BRILLIANT PHILOSOPHERS?

142 – Friday, May 22, 2009

I have constructed a series of ramps to assist Uncle Bud when it is necessary to navigate Aunt Mary down the steps of their condo. I observed three concrete risers between their entry and the parking area when I visited their home for the first time to take some food and share fellowship - Mary was recovering from a fall she sustained in the exact area during a recent excursion. When Cynthia informed her of my plan to build her an access ramp, Mary related that the real problem for any permanent incline is that it would have to be approved monthly by the condominium association. So I devised a plan to assemble three individual ramps, each one small enough that Uncle Bud could easily pick them up after each use and store them in his nearby garage, only putting them in place when he needed to take Mary somewhere. Since they would be removable, there was no need for them to be made of heavier and more costly weather-resistant materials. Upon delivery of the first two ramps, (mainly to see how well they worked and to more accurately measure for the third and most difficult fit of the three) I determined that Bud was not likely to remove them in between uses, therefore we would need to encase the risers in some type of non-slick finish in order to retard their deterioration and maintain the safety of both my elderly friends. This has proven to be another of those times when my planning has succumbed to Murphy’s Law and Larrison’s Corollary (see blog #128) and validated grandfather Virgil’s Axiom, “If one has not the time to do anything correctly initially, how will one find the resources to do it over again?” (Actually, since my grandfather was a more, shall we say, ‘terse’ man, I have paraphrased his statement into more publishable and less raw language.) The thought just occurred to me that I am a genetic descendant, either of brilliant philosophers, or of a couple of gentlemen having gleaned a great deal of sagacious insight into life through the school-of-hard-knocks – I will let you decide which.

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