Tonight, we got rid of our cheap plastic toilet seat and installed a much better one, it was still plastic, but solid and sturdy and heavy.

We tried the local hardware store, but they only sell cheap and flimsy ones. I did my thing online.

The new one doesn’t twist or squeak. Changing a toilet bowl seat is probably not the biggest news in the lives of most people, but it has me spinning a little bit.

I was the one who picked it out and bought it, Maria was the one who took off the old and replaced it with the much sturdier new one. We were lucky, the old was just about to come apart. I was amazed that she knew how to do this, and I should know better by now.

Because of my Mansion and refugee work, I am a whirling dervish when it comes to shopping online.

The whole thing was a kind of moment for me. In all of my 72 years on the planet, I never once changed a toilet seat, took out an old, or put in a new one. I couldn’t imagine how this was done, or that an ordinary person could do it.

I never lived with any family in any place where we didn’t call a plumber if the toilet bowl seat needed replacing. When Maria and I talked about our disintegrating seat, she said, oh let’s just order a new one. “I’ll put in on.”

What?, I thought.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about Superhero Maria who stacks wood, climbs on roofs, trims trees, digs graves, rearranges furniture, fixes fans. I don’t want to overdo it, but once again, I was shocked by the ease with which she put in the new seat. I’ve lived with her for more than 10 years now, but she continues to surprise me.

I think for the first years of our marriage, she was anxious to shed the hard and physical work she did to restore houses. She wanted to put all that energy and labor into making art, and she has.

She didn’t want to do a lot of labor, now she is comfortable with herself, she doesn’t feel forced. She likes using what she knows.

It grounds her. She is not, of course, a Superhero, she just knows how the world works and trusts her hands to do the work.

Now that she is more secure within herself, I see she likes doing strenuous physical work, she likes caring for the house, the grounds, the garden, and yes, the toilet seat. When I suggested calling the plumber, she was horrified. I was surprised.

I wonder about my life sometimes. I never saw anyone but a plumber fix a toilet seat, no one ever said to me that I could do that, or that most people can and do,  do it. I wasn’t born rich or to privilege but it never crossed my mind that this was something we could do.

I think I was taught and came to believe that I just wasn’t competent to do much more than read and write. I sometimes blame this on the Dyslexia, but it’s probably more complex than that. I was estranged from my father, and fathers usually teach their sons about these kinds of things.

And I was busy surviving. That is hard work sometimes.

The thing is, ever since I started to get well, I have learned that I love to learn. My poor teachers would be greatly relieved to know it wasn’t their fault. The whole world seems fresh and open to me.

In my New Jersey home plumbers came in a day or so and charged $150 for house calls. Otherwise, you couldn’t get one to come.

We just paid it, we never thought about it. The details of my life were all in the hands of others, I didn’t want much to do with those details myself. My first wife was no more inclined to put in a new bathroom toilet seat than I was.

We just called the plumber.

The other night, while trawling the Internet to look for information about the best toilet seats, I ran across an Amazon customer review from a woman who identified herself as 87 years.

She said the seat I was looking at was the best she had encountered in decades, she had installed scores, and it took her 15 minutes to put this one on the toilet seat.

She recommended it highly.

When she was younger, she wrote, it took her under 10 minutes.

Tonight I watched Maria and I realized that unlike chopping wood, this is really simple.

Ten minutes was about the length of the time it took Maria.

I appreciate engaging with reality and rethinking my relationship with the material world. Writers do sit on their asses quite a bit.

I stood in the doorway in awe tonight watching Maria sort through those instructions, nuts and bolts and screws and instructions all over the floor. There was no question of my doing it, and I was worried about her doing it. She was not worried. I listened carefully for the sounds of complaint or trouble.

Maria explains it this way: if men can do it, she can do it. I  have benefited from that. Lots of men are just too dumb to know that feminism is good for them if they can look at it selfishly. I can.

I know many men who would – will – tell me they don’t want their wives repairing toilet eats. They have their heads up their asses.

It was fitting that my writing hero John Updike’s short story collection sat on top of the toilet, I was present in spirit it was my mark, like the scat of a coyote.

It wasn’t as if we had servants or were rich when I was a kid.  I just had no idea how many things I could have learned to do myself. I cheated myself of this. And I was cheated by the absence of teaching or encouragement.

The next time a toilet seat needs to be replaced, I just might do it myself. Or let’s be honest, I might not. But at least I won’t think to call the plumber.

One step at a time, I have been learning how the world really works, stretching the boundaries of what I want to know and what I want to do. Don’t pick up the phone, see if you can do it yourself.

Maria knows how to take care of herself,  I can’t do much more than train dogs, write and take photos.

That isn’t nothing, but it’s not the same as understanding how the world around me works. I was disconnected from the reality of things, thus disconnected from myself. The farm has taught me a lot, but I have a lot to learn. And I am lucky to have a partner who loves to install toilet seats.

I never would have guessed.

So now, as my hair starts to gray, I’m getting on track, better late than never.

I’m opening my eyes all the time, seeing the world anew. That includes toilet seats.