I learned about tools from my father. Dad was a machine technician and tool engineer, and tools were like a language to him. The machines he designed and built were his collected works, In our family's house, he had a basement shop with a huge wooden work bench, vices bolted onto it, a drill press standing next to it, a table saw across the room, a metal-working lathe that stretched along one whole wall, plus countless hand tools and hardware on shelves, in drawers, on pegboards, and hanging from the joists overhead - all the bric-a-brac he'd accumulated from years of working with his hands, to build things and make things work and fix things.
When I was three I handed my father a flat wooden board with two curves I'd crayoned on it, two arcs that met at a point at one end, I asked Daddy if he would use his saw to cut along the lines, He did then he handed the board back to me as the boat I'd designed, with a smooth-sanded prow.
As I grew older, Dad was to build all sorts of things for me as I explored an eclectic succession of interests: magic tricks, a toy circus, neighbourhood shows, science projects.
From as early as I can remember to the time I left home to go to college, I continued to come to him with a design or an idea, and he would figure out how to build it. In fifth grade, a schoolmate and I wrote a puppet show that we wanted to perform for our class. I made the puppet heads myself, and I made the costumes and curtains with Mom - who was as expert designing and sewing with fabric as my father was designing and working with wood and metal. With Dad I made the puppet stage, in our own invented collaboration style between kid and adult with me saying something like, "It has to be this high, and it needs to come apart and fold up so it can fit in the backseat of the car, and it needs to set up fast, and it needs to have different coloured lights on top with switches you can reach to control them and a curtain you can pull from underneath, even if you still have a puppet on your hand." Dad figured out how to make it all work, sketching plans as we went along. Then with the tools in his shop he built it, and I helped.
Dad also spent a lot of time out in the garage or in the driveway working on the family car. I don't remember that he ever took it to a professional auto-repair shop. Maybe to save money, but also because he could usually figure out what needed fixing, just by taking it apart and looking. Though not trained as an auto mechanic, he could look under the hood and take parts and pieces out, spread them on a tarp to catch the oil and figure out what was supposed to happen between the elements of this complicated machine and then figure out what wasn't happening and then replace the worn-out part or whatever and then put everything back together again.
This aspect of Dad's mechanical genius was to remain a mystery to me, I never developed even he slightest interest in cars. The father of one of my playmates worked at a used-car lot selling them, so this boyfriend had learned from his father how to identify instantly the make and year of any car he spied whether parked or driving fast down the street. I was always impressed with this knack of my boyfriend's, and it seemed a very important one to have - especially if you wanted to grow up to be a real boy. The world of cars was almost exclusively a men-only world then. Our mothers drove us everywhere, chauffeuring us here and there constantly to lessons, rehearsals, doctor's appointments. But the selling and fixing and tuning up of cars as machines was a sphere women did not enter. My playmate showed off his ability to recognise car makes every chance he got. To this day, bombarded by automotive advertising like everyone else, I cannot tell what make a car is without getting up close and reading the manufacturer's logo. And I am utterly mystified when I look under the hood of a car - though if I am discussing a problem with a professional mechanic I have learned to appear less helpless and incompetent than I in fact feel.
I could probably have learned how to fix cars quite adeptly, or at least become adequate at it, if I had ever wanted to - I had a father who was unintimidated and intuitive about auto mechanics, and I had endless opportunity to observe him and to learn as much from him as I could. I could have learned to understand the systems of a car: electrical, gasoline, brake, combustion. I could have learned to understand and appreciate what each part's function is, how the parts interact, what detail or interaction can go amiss, how the machine works as a whole and in all its particulars. I could have leaned to take car parts apart. I could have learned to put them back together again in working order. But I never did. I simply didn't care about cars the way I cared about puppets.
| My father's connection to me seemed to precede my interest - and he connected to my interests, he did not make me connect to his |
One of Dad's greatest gifts to me was that he never made me feel that as a condition of his love I ought to be out with him in the driveway, under the hood or under the chassis, as a real son should, learning from his father everything he could about the nuts and bolts of auto mechanics, because it is a world steeped in masculine tradition and a world of men and men's lore that he could initiate me into step by step and safely. without any fear of failure. I just wasn't interested. He understood I wasn't interested - and I understood that was okay.
He let me know I was always welcome to join him if ever I was, but if I never was, that was fine too. And when I came to him for help building a puppet stage, he was completely there, completely available to me - with all the mechanical aptitude, intuition and dexterity he could apply under the hood of a car. And I remember having a wonderful time building that puppet stage together and making it work the way it needed to. It was a project he built expressly for me for my own special world of puppets - essentially a world of playing with dolls.
My friend Jerry and his wife have a son and a daughter, in their late teens. Jerry told Sue he was on a business trip on an airplane recently seated beside another father, someone who also had a son about the same age as Jerry's. They began to talk about this and that and about their sons. Jerry was eating, his mouth full of airline food, when this other father asked him, "What does your son play?" Jerry needed time to chew and to swallow before he could answer, and the other father didn't wait patiently or perhaps didn't notice so he pressed on. "What does he play? Does he play basketball, football, baseball? What does he play?" My friend Jerry finally swallowed enough to reply: "The piano." My friend had spoken with quiet pride, but his answer effectively ended the conversation. Such as it was.
