Peter McKay

This past week, sunshine served to destabilize moist air that had been left behind from a warm front that spread north and east throughout our area, causing a catastrophic precipitation event.

I don't know what any of that means, and I'll bet you don't either, but the end result was that for most of Wednesday night it rained like a horse going to town on a flat rock. At times it came down so heavily that for at least a few moments, I wondered whether I'd see an ark float down our street carrying two of every kind of animal.

Every time heavy rains come through, I get a little panicky. Our slate roof was installed in 1917, and has held up pretty well for 92 years. We had a roofing guy come by about 12 years ago, and he looked up at the roof, shrugged and assured us we had another 10 good years left in our shingles. That gave me confidence for a decade or so, but for the past two years every time a good storm arrives, I've wandered the house, peering at the ceilings and chewing my fingernails down to nothing.

That same summer 10 years ago, because I was turning our basement into a rec room for the kids, we had a waterproofing contractor come and do some work down there. Confident that I had a good 10 years in my roof, I opted for the full-scale waterproofing job, the one that cost about twice what I thought I could afford.

Over the course of a week, five huge guys with tattoos dug a big drain around our basement floor with jackhammers, raising enough dust that our neighbor's kids were coughing. They lined our basement walls with heavy plastic tarps and installed two huge sump pumps. Before they were done, with all the "extras," they also ran up enough of a dent in our home equity line of credit that we'd have to put off getting any roof work done until 2012. Maybe 2011, if I brown bagged lunches and the kids put off orthodontia until adulthood.

I wasn't crazy about the job the contractors were doing, and wondered whether I was being taken for a ride, but when I tried to point out mistakes, the jackhammer guys got disturbingly serious, glared at me and told me exactly what I could do with my concerns.

(It wasn't place a call to the Better Business Bureau.)

So this past week, as the massive rainstorm approached, I sat in the kitchen, staring at the weather lady and watching the radar map. As a huge purple swatch of rain and hail enveloped my neighborhood, I felt a knot growing in my stomach. I went down to the basement. From a darkened corner, I heard the sound of rushing water, and my blood pressure shot into the red zone.

The first thing I do when an emergency strikes is grab "Dad's Flashlight." It's a red metal one that I keep in the junk drawer in the kitchen. It's indispensable: In our house we have a lot of lights, but because we're not so good at buying light bulbs or changing light bulbs when they burn out, we don't have a lot of lights that actually work in an emergency. So it's imperative that Dad's Flashlight is always in the drawer where it's supposed to be. If it's not there in a crisis, I have to waste valuable time swearing loudly and accusing everybody but me of having messed with the one thing in the house nobody but me was supposed to touch.

Dad's Flashlight was not in the drawer where it was supposed to be, and I wasted 15 minutes stomping around the house making accusations and finding new adjectives to insert into the phrase "where's my (adjective) flashlight!"

I finally found it on a shelf in the living room, right where someone (maybe me) had left it last week. I rushed down the stairs, cleared away all the junk from the darkened corner of the basement, and found … nothing. Dry as a bone. It took 10 years, but my investment in belt and suspenders waterproofing had finally paid off. The water was rushing at our foundation sounding like a mini waterfall, hitting the barrier wall, then being dragged away by the double sumps. My wife and kids found me there, jumping up and down, cheering on my sump pumps at the top of my lungs.

The best part: Being down in the basement, I couldn't hear any of the slates as they slid off the roof and crashed onto the sidewalk.

To find out more about Peter McKay, please visit www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2009 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.