I have many memories of my Dad fixing, installing or building something. The most vivid is of him shoulder deep in a washing machine. The memory is set in an oddly shaped bathroom, one of two oddly shaped bathrooms in the house we had while I was in high school.* Dad asked me to help him at one point, because he needed to turn something that was at an awkward angle, and couldn’t because one of his wrists didn’t bend.**
In these memories, a couple of books feature prominently. They are basic how-to guides for fixing common household items. For a long time, I thought Dad was amazing and could fix or build anything, but I eventually realized, or had pointed out to me, that he was really ‘just’ using the books to diagnose what was wrong, and figuring out how to fix it.
I’ve been thinking about this because I’ve been doing a lot of stuff around the house lately: installing a new dishwasher, putting in a new kitchen faucet, putting in a new bathroom faucet, re-hanging a medicine cabinet and shower rod, etc. I mentioned all this to someone (“Any plans this weekend?”), and she said that I was very handy. I am not handy. I define being ‘handy’ as having that mix of experience and skill to be good at a wide variety of household repair tasks, and an expert in a few of them. A handy person can drill straight holes every time, a handy person can drive nails with two hits (tap, BANG, tap, BANG), a handy person works quickly and efficiently. I am not handy.
Fortunately, for most jobs around the house, you don’t need to be handy. You need to be patient, able to follow instructions, capable of improvising a little when things don’t go according to plan, and, most importantly, willing to work outside of your comfort zone. That, I can handle. Some instructions, a trip to the manufacturer’s website, maybe a YouTube video or two, and I’m ready to try it and see what happens. Through both nature and nurture, I think I can trace that back to Dad, and the many projects he tackled with the help of an aging how-to book.
Thanks, Dad.
*As a complete aside, I have no idea how you people who lived in one place all your lives date your memories. Without that location reference I would have no way of knowing when this took place.
**Old injury. You could call it a minor handicap, but it didn’t affect his life much, and he told me once that it was a deciding factor in the Navy taking him out of the ROTC program, and thus also out of Vietnam.
The Empty Highway 
Thanks for sharing your memories:)
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You are very welcome. I want to start putting more memories on here. They are, I’m finding, surprisingly fragile things.
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You will recognize, I hope, that the argument you make against your being “handy” is pretty much identical to the one I made for years, about not being an artist.
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You definitely have more points in Art than I have in Handy. It doesn’t help that Dex was my dump stat.
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“Fortunately, for most jobs around the house, you don’t need to be handy. You need to be patient, able to follow instructions, capable of improvising a little when things don’t go according to plan, and, most importantly, willing to work outside of your comfort zone.” — BAM! You are a handyman.
Done.
I will knight you with my grandfather’s hammer this Friday. 😉
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Also…
“As a complete aside, I have no idea how you people who lived in one place all your lives date your memories. Without that location reference I would have no way of knowing when this took place.”
We measure it by when other people moved into/out-of town. LOL. Oh, there are metrics. Deaths (sort of ironically given this blog…). Births. Graduations. “I had braces, so it must have been between…”. Etc.
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I enjoyed reading this story about your Dad, Matthew, and the impression it left–both when you were young and as you got older, gaining the ability to see behind the curtain as it were. It was also really cool to read about how you appreciate that experience now, even though you don’t rank handy among your current super powers.
I think you sell yourself short there, but my definition of handy isn’t as strict. : )
The other point I wanted to make is a little more personal. As someone who grew up with his Dad mostly absent, my memories of him are often trapped in the childhood fantasy of Dad as the hero or as the person that might have been if events had gone differently. It is rather askew from the experience of those that knew him well (my mom, my aunts, my uncles, his friends and colleagues), who knew his actual shortcomings and personality quirks–those things that ground a person and allow others to experience their humanness.
I think if I were given a wish to grant, one more experience to have, it would be to gain memories of these human moments that are unknown to me and know my Dad better as a man.
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Thank you, David. In some ways, I think the purpose of this blog is to shift through what I know about Dad, and try to know him better as a man. It’s not easy, and, frankly, I can barely begin to imagine what it must feel like to go through it from your point of view. I wish you peace, friend, and that you may discern the true shape of the man from the shadow he cast.
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