Just by virtue of the Y chromosome, men cannot bring themselves to ask for direction. In anything. You know how we talk about kids having to learn things from their own mistakes? For about half of the population, I actually don’t think that ever changes.
This evening, sitting on the lakeshore at my husband’s brother’s lake house, Steve told me about the first year they pulled the dock from the water, a mandatory task to be done by the end of November in preparation for winter snowmobiling activities. Theirs is a big floating dock. You’d assume there would be some guidelines, some instructions. Right?
There may have been, but they weren’t written in bold letters across the dock. And there were no obvious instructions, just some wagon wheels, poles, the dock, frigid water, 3 middle-aged men, a minivan and some misguided belief that they knew what they were doing.
And hours later, three middle-aged men sat at a kitchen table in my brother-in-law’s lake house in their underwear, shivering, wet, and cold, gazing out across the yard at the dock, still in the water.
Nancy Wiley writes. 