Desperate Times call for Desperate Measures - A personal narrative written for my English class

          I’ve had a number of situations I would consider defining moments for me. For many people, a lot of the defining moments are the same types of situations, such as marriage, the birth of one’s first child, divorce, graduation from high school and/or college. The defining moment I share with you now doesn’t fall into any of those categories. What I recall about this time is the difficulty of finding motivation, strength, and value within myself. I was involuntarily unemployed, so I basically had all the time in the world. At the same time, however, I felt like I still didn’t have any time.

            Because I had so much, time lost its value. Because I squandered my time, I lost sight of my own value. My wife and I were renting a basement apartment from her brother and living off her near-minimum-wage part-time job and my unemployment insurance checks. I felt like a useless, worthless piece of nothing. With each payment deposited to our checking account, we struggled to determine which of the bills was most crucial to be paid next. I lived primarily off cold cereal, and I started mixing water with milk powder from our long-term stored food to save the expense of fresh milk.

            To top off this downward spiral of events and emotions, my wife’s car broke down. Without the means to take it to a shop to be fixed, I began to diagnose the problem on my own. I figured it shouldn’t be too much trouble. I had, after all, successfully worked on my dad’s 1976 pickup truck in years gone by. This car, however, proved to be much more difficult very quickly.

Comparing a 2003 coupe to a 1976 full-size pickup truck is like comparing a half-empty gallon-jar of pickles and a can of sardines, with the latter being the coupe. Not only was the working area much smaller, but there were many more parts to deal with too. For some reason, air bags and air conditioning and fuel injectors and sensors of every type caught on over the years and became standard equipment on newer cars. I could barely squeeze my hands into areas under the hood of the coupe where I could nearly fit my whole body in those same areas in the pickup.

The symptoms pointed to a problem with either fuel or ignition. The spark plugs and wires were good. We had replaced them the year prior. The battery was still good. The alternator tested fine. The air filter was still moderately clean, and we had kept up on oil changes. In my mind, there were only two other possibilities. One required a $10 part. The other was an $800 fix at a nearby shop. I crossed my fingers and changed the fuel filter.

I held my breath as I turned the key to try to start the car.

Rrrrffrrfffrrffrffmmmpppt.

Rrrrffrrfffrrffrrfffmmmpppt.

Rrrrfffrrrfffrrfffrrffffmmmpppt.

It was no use. The car wouldn’t start.

That meant we had a worst-case scenario. I had to take the car in to be fixed by someone who was qualified to change the fuel pump embedded within the fuel tank; to the tune of $800.

There was only one problem with that. I didn’t have $800 to spend on car repairs. I didn’t have $800 period. That didn’t change the fact, however, that my wife needed the car to get to work and school.

Consequently, I decided to do the bravest, stupidest thing I had ever done. I decided to tackle the job myself.

After borrowing $250 from my father-in-law to buy a replacement fuel pump and a car repair manual, I started pulling that little car apart, with no hope of being able to hire someone to put the thing back together for me at any point in the foreseeable future.

I was pretty proud of myself when I finally got the fuel tank removed and confirmed the part I had bought with borrowed money was the right one for the job – it was a perfect match to the bad fuel pump. I marveled at the cheap plastic construction of the fuel tubes on the pump. “How on Earth did I get that out without breaking those little plastic nipples/tubes?” I wondered to myself. I made a mental note to be sure to reattach the fuel tank with extra caution.

After siphoning the fuel out of the tank to make it easier to lift back into place, I began worming the tank through all the other parts on the car’s undercarriage to get it into the right spot. With a twist here and a turn there, I had it in a position where it needed just a little bit of a boost to be snugly back in place. I gave it a little upward push, and CRACK!

I don’t remember exactly what I did next, but I will never forget the feeling of utter despair and hopelessness I felt in that moment. I was so close to likely having fixed the car on my own and getting things back in order, but instead, I managed to make the situation even worse. I had broken a $250 part I bought with borrowed money. I couldn’t borrow that much money again just to end up breaking another one. I couldn’t borrow the money to have someone else fix the car, and I wouldn’t ever have that much money to spend on car repairs as far as I knew in that moment. My unemployment checks would soon run out. Without a car my wife wouldn’t be able to get to and from work. Without an income, we could become homeless and destitute. In that moment, I felt I had just missed a minor success, and instead, doomed my wife and myself to a terrible fate.

In retrospect, I was making things out to be much worse than they really were – but that’s how depression works.

I did, however, learn that, given an abundance of time, the human mind can come up with brilliant solutions to life’s problems. This is the part of my defining moment I like to focus on, looking back.

With no other options available, I spent a lot of time staring at the broken fuel pump. I cursed the engineers who designed it and the manufacturers who produced it. How could they possibly have been so stupid!?

However, while I stared at their blunder, which was now my problem, I devised a plan that I dared execute only out of sheer desperation. It could be dangerous. If the plan failed, it could potentially end with the car in flames. I was, after all, dealing with the pressurizing and distribution of gasoline from an electrically-operated component.

I carefully measured the broken plastic tubes and headed to the hobby store. I picked up some small brass tubing, super glue, and epoxy. A careful search on the internet informed me that super glue would not likely be dissolved by gasoline.

I inserted the brass tubing inside the cheap plastic tubing, creating a durable internal skeletal sleeve. The fit was perfect, allowing an application of super glue to adhere the parts securely. After giving the super glue time to cure, I drenched the whole top of the component with 2-part epoxy resin, completely enveloping the brass-plastic tubes in the glob of glue, aside from their openings for fuel flow.

