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Saturday, May 25, 2002

By Peter McKay

This story is true. I wish with all my heart it weren't, but it is.

	Home Making Homemaking is a column about the projects and pride that make a house a home. Peter McKay, a Ben Avon resident, is a nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate.

One recent Friday night, our next-door neighbors went out for dinner and came back around 9:30. They drove their SUV up to their side door, pulled their sleeping daughter out of the back seat and carried her up to bed. Had they looked up, they would have seen the bloody, dirty body of a man swinging from our second-story window.

It started out pretty simply. That night I decided to move an old TV into the bedroom of Son No. 2. (A privilege in our house, TVs come and go in bedrooms depending on report cards.) For this TV to work properly, I had to hook up cable. I have, over the years, routed so much TV cable around and inside my house that I should get a pension from the cable company. But I had never cabled this particular room.

Once I had the cable through the wall, I realized that I didn't have quite enough to reach the corner with the TV. Rather than being sensible and running off to the home center (open 24 hours, cheap prices), I did what I always do, which is scrounge around the house till I find something I can cannibalize. After looking around for 45 minutes, I remembered that along the left side of the house, just outside a second-story window, I had hung some cable for a bedroom that no longer had a TV. (Son No. 1's report card last year revealed too little studying, way too much ESPN.)

It was too dark to get out my ladder, so the only way to get at this stretch of cable was by leaning out a small side window. If I stretched as far as I could, I'd be able to reach the signal splitter, unscrew the cable and pull it in the window.

At this point I should explain that we have custom storm windows on our house. We had to have them specially made, as most stock windows are inexpensive and easy to use. Our storms, however, are awkward, badly designed knuckle-busters that take at least 20 minutes to open or close, and they often get stuck halfway up or down.

I got the storm on this window up only about 18 inches, about far enough to squeeze my torso through. It wouldn't stay up on its own, so I had to prop it with the box top from the game Operation. (We have just the box top, as all the pieces were lost by 10:15 on Christmas morning.)

With the window propped open, I leaned as far as I could into the dark to unscrew the cable. What I found was that I had, in an effort to make a watertight connection, wrapped the signal splitter with about half a roll of electrical tape. So it took a good 10 minutes of fumbling to unwrap the tape in the dark. Finally, my hands covered with black adhesive from the tape, my shirt dirty from rubbing on the brick wall of our house, I unscrewed the cable and pulled.

Nothing. The connection had rusted tight. Leaning farther out, I tugged and pulled.

With the final yank, the cable separated. But in the process, I scraped my knuckles. With a loud moan, I dropped the cable line and grabbed my wounded hand.

At this point, the box top to Operation fell, and the storm window dropped like a guillotine on my back, nearly severing my spinal cord. I moaned again. Like a middle-aged Winnie the Pooh, I was unable to back through the opening, my torso swinging from the window ledge. Trapped, I tried calling out to my wife for help. She was in the living room below, engrossed in a book, and didn't answer. I yelled again.

That's when the neighbors pulled into their driveway below. I briefly considered calling out to them, but at the same time, I realized how idiotic I looked. Both my hand and my back were in incredible pain, but my ego was intact. I kept my mouth shut, dangling silently in the dark.

As they pulled their sleeping daughter from the car, she sleepily looked in my direction. I waved, my blackened hand dripping blood. She yawned and closed her eyes again. I'll bet she woke Saturday morning with a vague memory of a filthy, bloody man hanging from the side of my house and dismissed it as a bad dream.

It took me another 10 minutes to edge my way back in through the storm window. All told, my reluctance to drive less than two miles to the home center cost me almost two hours' time, my dignity, the skin off my knuckles and about a pint of blood. But at least my son now has cable in his room.

That is, until the next report cards come out.