A few years ago I began to wonder exactly why my father was so accepting of my atypical interests. I've heard so many stories from so many other sons about how their fathers had forced them into having interests that they didn't really come to on their own, and they didn't especially want to pursue, but they knew they had to or else -because their father would be very angry and perhaps punitive. Some of those forced choices bad become careers - successful on the outside, not so happy on the inside - and so sometimes the forcefulness of the choice could still be felt as if it were a wound inflicted yesterday.
So many sons have had their life choices determined by their fathers such that to fail at the endeavour - or even to decline the option respectfully is to risk losing their father's love, and perhaps to risk becoming less than nobody because he would not regard you as a real boy.
My father wasn't like that, and my life choices weren't made for me like that at all. I don't have a single recollection of my father ever telling me that I should be interested in my if what I was really interested in was x. My father's connection to me seemed to precede my interest - and he connected to my interests, he did not make me connect to his. The fact that almost all my interests were far afield of activities customarily coded "real boy's" did not seem to faze my father one whit. For instance, as an amateur photographer, he also took many prized pictures of me and my two sisters - including in costumes sewn by Mum for our dancing-school recitals. I went to dancing school weekly for nine years, starting at the age of five, first ballet, later tap. Initially it was my mother's idea, she tells me. And although I was an unathletic and chunky kid, I took to dancing school like a duck to water. But I didn't dare tell anyone outside the family. I knew for sure I'd get teased to death if anyone found out about my dancing lessons, so I never told anyone - not school mates, not playmates, not teachers, not anyone at church. It was a secret safe only within my immediate family. Dad's many slide transparencies of me in those dancing-school recital costumes help me remember that when I was the child in those photos, it never would have occurred to me that Mom and Dad would be ashamed - because they loved me and they were proud.
All of this makes my father rather an anomaly. Curious, I recently decided to ask him some questions to find out why he let me become myself. And I decided to start by asking him how he himself was raised.
| He learned something else... a lesson about what it can mean to you if you are given the support and freedom to become your own best self |
I learned something very interesting. I'd known young Vincent had grown up the only son of a farmer in Granite Falls, Minnesota. I'd known that Vincent's mother died when he was three shortly after giving birth to his only sibling, a sister, and that both children were then raised by their father and aunt. It turned out that Vincent had no interest in farming. He just didn't care for it. Instead, he liked to take things apart and tinker with them. He started with doorknobs and worked his way up to tractors. He would see what made them work and then he would try to put them back together again. Being young, he didn't always succeed.
Vincent's father paid attention, apparently, to this youthful show of interest in matters mechanical. So rather than saying, in effect, "You're my only son. I expect you to take over the family farm, and if you resist my will I'll make your life quite unpleasant" - and rather than saying, in effect, "What's wrong with you? Why can't you put things back together again when you take them apart? What are you?- all thumbs? Why can't you be a farmer and grow things just like me?" - instead of saying anything like that, Vincent's father arranged for him to go to Dunwoody Institute in Minneapolis, an industrial trade school in the big city. Fortunately for Vincent, he was encouraged to do what interested him and not forced to do what would have bored him. Thereupon he learned the tool-and-die-making trade and got really good at what he did best. He learned something else rather significant in that early experience, as I now surmise - a lesson about what it can mean to you if you are given the support and freedom to become your own best self. Very likely, that was a source for Vincent's knowledge of how he could possibly love me, when I came along.
As it turned out, I never learned from my father how to play catch, how to bat, how to toss baskets, how to scrimmage. My father didn't do any of that stuff himself, so he didn't do it with me. But I learned much from hanging out with my dad in his basement shop and making projects together. Especially I learned from my father about tools; how to hold and swing a claw hammer to focus the effort on the swinging weight of the hammerhead, how to make a saw cut at exactly a forty-five-degree angle, how to match a drill bit to the size of the screw you intend to drive into the wood.
In my father's shop there were many tools for building things and for making things and also tools for taking things apart - often the same tools. The ratchet screwdriver, for instance, could be set for reverse and used to unscrew rather than screw. A wrench flipped over and twisted counterclockwise could unbolt. The claw of a hammer was a rocking lever that could remove a nail the same hammer had pounded in. Though I never became as handy as my father, I picked up a measure of his knowledge about which hand tools to use to take apart something that isn't working right - and then, from looking at the parts and insides of some mechanical device I had never inspected before, I picked up some measure of his intuition for diagnosing how something was supposed to function properly even when it was somehow broken and not working at all. I learned that when something is broken, you use tools of disassembly, not destruction. You don't break it more. If you simply go at it with crowbar or sledgehammer, if you simply crash and bash and tear down, you don't understand how the machine was supposed to work to begin with, which parts did what to which other part, which part might have got rusted or jammed. If you destroy it, you destroy all the evidence you needed to get it to work right.
I became a writer and words became my tools. As I write I try to remember the lessons I learned in my father's shop.
Copyright John Stoltenberg [Graphic by David Collins]
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