Month: January 2025

When Everything that Possibly Can Go Wrong Does

  Some months are just no good.

  They start off just fine. Things are going okay. Then something bad happens, and then something else, and before the month is over you’re thinking of throwing yourself off a bridge.

  Not really, but you get the idea.

  Last month was that kind of month for the Woodwards. It started with the water bill.

  “This bill seems pretty high,” my wife said.

  She was right. It was really high, as in two to three times the usual amount. We called the water company, which sent a plumber to check for leaks.

  This was hardly the first time we’ve had leaks at our house – leaks in the downstairs bathroom ceiling, a leak in the upstairs shower line, multiple leaks in the main line from the water meter to the house. The pipes that were being used when our subdivision was built are notorious for leaks. Virtually every house in the neighborhood has had them.

  We hadn’t noticed a leak this time around, though. No sagging ceilings, no damp walls, no pools or puddles. That’s because the leak, which the plumber found in no time, was in the crawl space. Luckily, the water was soaking into the ground rather than causing any damage. 

  The pipes, however, were another story. Some of the pipes, the plumber said, had come loose and were, figuratively speaking, hanging threads.

  “They aren’t leaking yet, but they will,” he said. “They need to be replaced.”

  While he was at it, he installed a device that automatically shuts off the water any time there’s a leak anywhere. A handy thing to have.

  Peace of mind wasn’t cheap, however. The total bill: $7,500.

  A lot of money. But with any luck maybe we wouldn’t have any more unusual expenses for a while.

  Right. As if it had read our thoughts, the washing machine went on strike. It had been make threatening sounds for some time, Threatening – and loud. Sort of like a cross between thunder and a car crash.

  The repairman said the washing machine’s drum had come loose. It would be almost as expensive to repair it as it would to buy a new one. He charged us $120 to recommend that we spring for a new one.

  The new one, with tax, was $700 and change.

  Not to be outdone, the dishwasher joined in the fun. One day it was working fine, the next it would’t drain.

  For the second time in a week, we called a repairman. The problem was diagnosed as a malfunctioning pump. The cost to replace it was roughly $450.

  Then, an unexpected piece of good luck. The dishwasher had a one-year warranty. And it had been 363 days since it was installed!

   This is not the way our luck usually runs. More typical would have been 366 days since it was installed. The warranty covered the new pump and installation completely.

  “Maybe our luck has changed!” I said hopefully. 

  It hadn’t. Next came the worst thing of all.

  I was reading a book in the living room when it happened. Our son, Mark, was in the kitchen doing some paperwork. It was quiet in the house, until we heard a sound that could only mean trouble. Somewhere between a thud and a crash.

  I thought one of the tall dressers in an upstairs bedroom might have fallen over.

  If only that’s all it had been. The sound was that of my wife,  falling. She had tripped at the top of the stairs and fallen all the way to the bottom. Her leg had caught on a sharp corner of the bannister board on the way down, resulting in a deep gash.

  I won’t describe it except to say it was bad enough that Mark and I almost passed out when we saw it. We wrapped it in a towel and called our older daughter, a paramedic, to help.

  The accident happened at about 8 p.m. We were in the emergency room until 3 a.m. The doctor was working on her virtually all of that time. Forty-six stitches.

 Fast forward to the present. It’s been over a month since the accident. She’s still being treated at the wound clinic twice a week, but is getting around pretty well and has a good attitude. The doctor says she’s on her way to making a full recovery, though she’s still attached to a device called a wound vacuum and will have one heck of a scar.

  Things could be worse, in other words. All of the things that went wrong can be fixed. And compared with more serious and unfixable problems that some people have, they’re insignificant. Looking at it that way, we’ve been lucky. 

  Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to call the plumber again. A warning light is blinking on the water heater.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.

Salads, Salinas and Steinbeck

Editor’s Note:  This is the second of two columns from a recent trip to California. Originally planned to appear on Dec. 22, it was held for a Christmas column.

SALINAS, Calif. — Those who read the note at the end of my Dec. 8 column – “Next: The World’s Salad Bowl and the National Steinbeck Center” – may have wondered what salad had to do with John Steinbeck.

  The connection is that northern California’s Salinas Valley, “the world’s salad bowl,” is where the Nobel Prize-winning author was born and raised.

