View from the North 40: O vent pipe, vent pipe, wherefore art thou, vent pipe?

1. “The vent pipe is not regarded as lost until you realize it’s lost” — Mehmet Murat Ildan.

The vent ducting had to be installed on the range hood before any other major progress could be made on the house project. Of course, this was both simple and problematic. Welcome to my world.

We — mostly my husband, John — had gotten to the point that everything was there, in place, ready to go — except one 10-inch piece of vent pipe. So close, but it was gone. Lost? Mistakenly used for something else? Given away? Who knows? Not us.

2. “For want of a vent pipe the kingdom was lost” — 14th century proverb.

But John had vowed not to make another apple pie until the ducting was installed, as an incentive/reward kind of thing. So this little issues was a serious problem.

I’m not finger pointing, at either of us. Many things got rearranged into uncharted locations when we had to move in so abruptly. It was like, “Make way. Comin’ through. You, tools, step aside. Yo, building materials, go find a new hangout. We got important, everyday living stuff movin’ in and takin’ over this joint. Some random boxes ate comin’, too. Ya better get used to it.”

3. “Sometimes we have to lose our vent pipe to find out that we really want it, because we often ignore our vent pipes until they are lost” — Leon Brown.

John had looked for this one piece as he was getting other progress made, but to no avail. Alas, he finally asked if I would help in the search.

I was still sick that day, so the extent of my help was pausing the TV and asking basically, “Did you put it here? Did you put it there? How ’bout in that one place? Did it get mixed in with the stuff for the thing?” The answers were all, “No, but you need to look there anyway.”

4. “Vent pipe — without vent pipe all is lost” — Billy Graham.

I tried joining John on a search for the vent pipe one day, but he told me not to worry about it, he was on a mission to find it — and he had his crazy eyes working, so I put in a half-hearted search effort and called it a day. Besides, the house is biggish and the shop is huge and there’s construction stuff everywhere, a pipe would blend. In the end, I suggested buying another one.

Eventually, we got to the point where we only needed the missing piece — but John couldn’t find another section of vent pipe in town. He was frustrated.

We both wanted an apple pie.

The issue had become one of life’s critical moments.

5. “Everything we see is perspective, not vent pipe” — Marcus Aurelius.

Given incentive to search properly, I grilled John for a specific description of this particular vent pipe — it basically looked all the other sections, but shorter because part of it had been used already. Still it was about 24 inches long, not 10 inches like I’d thought, so I took a moment to visualize what that pipe would look like from all angles.

Channeling those images, I then announced that my search would begin in the house, so John headed out the door to the shop.

And then I well, I found the vent pipe in the first place I looked. Yeah, I know, it was both surprising and anticlimactic.

6. “It’s not the vent pipe you look at that matters; it’s the vent pipe you see” — Henry David Thoreau.

I grabbed the pipe and took it to John like a good golden retriever. His shock was gratifying and, understandably, he wanted to see where the pipe had been sitting. In fact, I had to put the pipe back where I’d found it and step away. This was serious business.

“It was right there?”

“Yeah.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“With these other ones?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“It’s shorter than I thought it was.”

“It’s taller than I thought it would be.”

“Y’know, I bent down and looked behind this thing,” he said, demonstrating by bending over the handful of various sized pipes sitting upright on the floor — like, right over the top of them with his face right there — and tipping a container behind the pipes forward and back into place.

“Really? You were that close?”

“Yeah.”

“Mmmm.”

“You’re going to write about this aren’t you.”

I would suck at playing poker.

“Oh yeah.”

“Fair enough,” he said.

But y’know what? He made me an apple pie, even before the ducting was completed, as my finder’s commission.

7. “The reward of a thing well done is having homemade apple pie for lunch the next day” — Ralph Waldo Emerson.

——

1. Mehmet Murat Ildan, Turkish playwright, novelist — Yes, of course. I took artistic license to make the quote refer to a vent pipe — it’s today’s subcontext.

2. 14th century proverb — While I admit the proverb cares naught about vent pipes, to be fair my misquote is also based on a commonly used misquote of the original text of the proverb. It’s just falsehoods all the way down.

3. Leon Brown, former star of “Sister Wives” — I don’t know who Leon Brown is, but this is word for word almost what was said and not what he meant at all.

7. Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist, philosopher, abolitionist, poet — He would’ve said it just like I wrote it — if he’d gotten homemade apple pie for lunch at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40 .