My furnace just beat it

As the For Sale sign in the front yard gently swayed in the new spring breeze a couple of weeks ago, I noticed an unfamiliar scent hanging in the air inside the house. I turned to my wife Kara, who had also noticed it. She put her book down and sniffed the air, trying to figure out whether or not to accuse me of having something to do with it.

One might expect, just a couple of days into spring, that the air would be filled with the promise of new life, something along the lines of jonquils, honeysuckle or scented candles floating around in a flooded basement. But our house was filled with an entirely different, much worse aroma.

“Why does our house smell like an Exxon tanker crashed into it last night?” I asked. The smell of oil was becoming so strong, you could taste it.

“Oh, man. This smells expensive,” Kara said.

Turns out that our furnace, which had been cranking along without issue since the release of the movie “Footloose,” decided that our last springtime in this house would be a perfect time to putter out to a stinky death. Of course, this timing made perfect sense, because Kevin Bacon, who starred in “Footloose,” later on appeared in “Apollo 13” with Tom Hanks. Tom Hanks starred in “The Money Pit,” a movie about why Shelley Long shouldn’t have left “Cheers,” but also about how stuff breaks all the time. Yes, you can make an entire movie about that. You can also write a newspaper column about it every week, if you have nothing better to do.

“It’s the heat exchanger,” the heat doctor said, using a tone that let me know that his patient was terminally ill. “Must be a crack in it. Even if I could fix it, it’d cost about the same as a new furnace.”

If your heat exchanger has never cracked, you might not be aware of this, but the smell of burning oil is nearly indistinguishable from the smell of burning money.

That night, as I lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, alarming thoughts raced through my head. A furnace is no cheap thing to replace, especially as you’re trying to scrimp together everything you have to move into a new place.

“Babe,” I said, gently rousting Kara.

“Mmph, what? I was asleep,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said quietly. “I was just wondering what would happen, you know? I mean, what would happen if Sanjaya won the whole thing?”

“Did you seriously just wake me up to ask me that?” she said.

“But if he wins, will they have to cancel the show?” I asked.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said.

And she was right. You need to have perspective. Some things just can’t be helped by worrying about them, even though you might think, in your heart of hearts, that the chubby guy was a better singer.

Besides, there are much more pertinent issues to worry about, things that are happening in the real world. For instance, did you know that Michael Jackson is pursuing the construction of a fifty-foot-tall Michael Jackson robot that will roam the Las Vegas desert, shooting laser beams out of some unspecified body parts? A buddy of mine sent me the link to that story, and it was actually a real story, not something from the Onion or Fox News.

I’m not sure we, as a society, can fully comprehend the ramifications of having a giant Michael Jackson robot roaming the desert until it actually happens, but one thing I do know: if it ever invites any of my young, impressionable appliances over to play, there’s no way that’s happening. But I do have an old furnace that it might like to meet.

You can send emails and condolences to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.