheaded oldest daughter of Mr. Y. When the toilet in the men's room of the Haysboro pool hall began acting up, for example, I loudly suggested that Mr. Y was the best person to fix it. The daughter was not happy when I said that. Years later, I realized that she thought I was making fun of her. I wasn't. I knew that plumbing was hard work and I knew that they made a lot of money, although I only knew that from jokes I'd read in Mad Magazine. I also assumed that, because she was the daughter of a plumber, that she must know something about plumbing too.

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It takes a long time to become a plumber. In Ontario, you have to apply to the Ontario College of Trades and you have to be an apprentice plumber for about five years (720 classroom hours and 9,000 in on-the-job training.) That means you have to spend about one year of your life dealing with pipes and water and septic tanks and all the treasures you might find therein. After that, you get to be a plumber.

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My hero, Charles Schulz, did not spend nearly that long in art school. He did much of his post-secondary studies through correspondence school and eventually became the greatest cartoonist in history. Yep, I'm talking Peanuts again.

Here is some wonderful serendipity: I have found a Peanuts cartoon that features a plumbing incident and a girl with red hair.

 Mr. Y's daughter could have easily been the unseen little red-haired girl in the Peanuts comic strip. My memory insists that she was as lovely as polished ivory, mostly because that is the way my best friend described her.

My best friend, like Mr. Y and Charles Schulz, is no longer with us. The redheaded daughter is and Google tells me she is involved with a farmers' market somewhere in southern Alberta. This means that she likely spends more time selling pumpkins and rhubarb and less time being Thyra the Valkyrie.

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Once, after church, I felt compelled to pay Mr. Y a compliment, so I told him he was the best plumber in Haysboro. Mr. Y laughed good naturedly and told me he was the only plumber in Haysboro. The reason I paid him that compliment was that earlier that summer, my best friend's father had hired Mr. Y to do some repair work in the bathroom of the bedroom my best friend's father shared with his wife. Apparently, the shower wasn't working. Mr. Y fixed it. I felt he deserved a compliment for that, even though I didn't directly benefit from his repair work since there was no circumstance imaginable that would require me to take a shower in the en suite bathroom of my best friend's parents.

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I was always disturbed that Thyra the Valkyrie was included alongside Merlin the Wizard, Thor the Warrior, and Questor the Elf among Gauntlet's playable characters. That's because I knew a bit about Norse mythology and so I got mad when lazy game developers assumed that Valkyrie was a synonym for warrior woman. It's not. The word Valkyrie can be translated as "chooser of the slain." In Norse mythology, it was the duty of the Valkyrie to accompany the souls of slain warriors to Valhalla, the Great Hall of the one-eyed god, Odin. Since Valkyries functioned only in the spirit realm, it didn't make a whole lot of sense that they would be present in the Gauntlet universe, where they would engage in that fruitless endless quest to seize as much treasure as possible.

Mind you, it also doesn't make sense that a note about plumbers and peanuts should devolve into an analysis of my best friend's dating life when he was 13, but I guess I should stop being surprised at what my stupid brain decides to focus on.