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 IT MUST HAVE been my night for servicing 1 million Btu boilers. First, a 150-room hotel’s domestic hot water boiler, and then a rooftop boiler that had decided to take a snooze during a sold-out performance in a 1,200-seat theater.What a view from on high! The only thing missing was Mary Poppins! After getting the reluctant boiler firing, I took some time to drink in the view as the boiler began circulating heated water through the massive air handler’s hydronic coil. Standing on a rooftop at night and viewing the twinkling lights of the city stretching out below has something magical and mystical about it that lifts the spirit. What a grand way to earn a living. Being a plumber gives you opportunities like that – going places no one else gets to go and seeing the world from a different perspective. At times the work is difficult: in cramped or virtually inaccessible recesses of darkened and damp places where no one else would dare enter; bugs as big as Volkswagens or cat diamonds placed neatly in piles behind the furnace that needs service – right where you need to stand on your head because someone installed it with the service door against the wall. Much of the work brings mental challenges that require creative thinking and the dexterity of a neurosurgeon. When last month’s e-mailer made the comment about my being “just a dumb (expletive deleted) plumber,” I couldn’t help but recall some powerful memories. His comment got me thinking about a few of the teachers I had in school, especially Skinny and Pearl. (He was thin as a rail and she was such a cat diamond!) They didn’t much care for my attitude – I always questioned authority and had to know why things were the way they were. They were from the old school of discipline and thought we should be seen, not heard.
Well, I ran into them at a concert one night at York College several years after I had graduated. I made it a point to cross the auditorium to be polite and say hello. By this time, I had been in the trades just long enough to become a Journeyman plumber and I was damn proud of having accomplished that. You have to understand that, as a dyslexic, I had missed out on completing a lot of things I had started in life and this was one of the few things I had managed to see through to a successful conclusion.
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Skinny and Pearl were the headmaster and headmistress during my fifth and sixth grade elementary school years. We used to call him Sniffles, too, because he had some sort of snot disorder that made him sniff a lot. I think he was allergic to students.
