Misery and a sump pump love company

One thing about having a hopelessly flooded basement as these record-shattering snows of our winter of discontent melt away is that you soon come to appreciate the wisdom of those heavy thinkers from the past who suggested that, to get the most mileage from it, misery is a condition that should be shared.

“Misery loves company,” was the way the Brit John Ray put it in compiling his collection of English proverbs way back in 1670. “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows,” was how the inscrutable William Shakespeare stated the case. And good old Publilius Syrus – wise master of the pithy truth and fundamental principle a really long time ago – surely nailed it with his Maxim 995: “It is a consolation to the wretched to have companions in misery.”

I have met my companions in misery while skulking through the sump pump section of the hardware store in quest of a spare pump and the required hoses, connectors, clamps and whatnot that the deal entails. I have bumped into them at the grocery store, while out for a walk, or on my daily run to the post office. Often, they stop to chat by the roadside as I participate in my annual Raking of the Gravel and Replacing of the Sod ritual to repair the scars of a state-sponsored hard winter’s assault on the landscape via snowplow and blower.

Inevitably at this time of year the conversation takes a turn toward flooded cellars. As we swap stories, embellishing them only when it seems necessary to hype the misery index, we are struck with how much we have in common in life’s wet-basement category.

Which is to say near-sleepless nights listening to the sump pump below whine and rattle as we imagine all manner of disastrous scenarios should the device give it up as a bad job and quit on us.

There in the dead of night, when imaginations can so easily get stuck in hyperactive mode, the questions spook us: Why is the pump running for so long between stops? Has a new gusher opened up and overwhelmed it, the advancing tidal wave about to wreck the hot water heater and short out the furnace? Why is the pump stopping for so long between starts? Has it burned out? Has it gone belly-up in the rushing torrents? Has the float become jammed against the side of the old 5-gallon plastic pail in which it is submerged? Is that leaky hose that we patched yesterday with 4 pounds of official state of Maine Duct Tape holding up worth a damn? And what’s up with that weird vibrating noise?

The suspense mounting, there is nothing to be done but roll out of bed, step into the rubber boots and tromp down the cellar stairs to have a look, repeating the drill periodically as the dictates of the imagination require until daybreak brings an ebbing of the tide and an easing of the mind.

Last weekend’s morning newspaper carried a wire story out of Chicago reporting that older Americans are happier than younger Americans. If such joys as flooded cellars were taken into account by researchers, it is not difficult to see why they would conclude that we are such a cheerful bunch, give or take a few old grouches here and there.

“The good news is that with age comes happiness. Life gets better in one’s perception as one ages,” one researcher gushed. This is partly because older people have learned to lower their expectations and accept their achievements, said another expert on aging. An older person may realize “it’s fine that I was a schoolteacher and not a Nobel Prize winner,” she said.

My research amongst my wretched companions in misery – most of them rather long in the tooth – shows there is nothing quite so conducive to lowering expectations and learning to accept your achievements as trying to outsmart a flooded cellar in Maine, in springtime.

As old fogies in good standing, most of us don’t expect a whole lot of success to come out of the exercise, and so we are never disappointed. And we are OK with not having won the Nobel Prize for sump-pumping above and beyond the call of duty. Our happiness, though, stems mainly from the fact that we know we won’t drown in our sleep some night during high tide. As long as the sump pump continues to flail ominously away in the basement there’s little chance we’ll ever get caught asleep long enough for that to happen.

Life doesn’t get much better than that.

BDN columnist Kent Ward lives in Limestone. Readers may e-mail him at olddawg@bangordailynews.net.