Nature abhors a vacuum. So does Alex.

My son destroyed our vacuum cleaner last week. What’s even more amazing is that he did it practically single-handedly and with a bare minimum of effort.

My son loves goldfish. No, I mean the edible kind. No, not those, I mean goldfish crackers. You know, these little cheesy things vaguely shaped like a four-year-olds impression of what a fish should look like. They come in bags that are refreshingly old-fashioned. They are made of heavy paper stock, nicely lined with foil, only wrapped once (as opposed to the loaves of bread I buy, which have been known to have been wrapped three times for the consumer’s convenience), and have a nice simple design on the outside. They appeal to adults and children alike. You can try to eat just a few, but you’re not likely to succeed. In fact, the only way in which they are not a traditional, old-fashioned snack food is in the price. They cost about $9.00 an ounce. Which is why my son loves them so much.

To add insult to the injury done to my wallet, what he loves most about them is their ability to be easily crushed into seventeen million tiny pieces and pressed into the Oriental rug my wife loves so much. He does this every chance he gets.

Alex did this last week. How he had time, I don’t know. There are only four rooms on the first floor of our house, and two of them are open to each other. My wife must have been in one of them. And probably, she was moving around between them. But toddlers have this uncanny ability to know that once you walk out of a room, they have approximately 7.3 seconds to knock over the water glass, smear chocolate on the TV screen, stick peanut butter in the VCR, and shave the cat. What’s more, all this generally takes them only 6.8 seconds, giving them a full half-second to adopt an innocent “Who, me?” expression just before you return.

So my wife gets out the vacuum. It’s a stand-up, with more attachments available than the space shuttle. There’s the part that gets under the furniture. There’s the part that gets behind the bookcase. There’s the part that gets the cobwebs out of the corners of the ceiling. And there’s at least two parts for which I haven’t yet figured out a function. (Although one is good for getting marjoram out of a toddler’s hair. I know this from experience.)

This is not my mother’s vacuum. My mother’s vacuum laid down on the floor, had a retractable cord (which, if you weren’t careful, would whip you when it withdrew), was loud enough to hear down the block, and only had one attachment. As near as my brother and I could figure, the only use for this attachment was to chase my sister with and make her think we were going to suck her up with the vacuum cleaner. It was a mean vacuum. It could suck up marbles. It could probably suck up tennis balls, if we had thought of it. Nothing short of half a pound of PlayDoh would have jammed that vacuum. In comparison, ours is a 90-pound wimp.

So, my wife is vacuuming crumbled goldfish off the floor, using attachment number 7, when my son distracts her. Neither of us knows how he did this, but when she turned her head to look at him, she ran over a sock with the vacuum.

My son hates to wear his socks. He leaves them all over the house. This one he cleverly left in the path of the vacuum. I say cleverly, because he also hates the sound of the vacuum cleaner, and so I suspect deliberate sabotage.

The vacuum grumbled, and grinded, and did its best to suck up the sock. Its best wasn’t good enough. With a hack and a wheeze, it died. When I got home, the house smelled of burnt electronics. It’s not a very pleasant smell.

So now we need a new vacuum. I’m spending a few days thinking about ways to pay for it, where to get one, how much to spend, and so on. And as I ruminate, I walk into my house, and immediately detect the smell of burnt electronics. And there’s my wife.

“We have a problem with the dryer.”