Maria has taken to calling me the “Grand Ca-Ca.” This was the name Frida Kahlo used to describe her lover and ex-husband Diego Rivera, the famous muralist.

I love the name (yes, I know what it means), actually, I smile or laugh whenever I hear it. I am no calling her “The Engineer,” for a new and fascinating turn in her life: loving mechanics and figuring out how they work.

We need a man around here.

We’ve been trying to get the right window fan for two years now, Maria has this very complex idea for blowing hot hair out of the house and blowing the cooler air, which is sometimes outside of the house and somehow downstairs or down the road.

She wrecked about six different window fans.

I finally got tired of all the cheap digital window fans who broke in days and ordered a giant, powerful King Window Fan. It was expensive, but she was very pleased.

It was a lot bigger than I thought and I was going to return it, but Maria and a friend opened it hauled it upstairs and took the window apart and stuffed it in there. They took care to keep me downstairs, and I didn’t want to go anywhere near the monster.

It looks like a jet airplane propeller, I think it will one day lift the house right up and sail down the road with it.

I don’t trust it, but Maria loves this fan and is the only person who understands it (there are only two of us). She is constantly adjusting the speed and changing directions of the fan.

When Frieda was alive, I used to say she was the only man in the house. Now, I say Maria is the only man in the house, she loves to get out her drill and hammer and read instructions and take things apart – door frames, windows, fans.

I like to write things on my blog and drive my new car around and wrestle with Zinnia.

You can hear the fan a mile or so down the highway.  I had this dream of  Bud getting pulled out of the window and shot out into the front yard.

I visited the fan and tried to connect with it, but it just blew some hot air at me.

No matter how many times I guess about what she is doing – hot air in, cool air out? – I get it wrong. I stay from this fan now, Maria is the only thing in the house that it loves.

When I ask her what she is planning, she looks at me with a mixture of pity and contempt. She is like a guy sometimes.

I tried to turn the fan off one night after Maria had fallen asleep but it took so long for the big propeller to turn off that I thought it was broken and turned it back on by mistake.

Just now, I asked her if she was setting the fan to blow the hot air in or not, and she said “no, silly, I’m keeping the cooler air in.”

I don’t understand how this could work, but I defer to “The Engineer,” when I sit in my study and write, I hear it calling to me from upstairs. My desk was trembling slightly.

It’s kind of sexy.

“Jon,” it says, “I am coming for you. I always come after the hot air.”

I yelled back up, in a pleading voice, “that’s no way to talk to the Grand Ca-Ca.”