All the little broken things

If you had asked me a week ago how things were, I would have burst into tears and sobbed that everything—everything!—was broken. The expensive dryer that we bought two years ago was dribbling and clanking. The new boiler that we installed this fall was clogged with sludge and making a noise like bombs exploding. Even the damn cable remote, which had never worked properly, had clicked its last. It felt as if the material world was saying, "Die, old lady, die!"

But I didn't die, and Other and I have beaten back the demons of destruction and entropy that afflict all modern things. The dryer weirdly started working again on its own. The boiler was examined by the installer, the manufacturer and our own plumber, and in a miracle I can attribute only to some kind of mechanical placebo effect quieted down—and, more miraculous, the boiler-insurance company (yes, there is such an entity) has agreed to pay the full cost of the new boiler, which replaces one that was 70 years old. As for the remote, well, I trudged up to Time Warner Cable prepared to wait in line for hours and was whisked to a window where I was handed a new remote, no questions asked.

Too good to be true, no?