Down the Drain

I finished writing an article today and was feeling pretty accomplished so we headed to Geek & Coffee with most of the Taggart family. I had Annie, and Aliya and I were leading the pack about a block from our house. Norah and Andrew were each carrying beach balls, because I figured those were safe for them to kick around in the yard at Geek & Coffee. The sidewalks are narrow here, so we were walking more or less single file.

Suddenly, I heard Don yell, “ANDREW!” which is not an uncommon occurrence but I still turned around to make sure he wasn’t doing something that would get us kicked out of town. I saw him running after a beach ball, in the street, with cars approaching. Then he was in the middle of the big storm drain grate yelling, “MY FOOT IS STUCK!” as the ball carried on down the street. While trying to extract himself from the grate before getting run over, I saw his iPhone fly out of the pocket of his sweatshirt and into the storm drain.

We attract our share of attention under normal circumstances…5 kids, a dog, beach balls, Don, and me, but now we had a kid stuck in the middle of the road, and Don holding his head and yelling, “OH MY GOD! THIS IS TERRIBLE!!” multiple times. Andrew freed himself but by then the neighbors were starting to peek out of their doors to see what was so terrible.

The kids attempted to open the giant grate and Adlani had the brilliant idea of opening the smaller grate and crawling through the pipe that led to the area under the large grate, but the grates wouldn’t budge. We thought about going home to get a broom and a roll of duct tape, but before we had a chance, a workman came off of a nearby roof where he must have been watching the whole scene unfold.

He had a piece of wire about the thickness of a light-weight wire hanger, and he bent it into a long handle with a rectangular section at 90 degrees, and fished the phone out of the storm drain within minutes, while cars drove past him lying on the road. 200 pesos later (he tried to refuse but Don insisted), we were on our way again.

Andrew’s take-away was that if this had happened in the ‘Ham, nobody would have rushed to help. Is that true? I’m not sure, but I do know there’s a lot more foot traffic here and more people with time to stop and lend a hand.

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As an aside, I think the kids have become a little too comfortable with Don over the last couple of weeks, but occasionally Don wins…