True story. Last night I was suddenly woken up at around 1am (I actually managed to get to sleep before 12am!) by the sound of my sixteen-year-old daughter begging my wife to come help her with an emergency. I (re)gained consciousness just as my wife, apparently still half asleep, was trying to convince our daughter to just go back to bed. That it’s nothing to worry about. That’s the auto-reflex when it comes to children waking you up in the middle of the night, right? “Mommy,” said the sixteen-year-old going up an octave (or three), “this is a REAL emergency!”
I kid you not, as I was being roused from my deliciously deep slumber, for a moment I experienced an urge to drag my blanket further up my bed so that it would cover my head. “I am just going to pretend that I didn’t hear anything,” the 70%-still-asleep part of my brain said, “and just go back to (full) sleep…” Well, that darn executive-function prefrontal-cortex was having nothing of it. “GET OUT OF BED NOW!!!” it yelled so loud that I could have almost been pushed out of bed and fall on the floor by the force of it.
Up and out I was, stomping my male, I’m-here-to-fix-the-problem feet as I dashed off to the scene of the disaster.
(By the way, that whole process that I just described of me going from “I’m going back to sleep” to “I am going to fix this problem now!” took all of about 1.5 seconds. It’s amazing the amount of detail that you can observe when you record the workings of the brain with a high-speed camera and then slow it down, isn’t it?)
When I saw what was happening, my knees almost buckled. It was deja vous all over again. “Oh no, we’ve been here before,” my traumatized amygdala whimpered. It was raining in my kids’ bathroom. Not drip drip drip, but raining!!! I knew what lay beyond that sheetrock drop ceiling. Sewage pipes. And, a number of years ago, one of those pipes came loose on Shabbos, and, well… you know what? There’s only so much action that I can pack into one article so perhaps we’ll discuss that story a different time. Suffice it to say that the memory of that extremely difficult (and smelly) Shabbos flooded my mind. And the puddle of water collecting on the floor (and, to my sudden horror, splashing on my feet) had that tell-tale smell. If you’ve been blessed to never have seen water that looks deceptively clean but has the uncanny smell of trillions upon trillions of bacterial organisms teeming throughout, consider yourself exceptionally lucky.
I was beside myself. The size of this leak dwarfed the one we experienced on that Shabbos many years ago. I couldn’t understand how the pipe was leaking so much sewage so late at night. After all, by that point, most people are asleep so the three apartment units that rise up above ours should have been largely inactive by that point.
“Perhaps it is pouring rain and flooding like crazy,” my cerebrum scrambled for an explanation, “like what happened in New York, and the pipes are getting overwhelmed by the enormous amount of runoff.” Whatever the case may be, I knew that I had to figure out from where this flood was emanating. QUICK!!!
I dashed upstairs (our bedrooms are all on the basement level of our two-story apartment, we enjoy hibernating like bears [our name is bear-man, after all] 🙂 and discovered what could only be described as horrifying. The entire upstairs level was covered by a gigantic puddle (a small lake, really) that was growing more ominous by the second. I think that at that moment I must have entered what trauma specialists call dissociation. Kind of like an out-of-body experience so you cease to feel the pain of what you’re going through. The magnitude of my entire home being absolutely flooded with sewage was beyond anything within my ability to process. Certainly not after having been ripped from sleep only about forty-five seconds prior.
Hashem helped me to locate the source of the flood very quickly. It was coming from one of the upstairs bathrooms. The one that, since the beginning of corona-cum-covid is located in the tiny room that serves as my home office (so far, I am one of those who just “went home never to return”). And that is when I heard a sound and saw a sight that almost instantaneously melted away all of my angst and flooded my brain with a euphoric dopamine rush that a heroin addict would be hard-pressed to emulate.
IT’S A BURST WATER-IN PIPE!!! HOORAY!!!
The discovery that I was not, after all, sloshing around in potentially-disease-ridden-sewage-water, and would instead have to do a “sponja gedolah” (if you don’t know what that is, ask one of your friends or relatives who lives in Israel) before we’ve even hit Purim, filled me with such a sense of relief and joy, that it is hard for me to accurately describe it.
Over the course of the next hour, as I squeegeed the copious amounts of water out of our apartment and into our yard together with my wife and daughter, I was literally singing. Not figuratively. Literally! And the movements of the squeegeeing the water out served as my dance.
Don’t ask me why, but the first song that spontaneously erupted from my lips was, “Iiiii’ve been working on the raaaiiiil-road aaaaalll my live-long daaaaays….” (Correct, I don’t even know the words!). Oh how sweet it was to be working on that flooded railroad until 2am!!! My attitude caught on and the three of us were laughing and joking throughout the ordeal. Suddenly, I realized that we were being so loud that we might wake up the neighbors! (Don’t ask me how it is that none of our other children woke up. I have no idea. It must have simply been Hashem’s chessed…).
At some point, a striking thought hit me. Had I known from the beginning that our house was flooding from a burst water-in pipe, I would have been miserable. Terribly resenting having to rip myself out of my bed to deal with such a disaster at 1am…
But, having expected the worst and then realizing that it was SOOOOO much less of a problem than I had thought, I was induced into a completely, entirely, utterly different frame of mind. It was literally a v’nahafoch hu from “crying and eulogies” to “rejoicing and happiness”. I found myself thunderstruck by the experience of how profoundly perspective can impact happiness or lack thereof, and I am still processing this experience as I write this piece. Simply amazing what a midnight flood can give you, isn’t it?
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