  Steinbeck has been my favorite writer since junior high school. I went from Hardy Boys mysteries to “The Grapes of Wrath.” What made me take Steinbeck’s masterpiece home from the library instead of “The Secret of the Old Mill” or “The Missing Chums” is long forgotten. Perhaps an older kid or a teacher recommended it. Whatever the reason, that book changed my life.

  It was the first time I read a book and found myself pausing to re-read passages because they were so beautifully written. Steinbeck’s books made me want to be a writer. Without them, I might never have worked for a newspaper.

  Last month I finally made it to the Steinbeck Center in Salinas. Salinas is 60 miles from San Jose, where my wife and a friend and I had gone for a Boise State University football game. We took Amtrak from San Jose to Salinas. At a museum next to the the train station,  we were treated to an unexpected history lesson about the Salinas Valley,

  The valley’s climate is perfect for growing vegetables – lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and tomatoes among others. If you had salad with your dinner last night, chances are it came from the Salinas Valley. Over half of the lettuce sold in U.S. supermarkets is grown there.

  The valley also was conducive to dairy farming in its early days. So conducive that too much milk was produced. The excess was used to make a mild white cheese. A local land baron, David Jacks, cornered the market on it. Jacks lived 19 miles from Salinas, in Monterey, Calif. Today we know the cheese as a staple of Mexican cuisine, Monterey Jack.

  The train station is a short walk from the Steinbeck Center and the author’s boyhood home.  Billed as “one of the largest literary museums in the United States dedicated to a single author,” the center opened in 1998 to honor Salinas’s most famous native son and “to create a forum for his writings and one that would inspire and launch successful literacy and educational programming.”

  Large and spacious, the center is home to priceless Steinbeck artifacts – his passports, pipes, glasses, checkbooks, letters, manuscripts, collections of his books, photographs, displays devoted to his books and – this one absolutely knocked me out – Rocinante.

  For those unfamiliar with Miguel de Cervantes’s classic novel, “Don Quixote,” Rocinante was the name of Don Quixote’s horse. It was also the name of the truck Steinbeck drove and lived in with his dog  while traveling the U.S. on a journey that provided material for his last book, “Travels with Charley: In Search of America.” 

  There in the center, gleaming greenly with a camper shell on its bed, was Rocinante. Not a replica, but the real thing – Steinbeck’s fully restored1960 GMC pickup truck, complete with a replica of Charley seated on the passenger seat. At risk of repeating myself, priceless.

  The center isn’t merely a repository of oddments. Visitors learn a good deal about its honoree as a person. Surprisingly for someone who would go on to become world famous, he was shy as a boy and young man, seldom if ever going to parties or other social events. His family lived in a Victorian home in the city of Salinas, but he worked on farms and as a hod carrier and ditch digger.

  The Victorian home where he grew up has been restored as The Steinbeck House, a restaurant and gift shop. All of the waitresses who work there are Steinbeck fans and volunteers.

  Our waitress shared couple of stories about the author as a boy, describing him as “a handful.” He piqued the ire of a local farmer by skinny dipping in his water tank. One of his memorable pranks was tying up a friend in his basement, then forgetting and leaving him there all day. Only when the Steinbecks were having dinner that evening and heard strange noises emanating from their basement did he sheepishly remember. 

  Asked when he started to write, he said he couldn’t remember a time when he didn’t write. Success didn’t come easily, however. He acquired a sizable collection of rejection letters. He and his first wife worried about money, of which they had very little.

 “Tortilla Flat,” his book about a group of hard-drinking paisanos in Monterey following World War I, changed that. His first best seller, it ended his days of poverty. Seeking privacy from well meaning but intrusive admirers, he built a fence around his property and named it Garlic Gulch.

  In all, he wrote 33 books, many of them a joy to read. But if there’s one Steinbeck book you absolutely should read, it’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” 

  Ironically, its author had reservations about how good it was. Ironic because it sold over 15 million copies, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and more than 80 years after its publication remains high on the lists of great American novels.

  So it wasn’t just some so-so book that changed my life. Thank you, Mr. Steinbeck, for writing it. And thanks to the National Steinbeck Center for helping me get to know you better.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@gmail.com.