The Gymnast

We had a gymnast in our house the other day. He stopped by to repair our upstairs heating unit, not at all your ordinary HVAC technician.

His company squeezed us onto the end of his workday because overnight temps were hitting the twenties. True to his word, the gymnast rapped on our door at 5:45, the dark evening just above freezing.

The youthful blonde introduced himself by the name of his company, but a heavy Eastern European accent prevented comprehension. I asked his name but couldn’t string together the thick syllables coming off his tongue. They might have started with a B and produced some version of Boynton, not a familiar name around here.

B asked a few impertinent questions – “Has this happened before?” – on the way upstairs. My answers revealed no diagnostic, only that his destiny lay above our heads, in the attic, through a crawl hole in the ceiling with no drop-down ladder.

We stood in the master closet, a walk-in filled with fancy clothes we seldom wear, and he mused on the square into which he must climb. I offered to get a ladder from the garage.

“I’ll get mine from the truck,” he said.

That’s no ladder, I thought, when he returned. That’s a step-stool. He’d slung it over his shoulder, a three-step stool with a rubber pad on the arch at the top hoisted up over his shoulder. He’ll never reach from that third step, I thought.

B proved otherwise. My limited thinking had him stopping at the third step. For him, the gymnast, standing on his toes on the rubber pad at the crest of the arch provided just enough height to grab two sides at the top of the frame, crunch his belly, fold his body in half, and swing up his legs, pulling with powerful arms until he disappeared into the darkness above.

I stood dumbfounded, waiting for the thud of his body hitting the ceiling above. The sound never came. Instead, I heard catlike footsteps across the boards and the sound of tinkering where our heating unit lay dead, or dying.

Twice more the gymnast went up like that, each time giving me panic about his foot missing the rubber, the step stool itself – “Cosco ®” – crumpling or tipping, spilling him into a row of wedding shervanis or other formal attire. It never happened.

Between his first and second trip I was ordered to call up when the thermostat went dead. Up he went, out came the sound of tinkering, then blowing, then the thermostat face went blank. “It’s off!”

No answer.

I moved to the spider hole and called up, “Did you hear, I said it’s off!”

No answer, just the sound of the drill and the tinkering. Eventually that sound, too, stopped. The blowing ceased. Minutes passed. Then half an hour. So much time passed it seemed possible the gymnast might lay electrocuted on the floor above me while I scrolled frivolously for deals on Cyber Monday.

When he emerged the second time, toes precisely on the rubber pad, lowering himself mightily onto his equipment, the gymnast proved to be in no hurry to finish the job. We stood around a vent for the heat to increase while the unit blew and the thermostat chugged. He explained his diagnosis: “The unit is very old. Loose connections.”

We’d just had it serviced: what had caused the loose connections now? “Chewing?”

“I see no signs of chewing. You have rodents?”

“I don’t hear any rodents.”

His third trip up the spider hole was to finalize the tightening of some stubborn connections. He’d come a long way in rush hour traffic at the end of a long day climbing into ceilings and repairing loose units. This gymnast, this technician, ran a company of two, himself and his wife, Eastern European immigrants of some kind making good on the Dream, making my home warm.

His routine lasted ninety minutes and he seemed glad to do it.

It was nice to wake up to a warm home.

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