tools
when I was a little boy, the world was weird. we were foreigners and everyone else were natives. my parents thought they were, well, superior to everyone else, but everyone else could do something. now understand, my father could preach, but hell, I could preach, and it only made sense that if I could, anyone could. my mother could manage a household with two servants who did all the work. she made it look so natural that I thought my little sister probably could, and if she could, then surely any woman could. sorry, but that's how the world looked to me as a little boy. but then there were tools. tools puzzled me. I wasn't supposed to touch them, but they just begged to be touched. no, they craved to be used. but dear god, not by my father, please. when my father hammered, he soon smashed a thumb or a finger, or maybe a plate that wasn't even close to the nail he allegedly meant to drive. if he tried to unscrew something, he destroyed the screw-head, and had no back-out to get the screw out once he'd destroyed the screw-head. I am, of course, unfair to my father. surely he drove a nail once, maybe even often, without hurting himself or breaking something nearby. surely he used a screwdriver once to remove a screw or to insert a screw and it just worked without any drama, but that's not how I remember him and tools. for him, a saw wandered away from the line and somehow produced a crooked end. a plane made a lumpy surface. for my father, a tool was to hang on a wall and leave alone. which was just as well, since he was gone most of the time. what's more useless than a handyman who isn't handy? but early on, I discovered that I could too climb up and fetch a tool, climb down and use it, then put it back as if it had hung in place all the time. I learned to hammer a nail straight and flush with the surface. screwdrivers let me disassemble and re-assemble many things, and the hell that broke loose when I had parts left over made me learn to remember how they came apart so I could put them back together right. I thought a plane was magnificent! ooooo! and chisels were divine. for a long time wrenches baffled me. for one thing, they were too heavy. even when I got strong enough, all I could see to do with them was to destroy wood. oh! but then I saw a plumber work with them, and several mysteries were solved at once. on one of my walks home from school, I watched a welder work, and decided I was going to grow up and be a welder! what he did was as close to magic as anything I'd ever watched! when we were in this country that terrible year in which I learned about school and how strangers who weren't natives behaved, my granddaddy - the good grandfather - gave me a set of tools and my own toolbox. it was metal and you could cut yourself on it! it! it had a hammer that really hammered, a saw that really sawed, four different-sized screwdrivers, a level, an L-shaped ruler. that was probably all. he told me that "later" we would add wrenches, and planes, and chisels, but these would do while I was learning. yes, when I got older enough, maybe I could get a welder's tools too. maybe. he showed me how to use each of the tools in my toolkit, but then he brought out the real magic. he'd bought me three books that showed how real tools, man-sized tools, were used, really used. every page had two, three, or four drawings, and dozens of words. and not a damned page said "Run, Dick, run." he was wonderful. the books were wonderful. but most of all, tools were wonderful. still are.
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