Jerry-rigged

Our mailbox died an untimely death. A typical metal mailbox affixed to a 4x4 wooden pole set in a concrete base, it served us well for a year – until the night a woman pulled into our driveway by mistake.

She arrived to attend a party happening next door. Five minutes before she drove up, I stepped onto our elliptical exercise machine. When the front doorbell rang, I groaned. Who would come calling, unannounced, after dark on a weekday? I wondered. I decided not to answer the door.

Half a minute later, I had second thoughts. What if my husband had arrived home from work and, somehow, had misplaced his keys? I stepped off the exerciser and started toward the front door just as Jerry entered through the garage door.

“Did you ring the front doorbell?” I asked.

“No, but someone is parked at the top of our driveway, and I saw three ladies with gifts walking across our yard toward the neighbor’s house,” he said.

Turning toward the door, he announced, “I’d better help the driver back down the driveway.” Our driveway takes an unexpected dogleg at the bottom. Already, we had lost three solar lights to people trying to back out.

Jerry stepped outside to see the woman’s car leave the driveway, smash a solar light, jump the ditch and continue across blacktopped road, grinding loudly. Finally, the car stopped. The woman opened the door. She asked innocently, “What did I do?”

Her bumper had snapped our wooden mailbox pole at its base. Her car had dragged the pole and attached mailbox backward, almost hitting the mailbox of our next-door neighbor opposite the house hosting the party.

The woman promised to pay to have our mailbox replaced. The broken pole could not be re-used, nor could the mangled box. We needed to buy a new mailbox and pole, then hire someone to dig a hole, pour concrete, stand the pole upright in the concrete, let the concrete set and, finally, attach the mailbox to the pole. We could not schedule this project immediately because of subfreezing February temperatures.

Not wanting to visit the post office daily to retrieve mail, Jerry devised an ingenious plan to continue using the old mailbox temporarily. He bought three concrete blocks with holes in them and set them atop each other, the holes slightly offset. He hammered out the dented mailbox.

Next, he and I lifted the broken-off pole holding the hammered-out mailbox. We stood the pole inside the semi-aligned holes of the concrete blocks. Jerry used small pieces of wood to wedge the pole, so it stayed upright.

Since the mailbox door would not shut properly, Jerry attached a bungee cord to the pole, ran it around the mail flag and attached its other end to the mailbox door. He tightened the cord so that, when pulled, the door would open, when released, it would shut.

To jury-rig, or jerry-rig, something is “to rig or assemble for temporary emergency use; improvise.”

In the words of Hebrews 9:10, “It's essentially a temporary arrangement until a complete overhaul could be made” (MSG). In another translation, the same verse says the temporary is “imposed until a time of reformation.”

We enjoyed our Jerry-rigged mailbox for two-and-a-half weeks, until temperatures warmed up enough to have a new one installed.

I’m thrilled my husband had the ingenuity to use concrete blocks and bungee cord to improvise a working mailbox. I’m thrilled we knew when to abandon the temporary and welcome the new and better thing that superseded it.

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Heb. 9:10 from THE MESSAGE: The Bible in Contemporary Language © 2002 by Eugene H. Peterson. All rights reserved. Heb. 9:10 from New American Standard Updated.

jury-rig. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/jury-rig (accessed: February 20, 2009).