Don't you just hate it when your drawers drop? It seems to happen at inopportune moments.
The other night, for instance, it happened to me when I was listening to a basketball game on the radio and simultaneously furthering my child's education.
The fourth-grader had been sent home from school with instructions to ask his parents for a list of five facts about World War II. I was working on my list: 1. Ronald Reagan was in the movie version. 2. The Russians were on our side. 3. The Enola Gay flew over Japan but we can't say what it did -- when the contents of a kitchen drawer went tumbling to the floor.
I had pulled the drawer out and had expected it to stop at the end of its run. But the drawer kept going and dumped most of its contents on the floor.
It was exasperating. But it was also familiar. I was a veteran of dropped drawers.
I knew exactly where the problem was. A metal track that ran underneath the drawer, down its middle, had come loose.
On the end of the track was a plastic plug, which I'll call a "stop." When everything was working correctly, the plug would ride forward in a companion metal track attached to the cabinet's frame. The drawer would travel, full speed ahead, until the plug hit the end of the line. There the plug would grab hold and stop the forward movement of the drawer.
That was theory. Reality was that the plug had worked itself loose, and the drawer was like a freight train without brakes. The drawer charged ahead. The "stop" came to the end of the line and jumped its track. It was crash time.
Years ago, when I first struggled with dropped drawers, it took me almost an hour to make things right. The other night it took me about 10 minutes. There is, I told myself, some advantage to getting older. You fix things faster.
I began the repair by removing the few items that remained inside the drawer. Gingerly rocking the fully extended drawer up and down, I was able to pull the drawer out of the cabinet without breaking anything.
When I turned the empty drawer over, I saw a nail had come loose. The nail had held down both the "stop" and one end of the the metal track on the drawer's bottom. Fortunately all the parts, including the nail, had not fled the scene.
I tried the simplest repair first. I was in a hurry. I had a war to capsulize and a basketball game to listen to. I hammered the nail back in its old hole.
Then I slipped the drawer back into the cabinet and pulled the drawer forward. Once again it was crash time. The stop came loose again. The nail had bailed out of its hole.
Once again I took the drawer out, and flipped it over. This time I plugged up the nail hole with a wooden match. I snapped off its business end and, using a rubber hammer, tapped the stick into the hole.
The match stick plugged the hole. This time when I hammered the nail into the bottom of the drawer, the nail held. I put the drawer back in the cabinet. This time, the track didn't wobble and the stop stopped. This time, the drawer didn't drop.
Feeling cocky from my success with the kitchen drawer, I went upstairs and tried to tackle the problem with an old chest of drawers. We had put the big old wooden chest in a kid's bedroom, both to hold clothes and preserve order, because it is one of the few pieces of furniture tougher than children.
The chest's bottom drawer, or sock drawer, is regularly stuck, in a half-opened position. Before bedtime, the 9-year-old and I shoot pairs of his rolled-up socks into the drawer. We make a game out of it, modeling it after the basketball game called "horse." If, for instance, the kid shoots a pair of socks into the drawer while he is sitting in the rocking chair with his eyes closed, I have to sit in the chair, close my eyes and make the same shot.
If I don't, I get the letter "H." The game continues, with socks fired from behind the bedroom door, behind your back, on the bed with your eyes closed and pillow over your head, until someone fails to replicate five made shots. Until, in other words, he gets the letters H-O-R-S-E.
I won't say how well I have been faring in these sock shoot-outs. But one reason I was working that drawer -- lubricating its runners with soap -- was to give myself a bigger target.