We often hear boasts of the American Can-Do spirit. We’ve earned it, but I don’t think it’s entirely accurate. Can- do implies expertise, which is pretty evenly distributed across humanity. What Americans have is more of a Must-Do spirit. front of the TV. After a while, he’d come out with three or four vacuum tubes in his hand. They looked like light bulbs with pins for a base. He’d mutter something about RCA and vertical hold, then disappear to the hardware store. I can’t remember him ever coming back without the solution. He could finish concrete, mud sheetrock, wire circuits, and spent an entire summer retrofitting a modern hot water heating system throughout the house. I was sent into the dark little places with a flashlight to get the other end of whatever he was pushing through the wall. This is what we did on weekends. Dad seemed to know everything, but looking back on it now, I realize he was figuring it out as he went. He worked all day as an engineer at a plant that made heaters and air conditioners. He’d never built anything or worked in a trade of any kind. He grew up during the Depression in Chicago without a father. He was put to work on weekends fixing things, I suppose, for his mother and sister. They didn’t do a lot of family picnics. Neither did we. Weekends were for working. In high school, when I wanted a cabinet to lock up my record albums and protect my
– does not come out of thin air. It comes out of someone’s garage and is no less a miracle than Steve Jobs’ Apple computer. (While impressive, the Apple computer was not actually made in a garage and could not then nor today shoot fruit.) I’m not sure if my father was a putterer . The label invokes some sort of leisurely pursuit. An aimless tinkering. I never saw a repairman or professional tradesman in our house. Everything Dad did around the crumbling house I grew up in with my five siblings was purposeful and profoundly necessary. He never called a repairman or professional tradesman to fix anything. The garage was stuffed with tools, and whatever he didn’t have for the job at hand would be acquired – a tradition I embrace to this day. We once jacked up the sagging center beam of our two-story house three inches with big screw jacks and cheater bars in the basement. My job was to run upstairs every time we took a turn on the jacks to see if the plaster was falling off the walls anywhere. I was nine or 10 when I learned that with determination, three rented screw jacks, and some amazing swears, you could move worlds. The house settled and groaned in the night all the rest of my youth. The little kids thought it was ghosts. I knew it was my dad and me. My dad fixed everything – even our television. When the set would go on the blink, he’d unscrew the back and poke around with some kind of tester while looking at the scrambled picture in the reflection of the hall mirror he’d take down and propped on the sofa in
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July 2019
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