Unfortunately, this turns out to be not a job for a regular screwdriver, which I discover when I insert the screwdriver in the first tiny hole relevant to the project and start to turn (“lefty-loosy, righty-tighty”). I grab my huge floating boat flashlight from the closet—okay I can really find five things in an emergency—and take a closer look. I don’t have a boat, by the way, but I love these flashlights. For about five bucks at the hardware store you get something that could pretty much light up a stadium on a foggy night…with the battery included!! And they’re so big they are impossible to misplace.
What will be required here, I discover, is a tool called a “hex wrench.” And I actually, believe it or not, own one. Since the divorce I have gone out with a couple of men who liked to impart knowledge of some of the mysteries of “the man zone,” and as a result I can now use a cordless drill, appreciate the necessity of draining the water heater once in a while, cut firewood with my pint-sized chain saw, and hang a picture. One of my favorite mottos is that a girl can never have too many box-cutters.
The intricacies of a hex wrench were first explained by the man in my life, the guy with the longbow and the motorcycle and the black leather pants, when we needed to disassemble and then reassemble my wrought iron bed a couple of years ago for the carpet installers. It is a weird folding tool comprising many small metal rods that fold into a sheath like my Swiss Army knife (okay, now we’re up to finding six things in an emergency!). I pick the smallest prong, which is not much bigger than a toothpick, and get to work loosening things that seem to be important. The screws that awkwardly emerge are about the size of peppercorns, and I can foresee absolute disaster if I drop one of the four down the drain. Who invented these things, I wonder? My hands are tiny, with chickenbone fingers that wear a size four and three-quarter ring, and I can’t imagine how men with much bigger hands ever navigate these contraptions for a living.
