Uncommon Axe of Kindness by Don Taco

 Uncommon Axe of Kindness

by Don Taco

 As we dressed for my father's funeral, a pipe under the bathroom sink burst, and soaked down one of my younger sisters, then several more of us as we tried to turn the water off. It had to be shut off at the street. It was a mess. And the well-wrought phrase 'insult to injury' was apt.

 The next weekend, my mother's two brothers, thirty-somethings, and my brother and I, eleven and thirteen, rented and borrowed the appropriate tools, crawled under the house, and re-plumbed it. There wasn't money to pay a professional.

 Hard, dirty work. Every inch of pipe had to be replaced. It took all of that weekend, and all of the next, to finish the job.

 My mother snapped a photo of her brothers near the end of the job. Filthy tee-shirts, torn jeans, smudged faces, and beers in hand. One is conking himself over the head with a huge pipe wrench. The other is shoving a reamer in his ear. Clowns. My family.

 The last piece of the puzzle was the line to the street. Which passed under the driveway. And down a lumpy slope of about forty degrees. Past the roots of a sizeable palm tree. And under the sidewalk as well. Decidedly not trivial. 

 By now, though, it is late Sunday after a second long dirty weekend, and we are exhausted. We are attacking the problem with a pick-axe and a shovel, breaking up the hard-packed clay soil of Southern California, and trying to follow the line of the old pipe down to the meter.

 There isn't room for a group effort, so we are taking turns, chopping and clearing, and the turns are getting shorter and shorter, because we are completely worn out.

 A station wagon passes by, stops, backs up, pulls up to the curb and parks. A man gets out, who turns out to be the husband of my eighth grade teacher. A man we have met, and recognize, but barely know.

 He has seen what we are trying to do, and how well we appear to be doing it. 

 He's dressed for a professional job, a sales position. He takes off his suit coat, tosses it on the car seat, grabs the pick-axe, and attacks the lawn. 

 Thirty minutes later, there is a trench the rest of the way down the slope, and the water meter is exposed. 

 He hops back in the car and continues home. With barely a word.

 Based on the progress we had been making, I estimate that he did more work in thirty minutes than the four of us would have accomplished in the next two hours.

 That wasn't the end of the task, but it sure brought us closer to it. Shoving a pipe under the sidewalk was relatively easy, but, to avoid having to cut through the driveway, we had to hook up a neighbor's hose to a length of pipe, and shove it through the clay like a battering ram. That was messy too. But we got lucky, and came out almost straight in line with the pipe we had to connect to. It was well past dark before we had water to the house again. After ten days without.

 But it probably would have been until the next weekend without the unsolicited help of a man who was just driving by. 

 That's neighborly.

 That's kindness.

 I try to be like that man.