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This Is Us
The Art of Being Useless
How can I ever be an adequate contributor to this family if I can’t even buy a damn dishwasher?
I’ve always admired handy people: people who can build things or weld things or do under-the-hood things. I’m not a handy person and most would say that I’m downright useless when it comes to completing even the simplest of home repairs.
I think it’s in my genes. My mother used to say my father had “feet for hands” and told tales about how he almost set the house on fire while changing a fuse. Because of this, he was always outsourcing projects elsewhere — minor plumbing issues, lawn mowing, driveway repaving, oil changes. I made a mental note and swore that I’d break the chain in the same way a scrappy teen born into a legacy of high school dropouts would vow to be the first to graduate college. I will be the first Daulerio to change a tire without slicing open my hand.
It never happened. I’ve still never changed a tire; neither have I mowed a lawn. It once took me six hours to put together a Little Tikes Cottage for my children and I couldn’t get the roof to lay flush. Is that what you say — lay flush?
I am my father’s son.
I live in a house. It’s technically my wife’s house — she’ll refer to it as “our house,” but I will not, because of this other deep-seated financial shame I carry with me. Thanks to a lifetime worth of erratic, debt-filled financial decisions, spotty employment, and a couple of years of financial purgatory thanks to the Hogan lawsuit, I won’t ever be able to purchase a house for us until late next century. And then I’ll be dead so it won’t matter anyway.
I do try to contribute elsewhere, wherever I can, where I won’t break anything. I unload the dishwasher and change baby diapers and throw some laundry in the dryer and take out the trash. I’ve also managed to turn the downstairs office into an arboretum, thanks to my obsessive (and expensive) house plant collection.
But these are chores any 10-year-old could do. When there is real work to be done — some curtain rods to be hung, holes to be drilled, anchors to be fitted, or showerheads to be replaced — we have to call our regular handyman, Quincy.
