Nancy Eshelman: A Piece of My Mind
Columns from The Patriot-News
by
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Plumbing the depths of my book
Someday I'm going to write a book. Critics will declare, "She certainly displays a vivid imagination." When I appear on "Oprah," skeptics will claim I'm another James Frey. They'll suggest I made this stuff up. But I couldn't.
Take the latest chapter from my life. It will be titled "How I came to have a new toilet."
Saturday, I was supervising the activity of the 16-month-old who toddles around my house. He was clutching a hard plastic ball, one of a set of three. Each has something inside that shakes, rattles or rolls.
I heard him turn the corner toward the powder room. It didn't concern me because that door's always shut.
Twenty seconds of silence blasted me out of my chair. After all, this is the same sweet toddler who locked himself in a bathroom a couple of weeks ago, prompting hysteria on both sides of the door, the removal and eventual destruction of a door knob and his mother's swan dive through a window after I used a mighty long screwdriver to pry out a screen -- and bend the frame permanently, I might add.
But that's another chapter.
This chapter was made possible because the door that's always shut wasn't.
En route to the powder room, I heard the flush.
When I walked in, the villain still had his pudgy little fingers on the handle. Water swirled in the bowl. The plastic ball had disappeared.
Little guy was wearing what I call his "cheesy" smile -- that's the one he flashes when he knows he's doing something off-limits, such as touching the telephone, playing with the computer mouse, or flicking the television on and off.
In an effort to undo what he'd done, I became intimate with the toilet. Even though I plunged my arm into water up to my elbow, I couldn't dislodge the plastic ball.
I could touch it. I could feel it turn. But it had wedged in a bend and it wasn't about to shake loose.
The plumber's reaction was what people like me usually get from people like him. They know we're inept and they want to make sure we know they know.
He expected a two-minute job.
Two hours later, he conceded it was time to buy a toilet.
He'd lugged in one tool after another. He'd assumed 14 yoga positions around the toilet. He'd dismantled the thing and yanked it off the floor. He'd carried it outside, tried to blast the ball out with water pressure, shaken it, turned it upside down and dragged more tools out of the truck.
Now he was admitting defeat, throwing in the towel, hanging up his plunger, so to speak.
We decided to drive to the big, orange store to buy a toilet. But first, he said, he wanted to measure the rough-in distance, just to make sure it was the normal 12 inches.
I nodded like I understood.
I didn't then, but I do now.
Twelve inches represents the standard distance from the wall to the hole in the floor under the toilet.
If the distance deviates from the standard, a toilet's going to cost you more.
You know the punch line, right?
I'm working on my next chapter: "Nothing I own is standard and always costs more to replace."
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About the Book
Plenty of people have come up to me over the years and said, "You ought to write a book."
My response has always been to ask them to imagine they are a hairdresser. All day they work in a salon, cutting hair, coloring hair, styling hair. Now, I ask, "When you go home at night do you want to cut hair, color hair and style hair?"
The last thing I wanted to do after a long day in the newsroom was construct sentences, edit paragraphs and compile a manuscript.
Then one day I had an awakening. All those words I had been stringing together in columns in The Patriot-News since 1989 were just hanging around in a computer library. A few were clipped from newspapers and shoved in people’s drawers. Some dangled from magnets on refrigerators. Why not gather a bunch of them together and create a book?
And so this work began taking shape.
What I have gathered here are columns written over the years about the joys and sorrows that come from caring about someone and about the changes I've observed as I've passed from child to adult, from daughter to mother to grandmother.
About the Author
Nancy Eshelman likes to call herself a late bloomer. She graduated from college at thirty, already the mother of two sons. Then she plunged feet first into the newspaper business, spending three decades as a reporter, writer and columnist. She has received writing awards from The Pennsylvania Newspaper Association and The Associated Press Managing Editors and has repeatedly been named Best Newspaper Columnist by the readers of Harrisburg Magazine. She is a graduate of Millersville University and holds a Master's Degree in Journalism from Temple University. She spent a semester teaching journalism at The Pennsylvania State University as Editor in Residence and also has taught at Temple University, Penn State Harrisburg and Lebanon Valley College. She lives in Harrisburg, Pa.