Superpowers

It's bitterly cold here in Gladlyville today, as it is across much of the Midwest. It was nine below when I got out of bed (-23°C, for my non-US friends), and I was listening to our furnace labor in the basement. My eye fell on one of the living room windows.

I feel strongly that our 1923 windows are part of the charm of our house, but they are not energy-efficient. One of them has developed a slight sag in its top half, and the draft is irksome even when the weather is more temperate. "Elwood," I said, "can we do something about this window?"

He considered and discarded a couple of possibilities. "I was wondering about getting a piece of wood from the basement and pushing it up from below," I said. "Sure," he said, "you could do that." But you guys, it felt like such a hassle: I'd have to measure, I'd have to sift through the messy pile of wood on the basement workbench, there probably wouldn't be an exact match, there might be sawing involved, blah blah blah. And I hadn't quite finished my coffee, so I wandered off.

Minutes later my husband disappeared into the basement and then reappeared immediately, holding a piece of wood. He opened the window, eased the wood into place, and hey presto! --it fit perfectly.

Surely somewhere in almost 17 years of archives I have posts about my husband's strange knack for sizing up dimensions by eye. He helped my college roommates and me move in the summer of 1991, and I still remember their awed voices: "Elwood is a spatial-visual GENIUS," they said, after they watched him magic a crammed apartment's worth of stuff into a too-small U-Haul. In our family we call him the Master Packer, because he can just see how things should fit together.

Sometimes this is mildly annoying. He wants the leftovers to fit precisely in their Tupperware. If he realizes too late that there is room at the top, he will scrape the food into something smaller, and I will grumble to myself later about washing the first container because it wasn't exactly right. But sometimes it just feels remarkable: he looked at the window, he looked at the wood in the basement, and he grabbed something that fit perfectly on the first try without any measurements.

"If there were a game show where people competed at scraping leftovers into just-right Tupperware, you would bring home the big bucks," I told him afterward. "Ah, yes," he said, "I'm sure the ratings for that show would be stratospheric."