My butt was on the ground and my hands were inside the car door, from which I had removed the interior panel. The wiring harness for the windows, door lock, mirror controls and door light snaked across the painted metal, hanging down like vines growing across a wall. My left hand held the bottom of the window glass, keeping it from sliding down from its raised position; through the access hole in the door designed by clever engineers for exactly this purpose, my right hand held the nut that I was trying to screw into the window regulator to hold the window more permanently in place. Uh-oh. I needed a third hand.
“Hey, dad,” I said, “can you get me the 10 mm socket? And the extender-thingie?”
“Sure,” dad said from behind me. I turned my head and watched as he poked through the toolbox, which was sitting on the rear passenger seat, that door also open. Otherwise my entire field of view was this unassembled door.
Four days earlier, after driving dad over to my nephew’s house to watch their cat while my nephew and his wife went camping, my inside car door handle had stopped working. I had hurriedly and in frustration given maybe a bit too much force to the switch to roll the driver’s side window down so I could exit. After chatting with dad and my nephew, I’d gotten back in the car and found that the window switch had broken, too.
Hazards of driving an old car. My car was new in 1996 but increasingly less so every year after that. I’m the third owner, and while it continues to run with just minor maintenance – I joke that as long as I keep the fluids topped up, it’ll outlast me – some things are just worn and fragile. In fact, this is the second time the window switch has broken. It’s a cheap part, but annoying to replace.
Behind me I heard dad click the socket onto the extension-thingie. “Here, son,” he handed it down to me. I asked him to hold the window in place, then used both hands to put the socket on the bolt head, and turn it.
“Righty, tighty; lefty, loosey,” dad said, ironically.
I chuckled. “I know! I learned that from you, at least.”
I’d learned a lot from dad, including many lessons that seemed to be simple rules for living under his roof growing up, but turned out to be cleverly disguised as life lessons. When I was a kid, our roles would be reversed from what I was doing now. He’d be the one with his head and hands on thing he was fixing; I’d be the one who had to find and bring the right tool, the tool he’d forgotten he’d needed right then and there. That lesson was “know your tools” and I always thought it was like magic how he could look at a bolt and know, somehow, that it was a 12 mm, or a 3/8″, depending on the circumstances and the part.
“I don’t care if you borrow my tools,” he told me, “as long as you put them back where you found them.” Again, that’s something specific for him; he always tried to keep his toolbox organized, the garage neat and tidy; he’d clean up spilled oil, polish his Craftsman wrenches before sorting them into their proper places. But that’s also a lesson about life. It’s OK to share, but make sure you return what you’ve borrowed.
He taught me how to maintain a car, what the parts of the car did, and backed it up with the lesson “Don’t just be a parts-swapper; fix the problem.” He had unkind words for engineers who designed things without any care for how the things would be used; he dismissed them as idealist eggheads, generally speaking. Dad was always a blue-collar working-class guy. He got dirt under his fingernails, he barked his knuckles trying to turn a wrench in tight spaces. And even though I was distracted, angsty, and dealing with a brain that I would not learn until much much later operated in non-standard ways, I did learn from him.
Happy Father’s Day, dad. I would not be the person I am today without your guidance and advice. Love your guts.