Never Really A Bad Time to be Grateful

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There’s nothing like a $1000 toilet to make you appreciate your life.

That may seem like a strange statement to some of you.  Okay, that probably seems like a strange statement to all of you.  But it’s true.  If you allow me to explain, perhaps it won’t seem so strange after all.

Like many in this economy, my family lives modestly.  We own a small home; my car is 10 years old; we don’t possess a boat or a vacation home; our family vacations typically consist of visiting relatives in New York or New Jersey, with the odd trip to Niagara Falls or Washington DC thrown in over the years.  In short, we don’t live lavishly yet still manage to find ourselves behind the financial eight ball.

So when something occurs that requires a hefty sum of cash, it tends to send us into a tailspin; a notice from the IRS indicating we made an error on our taxes; a “check engine” light on the minivan that requires a rebuilt transmission; an unexpected medical procedure that isn’t covered by insurance.

And of course, the $1000 toilet.

The toilet in question isn’t gold plated. It doesn’t clean itself or play music or have a heated seat. It’s not made by the federal government and comes with a $500 plunger.  It’s not even really the toilet itself, but the pumping mechanism that allows the toilet and the adjacent powder room sink to work below ground level. It’s the system we installed over 13 years ago when we moved into our home and determined that we could not survive with only one toilet in the house (even though the previous owners managed to).  When our plumber first installed it, the manual guaranteed “…a million flushes!”

And so it seems our million flushes are up.

When our plumber gave us the news that the cost to repair the system would run around $1000, I should have cried, but I didn’t.  I laughed.  We’ve become used to the $1000 repair on the car or the house.  But $1000 for a toilet?  Well, I sure didn’t see that coming! And so we’ll have to wait a bit longer to replace the decrepit garage door; to fix the leaky roof over the slider; to repair our front steps.  Because when you’re a family of four, your number two toilet suddenly becomes your number one priority.

The next day I happened to notice a posting on a friend’s Facebook page.  It said, “If you have food in your fridge, clothes on your back, a roof over your head and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75% of the world.  If you have money in the bank, your wallet and some spare change, you are among the top 8% of the worlds wealthy.  If you woke up this morning with more health than wellness, you are more blessed than the million people in this world who will not survive this week.   If you have not experienced the danger of battle, the agony of imprisonment or torture, or the horrible pangs of starvation, you are luckier than 500 million people alive and suffering. If you can read this message, you are more fortunate than 3 billion people in this world who cannot read at all.”

There’s nothing like the reminder of all the hunger, poverty, illness, hatred and illiteracy in the world to put your life in perspective.  Even if the percentages and statistics aren’t completely accurate, it was still a sober reminder of just how many blessings I have in my life compared to so many others.   Once again, humbled by Facebook.

As with most situations, there was a silver lining in all this.  At least now I finally have an answer to the question my husband has been asking me for months: “What do you want for your 50^th birthday?”

Why, a $1000 toilet, of course.