Although we don’t discuss it at parties, my wife and I are secretly proud to have in our kitchen that uniquely middle-class accessory, the junk drawer.

Need a washer for a dripping faucet? Look in the junk drawer. Need the directions for that Magic Maid Chrome Waffle Iron? Look in the junk drawer? Pocket garden shears? Three-sixteenths-inch drill bit? Cut flower life-extender powder? Junk drawer. Junk drawer. Junk drawer.

There’s only one thing that shouldn’t wind up in your junk drawer.

Your wife’s hands.

As any red-blooded American male can tell you, a wife rummaging through the junk drawer is a wife thinking about you with the words “lazy,” “deadbeat,” and “goof off” prominent in her mind.

For example, last week the arm on my favorite writing chair became loose. That made it difficult for me to write because every time I put pressure on the arm, it wiggled just enough to wake me up. While rummaging through the refrigerator, I suggested calling our handyman, George.

“Never mind, hon,” I said, after prying loose the small screwdriver she was holding and tossing it back into the junk drawer. “I’ll take care of it.”

Even the least mechanically-inclined red-blooded American male can tighten a screw. You can’t be a red-blooded American male if you don’t know righty-tighty, lefty-loosey.

The screw holding the armrest in place had the diameter of a demitasse cup, so I needed the heavy-duty screwdriver I kept in my father’s old tool box.

Yanking the toolbox free from where it was wedged behind my collection of yet-to-be-read Mad magazines propelled me backward into my bookcase. That knocked my electric drill off the top shelf, and it landed on the floor right next to my chair.

Fortunately, I needed the drill to remove the screw because I stripped the threads by turning it tighty instead of loosey.

The screw, it turned out, was one of those that shatters into shrapnel when you try to drill it out with a 1/2-inch drill bit. Had I not been skilled in hand tool operation those flying metal shards would never have missed my right eye by fractions of an inch. If you’re unfamiliar with home repair, let me assure you that while you’re flushing your eyes with precautionary tears, putting a 1/2-inch hole through an armrest is perfectly normal.

As is the blood.

Any red-blooded American male only needs one good eye to order a new armrest over the Internet, one his wife can pick up at the local big-box office supply store. This gives her the feeling that she is participating in the project.

I never would have been alerted to the hole in the floor, put there by the falling drill, if I hadn’t opened the armrest package so that the new mounting screws rolled into it. Nor would I have walked to the hardware store on the corner and discovered my credit was frozen because, according to the credit card company, there was no way I could be in Los Angeles and also on a plane to Bogotá using the ticket I purchased online shortly before departure.

That evening, over dinner, I recounted the day. I had ruined our credit, there was a termite colony living in the hole in my office floor, and the IRS was investigating our unreported income from armrest smuggling.

The next time my wife says I don’t do anything around the house I will burst out laughing…as soon as I weld the junk drawer shut.