The other day the bulb in the overhead light in my kitchen burned out. I had one of those long-life ones in there, so it had been years since I had needed to change it. Now, however, it was necessary, and because the fixture is fairly high I had to get a stepstool.

That shouldn’t have been a problem. After all, I’ve got three of them, even though my place is rather small. One is a conventional one-rung stepstool that I keep in my kitchen. The second is a two-rung affair that resides in a closet in the bedroom. The third – well, I’ll get to that in a moment.

Standing on the first stepstool, I found I had to really stretch and stretch to reach that bulb. I also found that – now that I’m no longer twenty years old – I felt a bit less stable doing this than in earlier years. But although I managed to finally get that bulb out, I couldn’t quite get the new one in. The fixture kept swinging and eluded my attempts, and I realized I had to get up high enough to hold onto the side of it with one hand while I screwed the bulb in with the other.

Enter stepstool number two, the one with two rungs and a little bar on top to hold onto. I got that one out of the bedroom closet and lugged it to the kitchen. But there I discovered that I wasn’t quite high enough and also that, if I held onto the bar for stability, I still had the swinging fixture problem.

Then there was the third stepstool. That was the one I had trouble finding; I hadn’t used it in years, and it was larger. I knew it probably was in one of the closets, but they are pretty well jammed with stuff and I just couldn’t see it, even with a flashlight.

That stepstool looks like this. Note how tall. Note the high bar. A great stepstool indeed – and it was the first gift Gerard ever gave me.

Yes, an odd gift. But Gerard was no dummy; he knew what he was doing. This gift came to me in January of 2006, when he and I were somewhat acquainted but were not yet romantically involved. I had written this post about a difficult day I’d had full of petty annoyances, and it included the following:

Oh, actually, today wasn’t so bad. It’s just that when I was about to start working on today’s post at my computer, the power went out.

… Oh, right, the toilet will only have one flush in it – I forget why, but something to do with a pump. And in the winter, the cold starts seeping in within minutes, reminding me that lingering around the house would not be a good thing. The computer, the post? Fagettabout it. Time to leave and go about the other business of the day.

Ah yes, time to leave. Leave. And then I remember: that wonderfully convenient electric garage door opener has to be disabled. Now, how do I do that, again? Each time it happens, I have to learn anew–get out the manual and the flashlight (even though the day was young, it was so dark a flashlight was needed to read the diagrams).

Then, out to the garage. Piece of cake. Just pull that red lever dangling from a rope on the ceiling, and then lift the garage door manually, the old-fashioned way. But the red lever is just an inch out of my reach, even when I stand on tiptoe. I can unlock the door to the house, go back to the closet and get out the stepstool. But really, is it necessary? And by now I’m late. So I decide to jump and grab the lever at the top of my jump. I used to be quite the leaper, having been a ballet dancer/teacher not so very long ago …

Well, I guess it’s been longer than I thought between leaps. Or maybe I’m not used to leaping on a concrete floor. Because somewhere between up and down (it didn’t seem to be on the landing; it seemed to happen in the air) I got a sudden sharpish pain in the ankle that went down the foot.

Expletives undeleted, I hobbled around the garage, and found that I could at least walk, although with pain. So I set off.

There was more to the post, but that was the gist of it. About five days later a large package arrived in the mail. What could it be? It was the stepstool, with some sort of clever message from Gerard. It most definitely was an endearing thing as far as I was concerned.

Fast forward to now. I finally found the thing hiding in a closet, hauled it out, and discovered it to be the absolutely perfect instrument for installing that lightbulb. It got me way up there in a way that felt secure enough that all I had to do was to lean my legs and lower torso against that top bar, hold onto the light fixture with one hand, and screw that bulb in with the other. Voilà, mission accomplished!

The gift that keeps on giving.