Smashing Irons
This column first appeared in the June 2013 issue of Forsyth Family magazine:
Ironing my shirt for work one morning, I was startled by a crackling bolt of electricity shooting out of the iron. Oh, my! Time to get a new iron.
I resolved to get one on my way home from work that day. It didn’t cross my mind, and it was only when it was time to iron my shirt the next morning that I remembered. Oh, well, can’t go to work with a wrinkled shirt. Nothing to be done now except be extra careful.
You might think that two bolts of electricity in one ironing session would have done the trick. But I didn’t give it a thought on the way home that day either. I had to go back out that night to get one. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the iron at the drug store came with a two-year warranty. On the way back home, I had a brainwave. Rather than toss the old iron in the trash, I should give it to Doobins and tell him that he could smash it to smithereens.
This is a young man who enjoys smashing ice on the sidewalk, cardboard boxes and the concrete on a fence post that we had dug up, and, as I expected, he was delighted. He wasted no time in arming himself with the croquet mallet that he uses for smashing things that need smashing and headed outside with the iron. That boy knows how to wield a croquet mallet and, in minutes, he was back in the house showing us the fruits of his labor.
Breaking up the iron had revealed some innards that he set aside as treasures. He asked for a box to store the rest of the mangled remains until it was time to do some follow-up smashing. The box I found in the basement said “Fragile” on all four sides. Filled with the dismembered iron – and with a bit of cord dangling over the side as it was trying to make an escape – the “Fragile” box looked to me like somebody’s idea of a funny piece of art.
Doobins disappeared with the box. A little while later, he came back in and said, “When do you think I will be able to smash the new iron?”
“It has a two-year warranty,” I said. “So not until sometime after that.”
“Well, I can’t wait for that day,” he said and disappeared again.
The next day, he came in and said, “Two years is a long time, isn’t it?”
“It is,” I said.
It would be good to find another old iron for him to smash, I thought. In the basement was a portable CD player. Garnet had put it there after it died. Having filed it under “Items Awaiting Our Week for Bulky Item Pickup,” I didn’t ever think about it unless I happened to notice it while putting a load of clothes in the dryer, and, even as I wondered whether Goodwill might be a source of affordable irons for Doobins to smash, it didn’t come to mind.
Garnet, though, can be a more nimble thinker than I am (although she would never dream of pointing that out). She did think of it, and, when one of Doobins’ cousins came over a couple of day later to play, she brought it up and took it, along with a couple of screwdrivers, out into the backyard. Handing a second croquet mallet to his cousin, Doobins noted that his own mallet was definitely starting to show some wear. The inside of the CD player contained even more marvels than the inside of the iron. And it had parts that broke apart in even more spectacular ways that the iron’s parts had. I think I am safe in saying that, should we ever have another CD player that needs to be demolished, his cousin would be happy to help.
When the subject of the iron and CD player came up a couple of days later, Doobins said, “If I got paid every time I smashed something, I would be rich.”