After the epoxy cured, it seemed I could probably hit that part of the pump with a hammer without doing any damage. Of course, I wasn’t taking any chances. I reassembled all the car’s parts very carefully, and this time the fuel tank went up into its spot without any obvious signs of damage. I still had to be brisk with it though, so I was wary when I went back to try to start the car again.

To my pleasant surprise, the car started right up. There were no signs of fuel leakage, even with the pump running. No warning lights illuminated on the dash board while the engine ran, and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Nothing, of course, except that I had just fixed a $250 critical component of a modern vehicle with less than $10 worth of supplies from the hobby store.

Looking back on this moment, there are two things I learned: First, human ingenuity can be astounding at times, and I’m human - so that includes me. Second, desperation is the polar opposite of fun, but sometimes it can be in those desperate moments we shine our best.

Goodbye, sweet Kiwi.

Throughout my youth, I figured I knew all I needed to about pets, but my first year of marriage taught me I was sorely mistaken.

I grew up in a pet-free home. I also had very few friends who had pets. After my oldest sister married, she had a cat she called CC, for Crazy Cat; it was a mean cat, and I was highly allergic to it too. My next door neighbors, whom I didn't socialize with much, had pets. The neighbors on one side had an annoyingly yappy little Yorkshire Terrier, and the neighbors on the other side had two yappy dogs and a cat, which preferred my mom's flower bed to its own litter box. 

Conversely, my wife grew up with pets in her home. She had a parakeet, "Puffin," and a cat, "Sadie," who were both her best friends. Sadie, an outside cat, would walk my (many-years-later-to-be) wife, Sharisse, home from elementary school for the last couple blocks, and Sharisse would get squawked at by Puffin until Sharisse opened the bird's cage door so she could hang out on Sharisse's shoulder for the rest of the day. She loved those animals and was heartbroken when they died. 

I never knew either of those pets, but I've heard stories about them from Sharisse and her family.

About the time Sharisse and I got engaged, she got a new feathered friend; a parakeet whose colors reminded us of a blue sky spotted with white clouds.  We later named the bird Cyrus, a name similar to Cirrus clouds. That bird moved into our first apartment with us.

Within our first year of marriage, in that first apartment, we were eager to get to know new people; especially our close neighbors. We had invited our downstairs neighbors up for Sunday dinner one week, to which they obliged. Before that evening was over, Cyrus, the parakeet, began flapping its wings rapidly, spraying blood on the adjacent wall. Obviously this wasn't normal, so we immediately examined the bird. It was bleeding from a wing. We quickly consulted the yellow pages in the phone book to find a veterinarian practice open late on a Sunday night. After several calls, we found one. However, it was about 40 minutes away, the examination fee would be $80, and we still had guests over. Of those three, though, my biggest concern was the cost.

The $80 fee would only cover the exam, and there would likely be additional expenses, not to mention the cost of driving that far. At that time, as is the case for innumerable newlyweds, we were both working full-time-plus and still living paycheck to paycheck. Covering the medical expenses for the bird would be difficult at best. 

With this in mind, I came up with a solution that I thought was both very intelligent and fiscally responsible, without having to give up having a pet in our home. I told my wife, "The bird only cost $20 at the pet store. If this one doesn't make it for some reason, we can just get another one."

As my wife's lips immediately began to quiver, her eyes filled with tears, her face soured, and I knew I had just said the stupidest, most insensitive thing I possibly could have in that moment; in front of our guests, no less. I felt my face turn red with embarrassment, and I very quickly changed my tune to something more along the lines of, "Yes, dear; anything you want."

We made the journey, the vet stopped the bleeding and told us the bird would be fine, and we paid no more than just the exam fee.

Now, 10 years later, it's obvious my heart has opened up much more to household pets. We lost Kiwi, one of our younger parakeets, to a sudden illness yesterday. While Sharisse hasn't had much the same relationship with our birds as she did with her childhood parakeet, Puffin, she was nonetheless very broken up about Kiwi's death. I've been the birds' primary caretaker since we put them up on a shelf hanging in a corner of our living room, safely protected from our cat, who would like nothing more than to eat our little birds. Because the shelf is high up, it's easier for me to refill their food and water dishes than it is for Sharisse to do so. Sadly, though, the birds don't get a lot of attention because it seems they prefer it that way.

Anyway, I find my heart aching as much for my own loss from Kiwi's death, as it aches for Sharisse's loss; and we both feel terrible for the poor, sweet little bird, who helped to keep our home happy with her cute chirping and songs. I spent some time, today, making a box from pine board to serve as a coffin for Kiwi; something past birds didn't receive, as they were buried in cardboard boxes. I think making the box allowed me an opportunity to grieve and to feel like I was somehow making up for being absent in her last moments, in addition to potentially having terrorized the poor bird with the vacuum cleaner as I was cleaning up around her cage as she was sitting on the bottom, too sick to sit up top with the other bird, a safe distance from the vacuum hose. 

As we nailed the pine box closed and buried it in the ground, it became clear to me just how far I've come in caring about our household pets. I used to not care for animals at all, and I never really wanted to have any pets. We've mainly had pets for my wife's sake. However, even though I didn't have a lot of interaction with Kiwi, she was my bird, she lived in my home, she was dependent on me for her sustenance, and it's obvious I cared about her. Perhaps I even loved that little bird.