It Happened One Spring

Yep, she's broken!

Friends and neighbors, I urge you to look at the picture to the left.  If you know what it is, it's likely that you have been a victim of the Heartbreak of Overhead Torsion Spring Failure.

That big beauty up there is the spring that provides counterbalance to the garage doors in our lives.  The fact that this big spring broke and turned into two smaller springs is not a cause for celebration, unless you own an overhead garage door company.

You see, the other night, I hauled the recycling down to the end of the driveway and lumbered back up to the garage.  As I've done a hundred million times, I hit the garage door closer button.  The door closed just like it has the previous hundred million times, but when it landed down at the bottom there arose such a clatter, I turned to the door to see what was the matter!

"What the (heck) is going on out there?" hollered Peggy, a woman who leads in any contest of wondering what the (heck) any noise is.  There was a springy sound, which, when I described it minutes later to Donnie, our friend who is also the King Of All Handymen, led him to diagnose the problem expertly.  The people hired by our homebuilder to install the door had left 27 stickers and magnets with their name and phone number, so we could reach them at any time.  I called, but it was after hours, and the recording explained how much it would cost to get a guy out to the house after hours.  For less than that, I could have had Dr Ben Carson scoot over and perform brain surgery on me, so I decided to wait until regular business hours.

Which left us with the problem of how I was going to drive to work in the morning, because the SUV was in the garage and with the door down I couldn't drive very far at all...maybe a foot or two! Adrenalin pumping through my veins, beads of sweat forming on my forehead, and the little muscles in my cerebellum rippling like a Kansas wheatfield, I grabbed that door and man, was it heavy!  Peggy gave a shove too and finally we got it raised.  So then, I asked Peggy to dart in and get the key, which she did, and then she drove it out as I stood there like Big Bad John holding up the mineshaft in the old Jimmy Dean song.  Our song had a happier ending, though, since I am still alive to tell you that the guy showed up yesterday, ignored my joke about "springing" into action, replaced the springs and drove off with a check signed by me for $283.  Not a bad half-hour's work!

It did remind me of the need for an word to be the antonym of "deja vu."  As soon as Peggy and I started telling friends the story, people were breaking their necks to tell us that the same thing happened to them, the reason I bring this up. There is an opposite of deja vu, where you find yourself in a scene that everyone else but you knows all about!  I am the last to know that you are supposed to lube that big boy with WD40 once or twice a year! But I get the point now.


And every time I come down with a medical condition or a traffic ticket, I always say, "That's a new one to me!" only to be greeted with lots of friends who have had dipoxy of the lingual frenum, or already knew that 42 was too fast to drive in front of the high school.

I'm always the last to know!