Late one night a few years ago, I was lying in the bedroom of a charming little split-level house in Princeton, New Jersey, where the bank had just allowed me to move. I was gazing through unlocked windows at a splendidly smogless sky, listening to only the internal combustion of crickets and smugly savoring my escape from Stalag New York.
Suddenly, the temperature of the room began to rise. When, in the next ten minutes, it had risen fifteen degrees, I suspected that something was wrong. I picked up the phone and was about to dial when my wife Judy awoke and said, "What are you doing?"
"The furnace seems to be running a trifle amok," I replied. "I'm calling the superintendent."
"Oh, my poor urban darling," she said. "You're the superintendent."
And there I sat, in one of the grimmest moments of my life, paralyzed by the thought that the man to call for help was me.
When he moved to the White House, Harry Truman said, "The duck stops here." And when a man moves to a country house, after years in city apartments, the furnace is right down there, somewhere behind the unpacked crockery. It wasn't a furnace, by the way: it was a gas heater, and I had the same comprehension of it that I had of transplanting kidneys. As I timidly toyed with its dials, wondering which of them would make the house blow up, I was filled with a poignant yearning for the days when a superintendent stood resourcefully between me and the ugly realities of sustaining life indoors. While managing to raise the temperature another five degrees, I silently apologized to him for the modest nature of my last Christmas tip.
Judy and I survived that steamy night by pretending that we were vacationing in Tahiti; and the following day I was able to pass the buck to a man from the gas company, who explained my problem in a foreign tongue.
"Your rear compression blower unit has to be able to handle the BTUs," he said.
I was too ashamed to ask him what BTU stood for. Was it a new federal agency or a Southern football team?
"Where's your fuse box?" he said.
I quickly tried to remember if a fuse box had come with the house. Was it something that the seller had thrown in along with the drapes?
The next day I summoned an electrician, a move that might have been considered but the do-it-yourself electrician is a man with a chance to activate his will.
"You'd better mow that lawn," the electrician said after wading through the elephant grass of my backyard.
"Oh, I know that everyone else cuts his grass," I told hi, "but I'm not keeping up with the Joneses."
"You won't be able to see the Joneses," he
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