Today is the end of an era here in the ‘Cuse, as the Syracuse China plant closes its doors. Oh, the current parent company – Libby – will keep stamping “Syracuse” on a line of china; it just won’t be made in the United States (let alone Syracuse) anymore. Let’s hope there aren’t any heavily armed and close to the edge paranoid schizophrenics amongst the soon to be unemployed. To add injury to injury, the Ball Corporation announced it’s closing their plant here, in July. Not to worry, though; we’re building a really, really big mall.

We have a bit of an eccentric stove in my house (it’s a Tappan – a brand I cannot recommend). It worked fairly well when I first bought it, but soon developed some sort of a neural disorder affecting the electronic burner ignition system. You turn, say, the right front knob, and the left rear burner starts sparking. Or you turn the front left one on, and the left rear one sparks. Or you turn the front left knob a little bit, and the front right one sparks, but you turn the knob a little further, and the right rear one starts. Unfortunately it’s not consistent, so you’re never sure which one will spark. I’ve gotten pretty good at figuring out which one’s clicking, and then turning on the gas to the one that seems to be firing (which of course causes a third burner to start clicking).

Sometimes I just turn ’em all on, and hope at least one of the damn things lights up (which can take a while, allowing the gas to accumulate under a frying pan or something, before suddenly exploding in a huge fireball, which is simultaneously very scary and really cool – especially if the kitchen lights are off). It’s kind of fun standing there, listening to the gas come rolling out and the four sparkers clicking, deciding how long to wait before shutting them off (I can hear Clint Eastwood whispering in my ear through clenched teeth, “are you feeling lucky, punk?”). Kind of a kitchen version of “chicken.”

Of course, sometimes you might want a specific burner to light, so you have to do it the old fashioned way – with a match. For this purpose, we have a box of wooden kitchen matches up in the cupboard. This box (which precedes my presence in the house), has a rather emphatically scrawled (complete with multiple underlines)

TOP

written across the top of the box. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision how that came to be (makes me laugh every time I see it).

Now, I’m sure there are many of you out there (particularly the females) who are saying to yourselves, “well that’s a very smart thing to do, labeling the top of the box so you don’t spill all the matches out.” And I suppose it is, but to me it epitomizes one of the differences between men and women – namely, the lack of an inclination to check before fully committing to a course of action that may have unpleasant ramifications (you know, like invading and occupying Iraq, or increasing troop levels in Afghanistan 🙄 ). The prime example of this, of course, is the toilet seat. Men who live with women are typically forced to put the toilet seat down (unless we want to be awakened in the middle of the night by an outraged – and somewhat damp – woman, hovering over us menacing, cursing like a sailor, and threatening a rather specific sort of bodily harm).

Contrary to popular belief, there are times that I, too, require the seat to be down, and on those occasions, I naturally check to make sure it is down before I assume the position (much like I only partially slide the match box cover open, until I’m sure I’ve got it right-side up). Now, I’ll admit that I’ve never actually fallen into the toilet, but I’m fairly certain that if it happened once, I’d never forget to check again.

I can hear the women out there now saying, “I don’t need the seat up, so why should I have to put it down?” A fair point, I guess, except I would counter with the argument that, while you don’t need the seat up, I’m pretty sure you’d just as soon that I didn’t leave it down (on a side note, it was years before it suddenly dawned on me one day why public toilet seats are horseshoe shaped). I’ve always thought the best way to get a woman to quit complaining about you not putting the seat down is to stop putting it up.

But, of course, putting the seat down is a small gesture, and the desire to preserve the peace greatly outweighs the slight effort it takes (and of course I refer not to physical effort, but the effort to remember to do it). Especially if you’d like to wake up with all the body parts you went to bed with (John Wayne Bobbitt left the seat up one time too many after a drunken night out on the town).

As I used to tell my stepson (who suffered alone in a house full of four women, and two female cats before I came along), you gotta pick your battles; no point in squandering good will on something trivial. In fact, in our house, putting the seat down isn’t enough; I have to put the lid down, too (not sure if Granny drowned in a past life or something).

Not on Sunday, though, as we’ll be having Easter dinner over at my in-laws, where my father-in-law is king of his castle, and a man is free to leave the seat up to his heart’s content.