Friday, November 10, 2006
The Infrastructure of Everyday Life
We recently had our bathroom remodeled. One challenge was a matter of translation. Where I grew up, a lavatory was where you went to pee: Latin word origins be damned, it wasn’t something you’d wash your hands in. But here, a lavatory is what my mum would call a handbasin. And, what we’d have called the toilet, the bog or the loo is known at Lowe’s as a cistern and pedestal, which makes me think of classical ruins, not efficient flushing.
Another challenge was choice. I’d never given a thought to faucets, but America runs on the proliferation of individual choices. So I took a reconnaissance trip up to the Grape Road hardware stores. Platoons of shiny fixtures stood to attention, vigilant chrome soldiers of hygiene. The variations were endless and incomprehensible: Lever or cross-handled? 3 inch or 8 inch center? The following week, I saw faucets everywhere. Chatting with a friend in a cafe, my attention would be irresistibly drawn to a sink behind the counter. I was haunted by faucets.
Meanwhile, I needed advice on picking a bathroom set. Jeff, the sales rep, was an eager pedagogue of plumbing: he sketched diagrams of trap-ways on the back of a sales slip, and expounded on the merits of gravity versus jet flushing systems. He offered pithy insights into the impact of ADA rules on domestic bathroom design. Forty five minutes later, my husband was catnapping under a display of American Standard vessels, and I’d placed an order for the perfect bathroom set.
The re-modeling project once begun flowed as smoothly, and as slowly, as a glacier. When the old wainscoting came down, the walls needed more than patching and the old wiring was scary. My new paint turned a hectic pink on the wall, so I spent a morning with the supplier, adding squirts of pigment to the remaining can trying to transform it into the serene lilac I’d planned. I got used to having a bathtub full of copper pipes in my office, and keeping my toothbrush in a shoe box in the laundry room.
Last weekend, I had the satisfaction of cleaning away the last of the construction dust and reassembling my bathroom. Without the contractor, the house suddenly seemed huge and private, and I felt a little shy of using my band-box perfect bathroom. But, a few days later, I’m already taking it for granted: it’s clean, it works.
In this morning’s paper, the dust is settling on the mid-term election results. Some grumble about the demands of participating in a democracy: the array of candidates who can seem only trivially different, rancourous campaign ads, the disruption of everyday routine as you get out to the polls to vote. Mostly, we like to take it for granted that local services will work, and policies will be formulated with some eye to the common good. Still, it’s a good thing to remodel your polity once in a while, update the wiring and put in some new lights.