Doing it right
When my husband and I were dating, I owned a little black Volkswagen Jetta. Although it was a good car, it required some annoying maintenance from time to time. In particular, there were rubber panels on the exterior of each door that would sometimes detach for some reason, leaving my otherwise attractive car looking like it had just been driven out of the junkyard. One day, Logan took it upon himself to help me finally fix the unsightly problem. We got some Liquid Nails and stuck the panels back in place, but it quickly became clear that that would not be a long-lasting solution. I shrugged my shoulders and got up to leave, thinking “Oh well. We can only do what we can do.”
Logan looked up at me, surprised that I was settling for such a mediocre fix. “Don’t you want to do it right?” he asked.
Still wanting to impress my new boyfriend, I stopped in my tracks and stammered, “Um…yes, yes, of course I do!” I sat back down next to him on the driveway and we continued working on the blasted door panels for muuuuch longer than I would have ever expected, scraping off layers of old glue and securing the rubber panels until we were certain they weren’t going anywhere.
That experience 20 years ago was my first inkling of how meticulous my husband can be when it comes to getting a job done right. It’s endearing, it’s admirable…and it can be pretty annoying to those of us who have a little more slaphappy work ethic.
Take, for example, a couple recent projects he’s been working on in our backyard: a play fort and a pergola. I’ve never been held an actual hostage, but I have been the one left to hold the dummy end of a tape measure while Logan uses the Pythagorean Theorem to plot out a perfect square on our patio; or prop up a post while support beams are trued up around it; or brace a piece of wood that is being cut at a perfect 45-degree angle. And I can tell you from experience that the hostages might be getting a better bargain. Helping my husband with a project can be a tedious ordeal.
But I will say this: the effort he puts into getting a job done right is the same kind of consideration he puts into taking care of his family, and for that, I am grateful. Last week, as I was sweeping water and leaves off our patio following a thunderstorm, I twisted my body in just the wrong way and tweaked my back something awful. I’d never done anything like that before and was completely unprepared for how much pain and loss of mobility such a simple thing could cause. For days, I felt like a 150-year-old woman every time I had to get in and out of a chair or roll onto my side while I slept. Logan was right there the whole time, helping me get out of cars, picking up things I’d dropped and could no longer reach, and offering me peanut M&M’s when he saw me looking longingly at them from across the room.
We have a running joke in our marriage, based off of something that I stupidly said to him when we were dating and I was trying to wrap my indecisive mind around the fact that Logan very well could be THE ONE.
“I mean, you’re the best guy in Spokane,” I had mused out loud one day, unintentionally indicating that maybe beyond Spokane there was someone even better. I immediately back-tracked what I had said, and Logan good-naturedly shrugged it off. Luckily, we’ve been joking about it ever since.
The point is: 20 years ago, I wasn’t sure how this man of mine would stack up to the millions of other men in the world. But as Logan let me hang onto his shoulders while he gently lowered me into a chair, I looked up at him and said, “Well, now it’s official: you’re the best guy anywhere.”
He chuckled. “Happy to hear it. Now, while you’re sitting there, could you stabilize this ladder for me? I need to plot out an exact isosceles triangle so I can hang a picture.”