Category Archives: inscrutable

At one point Friday night, while playing an online SpongeBob computer game, Michael hopped up and ran to the bathroom.

And as I usually do, I listened closely to the sound of his activity, ever vigilant against the possibility of his forgetting to flush or wash his hands properly.

After the sorts of sounds one expects to hear from a kid in the bathroom, there was a long silence. Michael was still in the bathroom, there was no doubt: the light was on, and he hadn’t come sprinting back to the computer. The germ of a question concerning his silent activities had just begun to form in my mind when he started bawling.

Both his mom and I got up immediately and hurried into the bathroom to see what sort of sad occurrence had triggered his outburst.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Nothing!” he cried, sniffing back tears.

“It doesn’t sound like nothing. It sounds like a whole lot of something. Now, what’s wrong?”

“NOTHING!” he shouted, through fresh tears.

“Did you hurt yourself?” His mom asked, quickly performing a mom-scan, looking for blood or other visible signs of injury.

“No… I found a bead,” he said.

“A bead?”

“Yes! This one!” He held up a microscopic bead, a clear one that might have fallen off of a bead necklace at some point in the last seven years we’ve lived in this house.

“Really?”

“Yes…” he said, but I was not convinced.

We thought nothing of it until later, as it neared bed time. While snuggling with his mom on the couch he began to wail again, this time his crying reaching a fevered pitch.

His mom finally got it out of him: He’d dropped a marble down the heater vent in the bathroom. A small, brown, glass marble.

“Is that all?” I asked while heading into the bathroom to investigate.

The bathroom heater vent is wooden grating on the floor, about four inches by eleven inches. Underneath is a wire mesh specifically placed there by his mom to keep this sort of thing from happening. This meant that Michael had to put forth some effort to get that marble to pass through.

One of his life’s passions is to cram things down openings to see them disappear and muse on where they might go. What he hasn’t grasped fully yet is the connection this activity has with losing items that are precious to him.

Which brings him to the point where he may possess a valuable trinket such as this marble, and yet be compelled to shove it into a drain or vent or other orifice, and render it lost to mankind for all eternity.

I removed the grating and the mesh and peered into the vent duct. It shot straight down about six inches, then curved back 90 degrees and continued on until it reached the heater itself. With a flashlight and a mirror I could see down the duct about three feet.

But there was no marble to be seen.

“I don’t see anything,” I yelled. This brought forth a fresh eruption of howls from Michael.

“It’s okay! It’s okay! Daddy will find it!” my wife yelled over the din, hoping some fraction of her words reached Michael’s ears.

So began my Valiant Effort at Marble Rescue.

First try:  Vacuum Cleaner with Sock Over the End

While this was very effective in retrieving all sorts of small objects, including a rubber ear bud grommet, two pieces of popcorn, a penny and several sticks, it did not yield a brown marble. I tried this trick several times before moving on.

Second try: Vacuum Cleaner with extended hose, but without Sock

This was even more effective, in that the suck power was increased greatly by not having the sock in place. Unfortunately, it meant tearing through the vacuum cleaner bag to find the marble, if retrieved. Of course I wasn’t brilliant enough to consider changing the bag before making this attempt, resulting in my going through a bag that was choked with dust bunnies, a spate of spider carcasses, sticks, popcorn and assorted floor-borne detritus. Not a fun evening.

Third try: Take the Heater Apart

This was not effective at all. After removing some screws and a couple of panels, I discovered that the portion of the heater I was after was pretty much set in concrete and not removable using tools at hand. I had no intention of jack-hammering my garage floor to retrieve a marble, so I gave up. It occurred to me later that it wouldn’t have worked anyway: the bottom part of the heater is the return, thus the marble wouldn’t be there anyway.

Forth try: Shop Vac with Greatly Extended Hose

This time I was smart and emptied the shop vac first. The only length of hose I had handy to act as an extension was some spare dishwasher drain tubing, so I duct-taped this to the shop vac hose and switched it on. I’d forgotten that the reason I kept the dishwasher drain tubing was because it makes a cool whistle when you pass air through it. With the shop vac pulling air through it like a wind tunnel, the tubing responded by shrieking like a banshee, emitting a skull-piercing scream during my recovery attempt. I got that tube down there as far as I could, pushed, pulled, twisted and probed, hoping by some miracle the marble would jump into the end and find its way into the shop vac.

No such luck.

And with that, I gave up.

After my hearing returned, I explained to Michael that the marble was just plain lost, and that he needs to learn his lesson not to do dumb things with stuff he likes.

We had a nice chat about it before bed time stories. He asked me about dumb things I had done as a kid. I could have reeled off a list that would have lasted all night, but I chose a couple of fitting examples and finished off by telling him that I eventually learned my lesson. Take care of things and you’ll be able to keep them for a long time.

Saturday and Sunday passed with no mention of the marble. I figured Michael had gone through all of the stages of grief over this marble, and was fully in acceptance.

It wasn’t until Monday, while Michael was at school, that the ugly reality of the marble loss once again slapped Michael in the emotional tush and sent him on another crying jag, this one pretty much tanking his day at Kindergarten. We got a note back from the teacher that day describing at great length how much effort it took to calm him down. He wasn’t able to do his work, he was sent to the principal, and he didn’t participate in classroom activities.

Because of a marble.

If I knew what it looked like, I’d just get one and then report that I “found” it in the garage under the heater.

I am going to try again, though. Next weekend. With a hose that doesn’t scream.