The Agony of Caulking

I sit gazing forlornly at the objects of my suffering: a tube of caulk, a big blue cylindrical caulk gun, and a flat, stiff, grout-assailing putty knife. They look back at me, wordlessly. In my bathroom, a shower stall waits. I sigh and reach for the caulk, but my hand comes up against some sort of invisible, electrified barrier, and I draw it back, yelping. I try again, going in from a different angle, and actually manage to grasp the tube before a thousand tiny land piranha swell out of nowhere and start eating the skin off my hand. I pull back again, shaking them off. Sit and look warily at the caulking paraphernalia. Sigh.

To my infinite chagrin, I’ve begun to notice signs of disrepair in my house. Which isn’t to say that those signs haven’t been there for some time: they have. I’ve just failed to notice them. This is a defensive mechanism. I have trained my brain to shield me from all forms of unpleasantness, especially unpleasantness of the domestic variety: the disintegrating caulk in our bathroom, for example, or the rust appearing on the metal railing outside the front door, or the hairline crack that stretches from floor to ceiling in the dining room. My eyes process these things, and my ears digest the sound of my wife telling me about them; but, somewhere in the crucial membrane between the sensory and the cognitive, my mind knows to activate a horde of synaptic censors that chew, termite-like, through this distressing input before it has a chance to penetrate to my more delicate cortexes, leaving me blissfully ignorant of my house’s problems.

At least it has until recently. No longer. Either my mind is getting lax about these things, or it’s decided that it would be foolish to allow the vessel of wood and drywall that houses its vessel of skin and bone to disintegrate totally. So I notice the failing grout whenever I take a shower, and it nags at me. It’s been nagging at me for two months, a great mental burden that my powers of laziness and benign domestic neglect have been unable to overcome.

And so, yesterday, I walked to the Home Depot and wandered its massive labyrinthine aisles until I found the caulk section, bought the necessary equipment, and came home, prepared for an afternoon of serious grouting. I put the bag down on my dresser. I looked at it uncertainly. I left the house.

It’s sitting there still, a beige plastic bag bristling with various protuberances whose malign shapes strike fear into my heart. I am resentful. I don’t ask the house to brush my teeth for me, or cut my hair, or bandage my gashes. Why should I have to deal with its personal upkeep? I’ve posed the question many times, and have not received an answer. The house is mute, as well as helpless before the vagaries of time and decay.

I reach down and grasp the putty knife. I open the bathroom door. I switch on the light.

I’m going in.