Soundtrack: Mario Brother's Theme Song

I love irony both in good times and in bad. It makes me smile, albeit occasionally with a great deal of bitterness. Today, the heavens opened and the waters literally poured down upon my head. Inside our apartment. I sat at the kitchen table and heard the shower in the main bathroom start. I thought it strange because Scott and I use the shower in our en-suite bathroom. We consider the other shower the guest shower. I was also home alone, and the last time I checked, we didn’t have a magic shower. But that’s the thing about magic, isn’t it? It starts and ends randomly.

I switched on the light and water poured from it – the light in the shower, not the shower. I turned off the light, seemed the prudent thing to do, and ran upstairs, but alas, I knocked to no avail. So I called the management company. Our manager was sick, but a nice woman urged calm, a task I felt well within my reach being that the leak was in the shower. She said they would take care of it. Not long later, she called back and asked if I had the number for the gentleman who managed the entire building. Not only did I have the number, I noticed, while beseeching my upstairs neighbor to open, that his door was open and he had workers.

I again ran upstairs. I called, “Hello?” and waited, knocked, called, “Hello?” and heard an echo back.

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

Until finally a man, balding, jeaned, and pleasant appeared.

“Are you Michael?”

“No, I’m doing some work for him. You just missed him.”

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“I think he’s gone for the day. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Well, I live below that apartment, and water is pouring through my light fixtures. No one seems to be home.”

For all of you who wonder what Ireland is like, what the Irish are like, this is what the Irish are like:

“I’m a plumber. Would ye like me to take a look at it?”

I never really understood why the Mario brothers were plumbers rescuing the princess until now. I’m not a princess, but I don’t know shite about plumbing, particularly when water is coming out of embedded lighting fixtures.

When I turned on the light to show him, all the lights in the bathroom were crying cold, dirt tears. I ran to the pantry for a bucket while he called Michael to gain access above. The pantry wasn’t crying; it was weeping steady drops, like being high in the mountains inside a cave with crevices and cracks in the wall, perpetual mist outside, water oozing through soil, tree roots, and moss. Yeah, that was my pantry.

Michael didn’t answer, and the plumber ran upstairs to try the neighbor again while I called the management company, in more of a panic, to say that the situation was becoming dire. I could just see it, in a moment all the lights throughout my apartment would be raining water.

The plumber broke into the apartment above. Well, the balcony door was opened so I suppose he didn’t “break” per se. A valve under a sink had broken and water gushed forth. He said the rain would ease in ten. I put out more towels and called Scott from the house phone in the kitchen. As I we spoke, the light over the counter spewed water on my head. It eased quickly, and I put towels everywhere I could find a leak: the entire main bathroom with an inch of water on the floor; the pantry on the same wall as the refrigerator, washer, dryer, ovens, and microwave; by the phone; and one over the book shelves in the hallway.

I have the windows opened in each room in the hopes that the apartment will cease to smell a basement. The wallpaper in the bathroom is damaged where the water seeped through the walls. Yes, indeed, it is quite a mess. The wiring is only a year old, and the renovations two. Apparently, we’re separated from our upstairs neighbor by bedrock, and William, the lovely man who owns our apartment, happens to be in the country and is stopping by to assess the damage. Our goal is not to have to move while repairs are completed. I’m hoping, thinking, that it’s not as bad as it seems.

I walked away from it, and I’m sitting in my chair in my very first home office, and before sitting down to work, hours after I had intended, I played an anagram game on my phone. My first long word allowing me to move to the next level was ‘coping.’