When Bob Vila's people contacted my people, they asked if I'd be interested in meeting with him.

This famous handyman, author, preservationist and general do-gooder is a household name from his days as host of the long-running PBS series, "This Old House," so of course I wanted to meet him.

After all, I have a really old house.

Where would you like to meet, they asked me and I said: How about my house? Maybe he can fix my darn toilet, which I have never been able to get to work right in 10 years of home ownership.

When Bob Vila's people got back to my people (OK, it was me; I don't really have any people), to my amazement they agreed. Bob will come to your house, they said.

Vila was in town for the recent New Orleans Home & Garden Show, as a celebrity pitchman for Bayer Home Health system, a proactive termite control system developed by the pharmaceutical and chemical giant, and it's probably a decent system if Vila put his name on it, but I didn't want to talk termites with him.

Frankly, watching the trees of Audubon Park -- where I live -- slowly disappear to the devastation of these little critters is one of the great heartbreaks of my life. It seems at least once a year a strong wind comes through the park and topples a huge tree which, upon inspection, proves to be completely hollowed out by termites and unable to resist the forces of nature.

The federal government is spending millions of dollars to treat homes in the French Quarter -- homes which can be rebuilt in a year -- but no one seems to be doing anything about the great oaks of Uptown -- which can't be regrown in under 300 years.

Yes, I realize the architecture involved in the federal protection program is a precious resource to this town and its economy, but you don't have to be a tree-hugger to lament the implications of the world-famous tree-lined St. Charles Streetcar line without any trees to line it, but I stray from the story at hand. However, there is a connection here.

My lamentations on the state of Audubon Park lifted me out of my self-centeredness, if only for a moment -- or, more specifically, if only for an assignment. I decided that my toilet can wait. It has waited this long after all; what's another 5,000 weak flushes?

Instead of bringing Vila's formidable fix-it skills into my house, I decided to harness his generosity of time and his famous name for the greater good and when he came over one morning last week, I took him into Audubon Park, to a favorite place of mine, the beautiful, haunting, moss-canopied, mystical Sara Lavinia Hyams Fountain.

The fountain -- which is actually a wading pool, not a water-spewing extravaganza -- sits just outside the fence of the zoo on the river side of Magazine Street and it is famous primarily for the shame its Audubon Park caretakers have bestowed upon it. In the 10 years I have lived next to the park, it has never worked.

Photos from news stories in the Times-Picayune in 1986 and then again back in 1964 show that the fountain looked pretty much then like it does now, sad, broken, empty and neglected.

You could almost weep for the memory of Sara Lavinia Hyams, a forgotten New Orleans philanthropist. Besides leaving her considerable collection of paintings to the New Orleans Museum of Art, she bequeathed her personal jewelry collection -- valued at $30,000 in 1914 dollars, or more than half a million dollars today -- to be sold to erect two fountains, one in City park, one in Audubon. "Given to the little children of New Orleans," the fountains are inscribed.

(In City Park near the carousel, the Sara Lavinia Hyams Fountain is clean, cheery and operational, refurbished and rededicated in 1989.)

Now in my neighborhood, we badger the Audubon Institute folks from time to time about matters of neglect. A great contention when they decided to build an immaculately groomed and sculpted golf course this past year was the implication that they can cut golf greens to a meticulously calibrated length on a daily basis, but when we take our kids over to the lagoons or the tiny labyrinth near the horse stables, they're forced to tromp around in grass that rises above their knees.

Perhaps the most egregious detail of my neighborhood's efforts to fix the fountain came in the form of a response to a letter my neighbor had written to the Audubon Commission griping about the sad state of the park's affairs.

William Kurtz, the executive vice president and chief revenue officer (an ominous sign) of the institute, responded: "Over the last several years, we have looked at the possibility of revitalizing the Hyams Fountain and have found to do so would require extensive repair and plumbing work. The biggest problems, however, revolve around security of the fountain itself and the liability exposure that the park would assume if an unsupervised, unfenced, water feature were operated in today's legal climate."

So, let me get this straight. The Sara Lavinia Hyams Fountain, which measures 40 by 14 feet with a maximum depth of 12 inches, is a security risk to the park. Yet, 300 yards away, across Magazine Street, the renovation of the golf course has created -- what? -- perhaps 30 acres of unsupervised, unfenced water features, sprawling, massive lagoons which range from 5 to 15 feet deep.

Hmm.

And never mind that, after any big rain, such as this past Friday, the Hyams Fountain fills with water anyway. When I walked over there Sunday morning, through high grass, I nearly expected to see institute lawyers and insurance adjusters over there siphoning this danger away lest some litigious gnome fall in.

From all this, and from randomly inspecting the park, one could easily get the suspicion that the caretakers of Audubon Park nurture only the income-generating assets of the park and leave the rest to general infirmity, but -- gosh -- that would be awfully cynical to suggest so I'll have none of it.

So I thought I'd try to help out. I realize that I can't fix all the broken lights in the park and clean up the shoddy park bathrooms that offer all the hospitality of the New York City subway system, and I can't cut all that grass. But I thought maybe I could carve out my own little section, one small part of the problem, and see if I couldn't fix it.

Or, more specifically, see if Bob Vila couldn't fix it.

We walked from my house over to the fountain and, while he was extremely gracious and good-natured about our trek, when we got there he looked at me and said: "What do you want me to do?"

"Fix it," I said.

"I'd need a channel lock," he said and I have no idea what a channel lock is, but I had stuffed my pockets with wrenches and a screw driver and I handed him one and he looked at it and said: "This is a Chinese piece of crap," but it was actually the finest tool in my toolbox, so he took it and gamely went to work, which wasn't all that difficult because, despite the Audubon Commission's attention to litigious booby traps in the area, they haven't actually secured or locked the plumbing encasement for the fountain in years.

So Vila opened it and fiddled around with the valve but came up dry. Literally. "The water source has been cut off," he said. "I can't tell you what's wrong with the plumbing or the pipes without getting some water to the fountain."

He walked around the fountain, inspecting the sturdy granite ensemble and the gracefully aging bronze children, fixed forever in playful repose around the wading pool's edge.

"I love this," he said. "These Roman bronzes are fantastic works of art. And I can't really say what the pipes look like on the inside, but I would assume from looking at it that it still works." He pointed to the fountain's water spigots -- spouts emanating from the mouths of granite fish -- and he noted by the stains under them that water still drips out from time to time.

"Who's in charge of this place?" he asked me and I tried to explain the park and its management. "A shame," he said as he handed me my crappy Chinese wrench and we walked back to my place.

He took in the great neglected expanse of moss-draped oaks along the Magazine Street stretch of the park, and the marvelous old gas lamps that haven't worked in decades and he said: "This could be something. Imagine if you had nighttime illumination in here, imagine how beautiful it would be."

And I was thinking: I have imagined that. But sometimes my imagination gets the best of me.