My deepest apologies go out to Mac Davis. Apparently, he isn’t dead.
I don’t know why I thought Mac was no longer with us, but I made the same mistake with Ed McMahon about two years ago. I guess it’s true what they say; out of sight, out of mind. And I am so glad that Mac isn’t gone because it means there still might be a chance that I’ll get to hear him sing “Tequila Sheila” in person.
They just don’t make songs like that anymore.
Yesterday I committed myself to cleaning the house and I decided I might as well start in the bowels (no pun intended) of hell, otherwise known as the master bathroom. As I cleaned, I spent a lot of time deep in thought. I thought about how nice it used to be when we had Cata clean the house even though her abuse of Pledge Grab-its almost drove us to the poorhouse and I thought about how people that are overly dramatic about inconsequential things get on my nerves.
And then I realized I was about to die from the fumes of all the cleaning products and laid on the bathroom floor and wept for the years that Cata came on a weekly basis. Why is my life so hard? How long, O Lord, must I clean my own toilets?
In all reality, I think I almost died at the hands of Tilex. I sprayed the entire shower stall liberally with the Tilex and forgot to turn on the bathroom vent. When I felt my throat begin to burn, I knew something was amiss and rushed to air out the bathroom. Because when my time on this earth is through, I don’t want to be wearing rubber gloves and holding a scrub brush.
Anyway, every time I clean the shower I can’t help but think of Jose. When P and I added on to our house six years ago, Jose was the man who tiled our new shower stall in our new master bathroom. We had originally hired a man named Mr. Baldo of “Baldo and Son Construction” to tile the shower and other various jobs, but Mr. Baldo took off with our money before he ever completed all the work we’d hired him to do.
Of course, we shouldn’t have been shocked by this turn of events considering that he’d already admitted to us that he didn’t actually have a son, even though his business was named “Baldo AND SON”. I guess he just felt that the “AND SON” gave him an air of legitimacy, much like Fred Sanford.
We found ourselves without a tile guy and with a shower that desperately needed to be tiled. One of our sub-contractors mentioned that his brother-in-law, Jose, might be available to do some tile work, so we called him. He was more than happy to do the work, his price was reasonable and, best of all, he could start the next day.
Jose showed up promptly the next morning with his bucket of grout and began laying tile in the shower. He turned out to be quite a chatty fellow and while he was working began to carry on a conversation with P. They talked about the neighborhood and our construction project and then Jose said, “You know? I didn’t even know how to install tile until last week, but I bought this video at Home Depot and now I think I know what I’m doing.”
Well.
That certainly is comforting, Jose.
You would think he might have wanted to keep that bit of information to himself, but I think Jose was a firm believer in being transparent. And, as it turned out, he was also a firm believer in something else.
P returned to the job site the next morning and could tell that Jose had left in a hurry. His tools were strewn about the bathroom and he hadn’t covered the bucket of grout. When Jose showed up that morning, P asked him what had happened. Jose informed P that our house was haunted by ghosts and we needed to have some sort of exorcism.
Okay, sure. Let’s get that scheduled.
When pressed further, Jose based this suspicion on the fact that he’d heard voices after everyone left. Never mind the fact that we live in a corner house where people are constantly walking by and every window in the house was left open. The logical conclusion was that we had us some ghosts.
We never did have the house exorcised and, shockingly, we’ve never had any more ghost issues. However, there is something in our house that’s extremely frightening. The tile job in our shower.
It’s painfully obvious that we didn’t need a priest as much as we needed someone with more tile experience than an hour spent watching a video from Home Depot.