Signature in the night

I have been out of practice for quite some time, but today I can report my signature handyman skills are intact.

During the night last night, every 90 seconds or so, the toilet in the back bathroom would emit a brief gushing sound, then fall silent for another 90 seconds. That brief gushing sound was my signature. In 95 percent of all the handyman projects that I have undertaken in almost five decades, I have left a personal signature of some kind.

A couple of those signatures required summoning a professional. Most of them, though, were in the category of what I call "ancillary dilemmas." Some primary dilemma will arise: a leaky toilet. In my work to correct the primary dilemma, I will set off an ancillary dilemma: the leaky toilet becomes a toilet twice as leaky as it was before.

Or, in this case, the leak will be stopped but the toilet tank won't fill. Oh, it will fill, but it takes about six hours. I can talk knowledgably about ancillary dilemmas; I reasoned that because the plumbing is so old (maybe going back as far as the 1950s), when I shut off the valve to the toilet's water supply (it took a wrench and some muscle), corrosion was loosed into the line, which traveled into the fill valve (the thing with a cup on it that slides up and down) in the tank, the same way a leg clot travels up the body and causes a heart attack.

The corrosion no doubt had caused a massive heart attack in the fill valve. I was going to leave it. It was a pretty nifty signature, after all: six hours of a faint, reedy whine until the tank was filled. But Karen would have none of it. "Please fix the tank," she commanded.

I decided not to just replace the fill valve, but the water supply valve and feeder line as well. You have to appreciate the peril inherent in such a decision. Normally it is a job that would take 25 minutes. In the handyman's world, if all goes exactly right, it will take two days and three trips, with potential for ancillary dilemmas that would fill three pages.

But I am experienced, and my seasoning told me to take all the old parts with me into the store, hand them to a salesperson in the plumbing aisle, hope to God they were not too old to have no replacements, and let the salesperson fill my arms with the necessary new parts. This is exactly what happened. At home, I spread the parts out on the kitchen table and read everything twice.

In the bathroom, I spread the instructions on the toilet seat and lay the parts on the rug. A very wet rug, by the way, due to minor flooding during disassembly. After 30 minutes and a couple of grave decisions (the true meaning of "finger tight," for example), everything was back together. Outside, then down at the wall, I turned the water back on. Such moments of truth, these tiny errands become. Whoosh! came the water through the new fill valve and into the tank. In seconds the tank was filled, and I adjusted the black cup gizmo to raise the level a little. Then the fill valve clicked closed. Silence. Filled tank. No leaks. I flushed it. It worked.

I replaced the tank lid with a Harrison Ford flourish and went to get a towel to blot up the rug, then turned a fan on the rug to hasten drying. Mission accomplished. Nice evening, good dinner, a little TV, bedtime. Shortly after 1, I woke up and, lying there, heard the sound. Unmistakable, the sound of a toilet running, even if for only one second. Then I heard it again. Again. I tiptoed to the bathroom, lifted the tank lid. No leak, no nothing. Perfect silence. Then: the sound. Loud, standing right there. I jumped.

I left it as it was, hoping Karen would not awaken before daylight. I did not want to be trouble-shooting a toilet with a flashlight. In bed, listening with a sort of aggravated fondness to my signature, I remembered something about the instructions, something about holding the black cup under water. I had not done that during the reassembly. At first light, I arose, fished the instructions out of the garbage, read again about the cup, strode to the bathroom, and held it under water for the prescribed 30 seconds without, I might add, overflowing the tank.

It has been three hours now, and I think I have fixed it. But I won't be comfortable for a couple of days.