Who Knew? Plumbing Requires a Penis!

One of the kids in the neigh­bor­hood, an occa­sion­al play­mate of G’s, came run­ning up to the door a short time ago want­i­ng to know if G’s dad was at home. G had answered the door and said no, and the kid ran off with no fur­ther expla­na­tion. I asked our girls to run out and make sure she was okay and ask if there was some way I could help. (I would have gone myself, but the increased pain due to yes­ter­day’s excur­sion is mak­ing the two flights of stairs to get out there even more of a prob­lem than usual.)

Nope, I can’t help in any way, it has to be a man. Her moth­er was at home. There’s some sit­u­a­tion involv­ing a large hole in the yard and a bro­ken water pipe “that’s not the kind you’re sup­posed to have.” Her moth­er sent the nine-year-old child out to knock on the door of absolute­ly every house (though she does­n’t KNOW the peo­ple in most of those hous­es!) until she finds some man at home who will come back to the house with her to tell moth­er what to do. The child is most def­i­nite­ly out of the moth­er’s sight while doing this at all but the 3–4 hous­es near­est them, but that seems to be of lit­tle con­cern. The father is not home and appar­ent­ly not reach­able by phone. 

Is it any won­der that we’re not com­fort­able with G going over to this kid’s house?

I sup­pose any sit­u­a­tion involv­ing a water pipe can­not be resolved with­out the pres­ence of a ran­dom penis-bear­er. Not that I know any­thing about water pipes, except that she should turn the water off or call the water depart­ment to do it if she can’t man­age it. But there are women who know a heck of a lot of things I don’t know, includ­ing pipe arcana.