god-of-small-things

OK, so I am getting old.

"Can you close the garage for honey?" my dear wife asked me on Tuesday night.

When I walked out the door, I thought to myself, why is the door hanging at an angle. Turns out one of the springs on the side has lost tension, and the door is now longer counter balanced. Garage doors, in case you haven't discovered this, are really heavy. And they hurt when they fall on the side of your head, which happened after I pushed on the door, and the wheels on one side came off the track.

I used to be pretty handy but since I traded my hammer for a word processor more than a decade a go, I've lost whatever skills I used to have. This did not deter me from trying to fix the door.

The result was a burst of swearing from me as the door fell further and further off track. My friend Chris had to come and rescue me. It was close to midnight before the door was finally laid to rest on the side of the driveway and my car was freed to await the morning commute

From some very cursory research, I found that getting the door fixed would cost somewhere between $200 and $500, not exactly the kind of spare change I have lying around in the drawer (especially with 3 kids and a mortgage).

Fast forward to last night, about 9:30. The kids were finally in bed, and I on my way to the kitchen, wondering where the money for the door was coming from, when I heard a knock at the door.

My friends Bev and John were outside. "We heard about your garage door troubles," Bev said, as John stood by the wounded garage door, looking it over.
Then it dawns on me. John used to install garage doors for a living.

He moved over to the garage and after glancing at the rails and spring says, "I can fix it."

Saturday morning, John and I will be fixing the door. Actually he'll be fixing the door, and I'll be doing whatever John tells me to do.

Thank God for friends and small graces.

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