Who wants to be a slapstick comedian?

DIDJA ever have one of those weeks, months or years? My family seems to have them with increasing frequency.

This spring, Stanley’s car was rear-ended twice, both times by women. The second rear-ender finished off the ol’ Swamp Rat, a tough station wagon that had previously survived being set on fire overnight by a smoldering charcoal briquette.

Next on the agenda was an effort at home repair. An ugly old light fixture in our stairwell had been irking me for a while, so when my pal offered us an overhead light with fan she didn’t want, we jumped at the freebie. It loitered in the basement for many months until Stanley, trying to make his grumpy wife happy, offered to install it one rainy Saturday afternoon.

It was quite a procedure, calling, strangely enough, for both of us to stand on top of an old chest, trying to temporarily secure the lamp to its fixture 10 feet above the stairs with chopsticks shoved through the bolt-holes. Several ladders had to be propped precariously over the stairs. The dog had to be reminded not to stroll under the ladders in case of bad luck. I’m not sure she obeyed the order.

Finally, the lamp was in place and Stanley said he was going to turn the circuit breaker back on. “Why don’t you put the light-bulbs in first?” I asked, picturing the full glory of the moment when the breaker snapped into action and God decreed there would be light.

So Stanley inserted the first bulb, twisted it, and it began to glow. He had installed the whole light fixture with live electricity coursing through the wires he was handling. Oh, well. He assured me that even if he had been electrocuted, it would only have been a flesh wound.

“Hey, can you attach the paddles for the fan now?” I asked, as eager to change the subject as I was to get more air circulating through our fetid compound.

Stanley attached the first paddle to the fixture. Then he realized it was about six inches too long to spin around in the allotted space. Oops.

It turns out that if we want a fan, we’ll have to take the paddles to some accomplished carpenter and have him adjust them to the appropriate length. I can assure you, in my household, this will not be a priority. Besides, the stubs of the fan without the paddles make a nice little breeze.

For us, fixing things is never Job One. Oh, I have plenty of ideas -- just no skill to get them done. It was my scheme to get this fan put in that stairwell, but do you think it had occurred to me to measure anything? I am the least handy person in the universe. And Stanley’s always distracted by more exciting plans. It’s no wonder that when we try to work together, we’re basically Laurel and Hardy.

Here’s how Wikipedia describes those old comedians, whose movies ruled in the 1920s to mid-1940s -- I’m sorry to say this summary rings an awful lot of bells. “Laurel and Hardy’s onscreen personas are of two dim but eternally optimistic men, secure in their perpetual and impregnable innocence. Their humor is physical, but their accident-prone buffoonery is distinguished by their affable personalities and mutual devotion; essentially ‘children’ in an adult world.”

Accident-prone buffoonery plus immaturity? I like it – in theory. In practice, no.

Anyhoo, that particular Saturday -- having resolved that we really aren’t even capable of screwing in a lightbulb without endangering life and limb – we were invited out for a dinner that wound up with coconut cream pie. Now, Stanley has enough problems with gluten and dairy that he should never eat pie of any sort, but he could not resist and dove into two huge slabs.

When he eats dairy products his mind becomes steeped in a kind of murky soup. Which is why the next morning I awoke early to the sound of water winding through our pipes. Wondering what was going on, I lumbered down to the kitchen to find that the previous night, fog-brained Stanley had started filling a pot in the sink to soak it, and had then walked away and gone to bed. Water had filled the sink, trickled along the countertop, seeped behind the wall and wormed its way downstairs into the laundry room, where it had inched along the downstairs carpet.

All this, on the busiest weekend of my work year, which may not be saying much by ordinary standards but, trust me, was plenty busy.

As somebody who routinely burns the bottoms off pots and accidentally sets floors on fire, I couldn’t even ream poor Stanley out. This smooth move could just as easily have been made by yours truly, with no coconut cream pie in sight.

Luckily, there are professionals to deal with one’s messes, and home insurance to pay for them -- minus the deductible, of course. Still, the entire first floor will have to be ripped out, cupboards will have to be wrenched from their moorings and discarded. At some point, the whole family may have to move out of the house. In the meantime, trips have had to be cancelled and major plans for the summer changed.

And so I have to ask, where’s the Good Luck Adjuster? Is there somebody my family hasn’t been paying, a Godfather to whom we owe mysterious dues? Is there a guardian angel sulking somewhere over a thank-you note we didn’t write? Is there a local king who disguised himself as a pauper and is still fuming that we walked right past him in his rags and failed to offer him our last apple?

In the world of fairy tales, you could always blame your misfortunes on that bitter crone who showed up at your baby’s christening and cast a nasty spell. A few hundred years ago, Puritans might have suggested that such misfortunes were a sure sign of devil worship. The superstitious might still hint that they’re broken mirror-related, or the result of an inky feline darting across our path.

Perhaps I failed to forward one of those sappy send-this-to-ten-of-your-friends e-mails women pass along, admonishing recipients not to break the chain for fear of punishment from Fortuna.

Or maybe it’s just our turn. All I can say, Fate, is this whole shtick of yours is getting really, really tired. Four words for you: Snap out of it.