When He Came to My House to Fix the Faucet, My Plumber Did Something I Didn’t Expect.

Life is Full of Surprises

Photo by Shreeya Pradhananga on Unsplash

When a neighbor told me that the faucet in my backyard had sprung a leak, I shut off the water from inside the house and phoned a local plumbing company. They said they could send out a plumber that afternoon.

Joe arrived promptly. He was a Millennial about my son’s age, friendly and focused. I sat on the edge of the porch and watched as he took a look at the broken faucet.

“This is gonna be a fairly easy fix,” he told me. “I’m pretty sure I’ve got everything I need in my truck.”

He spent a few more minutes examining the set up. Then he stopped and looked up at the sky. It was a pleasant spring day.

“This is a great kite-flying day,” he said.

That was unexpected.

I hadn’t noticed it before, but now I saw that there was a brisk wind moving through the branches of the trees in my backyard.

“I haven’t flown a kite since I was a kid,” I told him.

“I love flying kites,” he said. “I do it all the time. You know, I think I might have one under the seat in my truck.”

I followed him down the driveway to his truck, which was parked at the curb, and he got out the parts he would need to make the repair. Then he put them aside, poked around inside the truck cab for a few more minutes, and brought out a small, brightly colored plastic kite.

“Want to try it out?” he asked.

Nobody sent out to my house to make a repair had ever stopped in the middle of the job to fly a kite.

It was still breezy, and there was no traffic on my small street, so it was perfectly safe.

“Sure,” I said.

Stepping into the road, he took the spool and let out some string, then flung the kite up so it could catch a breeze and soar. It didn’t exactly soar, but it rose into the air and floated about for a bit before sinking back to earth.

He did this a few times, then handed the spool to me. If this story were fiction, that little plastic kite would have sailed into the sky and we would have watched it together, happy and proud, but since this was reality, that little kite barely got into the air before gravity showed it exactly who was boss.

I was never particularly good at kite flying.

Still, just the fact that we had taken a pause in the middle of something as routine and impersonal as fixing a faucet to do something as cool and impulsive as flying a kite was enough to make me happy.

After I tried and failed to get the kite aloft a few more times, I handed it back. He flew it for a few minutes, then returned it to the truck and finished repairing my faucet.

“That was fun,” I said. “Thanks.”

When I got the inevitable survey from his company, I sang his praises as a fixer of faucets but decided not to mention flying the kite.

Although I’d like to think that our kite flying interlude was a little “take a moment to enjoy your life” service that the plumbing company provides with every repair, I suspect that it wasn’t, and that I just got the right plumber on the right windy day.

Either way, it was a fun surprise and at 71 it’s good to be reminded that life still holds plenty of fun surprises.

(**Roz Warren, who writes for everyone from the Funny Times to the New York Times, has been featured on both The Today Show and Morning Edition, and has been included in 20 Chicken Soup for the Soul collections, is a [Writing Coach](https://rosalindwarren.medium.com/need-a-good-editor-get-in-touch-c3508093b772?sk=da811ef430b407044d2aff236d7c0570) who specializes in helping Medium writers craft and publish better stories. Drop her a line at roSwarren@gmail.com. (That’s Ros with an “s,” not a “z.”)**

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