Mixing mortar and laying bricks...

One of the most common words used to describe my father was "handy." You can ask just about anyone that knew him and much sooner than later his ability to repair just about anything will give rise to stories of not only his skills, but also his willingness to help others that lacked these talents. As a child I was fascinated by his "handy" demeanor. There never was a doubt in my mind that if one of my toys broke, I would be able to count on dad to fix it. His talents went above and beyond just fixing broken toys. My dad could repair almost any car, house appliance, electronic or mechanical device, and furniture you could imagine. As an adult I am still in awe with what I now look back at and realize to be an incredible talent and set of skills which he possessed. He would as easily bake a cake in the shape of a two story ship, as he would process photographs in a dark room, or draw the architectural and structural floor plan of a completely new home. In my mind, not just my heart, I am totally aware that he was a man way ahead of his time. Given a longer than the mere 44 years of life which he lived, I always wonder what other amazing things he would of achieved. He definitely drew a seemingly unfair short straw when his life was taken by heart disease at such a young age.

I think that I inherited more of his curiosity than I did his amazing capability to take things apart, and then put them back together successfully and in working condition. I remember as a child dismantling toys, radios, recorders, and all sorts of gizmos just because I wanted to know how it was that they worked inside. I would probably estimate that my success at later putting the same devices back together and then having them work properly was somewhere in the 95 percent range. Not bad for not having all the right tools to do the job. The majority of the things that did not safely survive my dismembering curiosity where typically because they were not meant to be dismantled in the first place and some part would snap and break and later make it very hard to glue them back together. Awe, superglue, the miracle liquid that probably brought up the survival rate of my mechanical patients from a mere 85 to 95 percent!

This extreme curiosity of mine of taking things apart, later paid off handsomely when I enrolled in engineering school. Electric and mechanical motors, gears, wheels, pulleys, belts, locks, triggers, and all other sorts of mechanical devices were all old news to me by the time I started to officially learn their purpose and functionality. My first big boy toy was a 1971 VW Beetle I purchased with a loan co-signed by my girlfriend's father when I was in my first year of college at age 17. Just like my dad, there was no place in my vocabulary that would accept the word "professional mechanic" as an option when something went wrong with my 8 year old ride. I remember once spending over six hours trying to figure out how to remove the rear wheel drum casing. After hours of hammering, adding heat, and a whole lot of frustration I later realized that behind the casing there was a small hole that allowed you to loosen the cover by simply spinning a small gear with your finger. What I would of given for the now so simple access to this kind of information via a Haynes Auto Repair Manual, or just looking it up on the Internet. Still, it was my total pursuit of figuring out these things on my own that eventually led me to be able to do much of the same kind of repairs my dad insisted on me watching him do while I was growing up.

Recently, on my way to take out the trash I discovered that some not so alien creatures had put an excessive amount of weight on some of the decorative bricks that adorn one of the flowerbeds in the front of my home making them loose. In fact, a whole row of the bricks had come apart and were just waiting for me to touch them so that they could land on the ground instead of where they had been replaced as if nothing had ever happened to them in the first place. In my first home I had once made some flowerbeds in the front of the house and I instantly understood that as talented as I might think I am, this was a job that would require a few hours of work and could not be repaired with super-glue. A quick query to one of the alien creatures that lives in my own home revealed a "those bricks were weak dad, they fell from just sitting on them", which was meant to be a confession with no admission of guilt. When I asked the young man if he would help me repair it, to my surprise he easily accepted either because of a guilty conscience or a possible opportunity to earn a couple of quick bucks. I did not offer money for his support, but allowances have been scarce since he recently dropped out of school, and we both new that physical labor is always worth rewarding in order to develop good working habits.

A few days later I soon found myself going to the hardware store to buy the mortar, a mixing bucket, some gloves, and a few tools to get the job done right. Later that same afternoon we dressed down for the occasion and took our sense of manly intentions and set ourselves to the task of mixing mortar and fixing the damaged flower bed. I know that if I would of done it all on my own, I would of finished in about half the time, but in my mind there was more to fix than just a flower bed. We removed the damaged bricks and I immediately gave him the task of chiseling the old mortar off the old bricks while I chiseled the old mortar off the decorative blocks that went beneath them. He struggled at first trying to figure out an easy way, but soon I showed him the right way which not only made it easier, but also made it safer. While I poured dry mortar into the mixing bucket I talked to him about the first time I had ever done this kind of work in the house now occupied by his mother. Then I told him the things I learned in the process about wetting the bricks, and keeping the mortar mix with just the right consistency throughout the project so that it would hold for a long time. In fact, not one of those bricks at my now ex-wife's home has ever come apart from the flowerbed. Soon we were both working in what I considered an interesting harmony by him keeping the mortar nice and ready, wetting the bricks to be placed back in place, and handing tools back and forth while I laid one brick after another until we were done. A one hour job actually took us close to three hours to complete, which in my opinion worked out to be just the right amount of time that we needed to share this father and son moment and make it worth both of our time.

I am not as young as I feel inside anymore. The three hours bent over laying those bricks did a job with my back that took one pain killer, two Motrin, and 90 minutes in the jacuzzi to set me back into working order again. To my surprise, when I walked into the house after cleaning all the tools and the work area, I found my almost 17 years old assistant passed out and sound asleep on the family room couch. Apparently he is not as alien as I thought, and more human than I imagined! Later that same day in the evening, while I was soaking my soar back in the hot tub, my son arrived with a friend in the back yard. While they were chatting away they exchanged a couple of silly comments with me, but I was sure that once his friend would depart, so would my son into the teenage wilderness. I was wrong. After about 30 minutes the other young guy left and my son instead walked over next to where I was soaking and spent another full hour in conversation with his old man. Just when I thought he probably had had enough of the father and son theme, I discovered that he was still in the mood for sharing some more of that precious commodity of time with me.

I am glad my dad had strong "do-it-yourself genes" that somehow got passed along to me. Even after his death he is still being "handy" by helping me fix some of the things that are broken in my life. Sometimes I feels like he is sitting right next to me when I am mentally and emotionally engulfed in the task of trying to super glue the bits and pieces of my life that were not meant to be taken apart in the first place, but somehow ended up in that condition anyway. It is almost like he is telling me that if I am patient, if I take my time, one by one of those broken parts will all fit back together again and start working as they should. Us men, we are like this, fixers. We have an urge, almost an instinct that drives us to glue things back together when we see them in pieces. I for one am not ashamed of this compulsive behaviour even though many times I recognize the weakness that comes from going overboard and trying too hard. Not everything that seems broken truly is broken. Sometimes that is just the way things are, and I recognize that by trying to fix them I will probably make them worse or not work in the end. I understand now that sometimes my desire to fix what in my mind and heart seems to be malfunctioning is more out of instinct, than out of true knowledge. For this reason I seek knowledge, wisdom, and enlightenment. So that I don't have to spend six hours hammering, applying heat, and being in total frustration, when in fact there might be a little hole in the back part of the problem that might allow me to get the job done much easier and hopefully allow me to do it right too.

Thank you for reading,

Dad