Sadly, this talent does me little good when, say, the garbage disposal stops working. It's not like I can open the cabinet beneath the sink and say, "Hey, did you know that the actor who played The Jeffersons' neighbor Mr. Bentley was also the guy on Sesame Street who painted numbers on everything?" and have the disposal start right up again. Believe me, I've tried.

Instead, much to my wife's chagrin, my preferred approach to most household repair issues is to ignore them. Take, for example, our back door latch that's been sticking lately. Sometimes the door won't open at all. When this happens I take immediate steps — straight to the side door. Were the side door also to break, I would just start using the front door, and so on. Eventually I would probably wind up climbing out an attic window and rappelling down the side of the house whenever I needed to leave.

I understand that most men do not think this way. More typical is my high school friend Doug. While visiting recently, he noticed our door problem and, after locating some tools I keep around — purely for decorative purposes — he took the door off its hinges and began fixing the latch, all without asking permission, mind you.

Looking over Doug with the door and various latch parts splayed around the kitchen, I couldn't imagine a more alien impulse. While staying as a guest in a friend's house I would no more take it upon myself to do household repairs than I would take out a Swiss army knife and begin performing amateur dentistry on the pets.

My guess is that most men probably learned their fix-it skills as boys while helping out in dad's workshop. I imagine a scene right out of a Norman Rockwell painting, with dad imparting to his young son valuable lessons like, "This is a 16 millimeter masonry drill bit. I asked for a 16 millimeter twist bit. Next time, get it the #&$@ right!"

Just my luck, I grew up in a single-parent household where the only home repair tool my mother knew how to use was the telephone. Every time the dishwasher overflowed, for example, Mom would snap into action by calling… the fire department. I guess her thinking was, "Who knows more about water spraying all over the place than the guys with the fire hoses?" Thankfully, I never got to test my theory that in the event of an actual fire, she would have dialed up Kenmore's 800 number.

On those occasions when the fire department was not up to handling our home repair needs, Mom hired a handyman. She always looked for three primary qualifications from a prospective handyman: experience, credentials and references. If you had any of these, Mom assumed you were too expensive for us, and kept looking.

To her credit, Mom wasn't about to hold it against a guy just because he'd done some prison time or smelled like he hadn't bathed since the Nixon Administration — especially not if a great deal on gutter repair was in the offing. "Besides," she no doubt figured, "what could happen as long as Malcolm's at home alone keeping an eye on things?"

As a result of this lowball approach to home improvement, all the broken windows and leaky faucets of my childhood were fixed by desperate-looking characters who appeared to have been plucked from a local Charles Manson look-alike contest.

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, I realize that if I hadn't been put off by the stench of cheap liquor and the incoherent mumbling, these drifters might have taught me some valuable household repair skills, not to mention how to use a sharpened spoon to fashion a prison tattoo.