published in The Fauquier Times-Democrat Weekend, January 14, 2011
Many of us can confess to having some partially functioning appliance or gadget (and we’re not even going to discuss humans here) that we have learned to accept and work around. We really don’t consider its defects until it’s time to hand it over to someone else to use. Even then it doesn’t dawn on us to mention that the dryer starts as soon as the door is shut; there’s no need to press the “Push to Start” button. Others may view this as a defect, but over the years, you have come to see this as a time saving feature.
Haven’t we all had that experience where someone offers us a ride, and only when we’ve been tugging on the door handle to get in, do they remember that, “Oh, the door on that side doesn’t work; you’re going to need to creep in from the window or climb across the driver’s seat.” This also could be a feature, depending on who the driver is, and who is accepting the ride.
I grew up in a household in which our “toolbox” consisted of a small plastic bin atop the dryer. Into this, sundry tools were tossed, including the butter knife-cum-screwdriver. My father never regarded mechanical issues to be of great import, and there were times when we would travel places with the car battery in a corroded enough state that the butter knife was practically a part of the key chain. Car won’t start? Open up the hood, scrape the terminals, then jumpstart the car. (Remind me, by the way, not to clip out this column to send to my parents.)
My husband, on the other hand, grew up in a household with an Erector (Meccano) set that had spanned a few generations. Under their father’s guidance, the three boys, and sometimes one of the three girls, would make actual, working models of clamshell excavators, automatic transmissions that shifted gears as needed, and other such “small and simple” projects. He and his brother even made, from Meccano, a ventilator that they actually used on a patient in India. See what alternatives are available to the family that grows up without a television and a car?
I remember one of the first times my husband-to-be visited my parents’ home in Columbia, South Carolina. While there, a number of maintenance projects began to pop up like daffodils at the end of winter. I believe this is a phenomenon that typically occurs when the son-in-law comes visiting, and it may be more acute prior to marriage, during the time when it may be necessary to impress someone, whether it be the erstwhile in-laws or the future mate.
There was some issue with the lawn mower at my parents’ house (as there usually was every other summer), and Eldred asked me where we kept the oil to be put into the mower.
“Oh, no, no, no,” I explained in my superior, I-grew-up-in-America voice. This man had only just come to the United States in his mid-twenties. He had grown up in a series of flats in Bombay (now Mumbai) where they barely had a patch of grass, much less need of a lawn mower. “We don’t put oil in our lawn mower, Silly! We put gasoline in it to make it run.” It was obvious to me that he had grown up in a family without a car.
Needless to say, I learned a little something about lawn mower maintenance on that day. I also picked up some clues as to why our lawn mowers seemed to always need resuscitation. I wish I could to excuse my ignorance by saying that I was nineteen at the time, or that I was never gifted mechanically, but these would just be excuses.
Before we got married, I taught my husband how to drive, although I rarely like to advertise this now. It’s not that he’s a bad driver per se; it’s just that he always seems to be focused on something else.
What amazed me then was that although he had never driven a car in India, and rarely ridden in one there, he knew and understood everything that went on under the hood. We bought an old, mileage-ridden car. Back then I thought we were buying that car because we were college students and that was all we could afford. Now that I reflect on it, I realize that our first car, that old 1977 Mercury Marquis that we bought off the gas station parking lot, was really an excuse for my husband to begin acquiring tools in earnest. Lots of them. And not of the butter knife variety, either. How many college students have an air compressor and air impact tools in their apartment?
My husband is still obsessed with tools and gadgets. I’m really glad to have him, defects and all.
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