Have you ever known someone who is just a natural whiz at doing anything of a do-it-yourself nature? He or she is the type who can build a shed, repair a leaky faucet, use a chainsaw to cut down a tree, change a car’s flat tire lickety-split, do some basic electrical wiring or restore an inoperable lawn mower to running condition. I greatly admire such folks because I can’t do any of that stuff.
Maybe I am just missing that DIY gene. If so, my father was also born without that in his DNA. I never saw him truly fix anything in our home. He didn’t have a toolbox. Rather, he had a hammer, two screwdrivers (flat and Phillips head), a pair of pliers and a roll of duct tape. If those implements could not get the job done, well it wasn’t going to get done.
Before buying his first new car in 1965, my father owned one clunker after another. It seemed that there was always some chronic problem with his latest vehicle. My dad is the only person I have ever seen attending to a car engine issue with a hammer. He often would fly out to his car with the hammer, and it seems that the problem sometimes involved a loose battery connection. I believe that his approach was to hammer a nail between the battery post and the connector to secure the link. God forbid that he would take it into a shop to get it fixed. That would cost money.
Perhaps if my father had been “handy,” I could have learned some things from him despite my lack of innate DIY ability. But hold on a second, I did see him use duct tape to deal with a variety of issues. For instance, after years of use, the door on the clothes dryer would not clamp closed. It was beyond his abilities to actually fix the closing mechanism, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to call in a repair person. So, duct tape it was. A piece of tape kept the door closed, and he only had to replace it from time to time when it lost its stickiness. It wasn’t pretty, but it got the job done at less than minimal cost. So, I guess he did teach me to consider using duct tape if a problem could not be addressed by using a hammer or screwdriver.
Let’s not put all of the blame on my father, though. I was in the Cub Scouts and then the Boy Scouts for a number of years and had multiple chances to learn from some talented adults. Our assistant scoutmaster was an electrical engineer who worked at the University of Pennsylvania on the ENIAC computer, the first programmable, large-scale computer to operate at electronic speed. He taught us scouts all about electrical components – transistors, capacitors, resistors – and how to create an electrical circuit board. We all had an opportunity to learn how to solder. As a group, we built a rudimentary Theremin-like device that emitted sounds based on the amount of light that shone on it. We even took it to a city-wide Scout expo, where various creations were on display. All that I can remember from the entire months-long experience was buying a piece of pizza at the expo and shaking oregano on it from a big jar. The electrical components and how they worked did not click with me. Needless to say, my soldering was not pretty.
The Boy Scouts offered another possibility for me to learn quality DIY skills. On a couple of occasions, we built from scratch a sled-type conveyance with wheels – sort of like an Iditarod sled. This was in preparation for an event with other troops where the sleds would be raced on short courses. Now, I said that “we built,” but my involvement was pretty much limited to making encouraging remarks and serving as ballast when needed. All of the carpentry and construction techniques that were employed in the building of the sled, and thus modeled for me, had no impact. None of it stuck.
Flash forward to tenth grade, my first year at Northeast High School. It was 1970. Boys were to take a shop class, and girls were to take a home economics class. I was assigned wood shop and boy was I bad at it. The first task was to take a small piece of wood and plane it down on two sides that met to form a perfect ninety-degree angle. Some of the guys completed the task within five or ten minutes, while everyone else seemed to have it done by the end of the first class. That is everyone except for me.
I kept using the plane to shave away bits of wood, but I could not get to that perfect angle. At the second class, while the rest of the class was moving on to the second task, I was still laboring at that first simple assignment. The piece of wood was getting smaller, but I was no closer to ninety-degrees. I would like to say that the wood shop teacher was a kindly older man, and he took pity on me. However, I don’t remember it that way. I think he was just amazed at my incompetence. Long story short, I never got the piece of wood to ninety-degrees and by the end of the week, I was transferred to a cooking class, along with one other wood shop loser.
Certainly, eating and food preparation was more in line with my passion and experience, and I loved the cooking class. Even so, I have a bothersome memory from what I learned there. One of the first foods we prepared were baked apples, with butter, sugar and cinnamon. They were easy to make and tasted great. So, I took the simple recipe home and asked my mom if I could make a baked apple. She looked at me like I had two heads and said, “Are you crazy? You’re not going to heat up the oven and use all of that electricity to bake an apple.”
That was disappointing, but the cooking class overall was a better place for me than wood shop. Now, maybe if I had stuck with shop, I would have eventually gotten that perfect ninety-degree angle and then gone ahead to learn about driving nails, and using wood screws and building things. Somehow, though, I don’t think that ever would have happened. When you are missing a gene, you can’t fake it.