I
What My Father Taught Me
Know the difference between a Phillips head from a regular screwdriver.
Get several different sizes of each.
Own a good heavy hammer.
Always have tools at hand.
If it's broke, fix it.
II
What My IT Colleagues Taught Me
If it's broke, fix it.
If it can't be fixed, kill it.
fix it, if you can.
My father might have taught me that, or my mother. They both knew how to fix things. They also knew when to find someone else to fix what they couldn't.
This morning, my oven wouldn't self-clean -- it beeped insistently and told me F2. I looked it up online, thinking I might be able to fix it. Overheating, scarily so. I threw the breaker switches and called a professional.
Later, irritated by the wobbling bedside table my father made for me at least thirty years ago, I determined to fix it, grabbed the Phillips head, and flipped the table upside down. But when I saw the X marks (always a fat pencil, always drawn, never rubbed out) and the punched initials (why twice, I wonder), I hesitated and reached for a camera.
I couldn't fix the wobbles -- either the one setting the table off balance, or the one sin me caused by father's Xs, reminding me of his shop, tools, hands, marks.
I worked on one thing and something else resulted.
There's nothing more to say.
My father's basement workshop exhaled sawdust, paint blotches, brush bristles, fresh and old honeycomb, and fumes roiling of oil and thinner. Always a tinkerer, he enjoyed his tools -- small ones: hammers, saws (including a beautiful antique one with decorated wood handle), screw drivers, ratchets, pliers, vises, planes, screws, nails, hinges, and the like; and large ones: table saw, table drill, lathe, welding equipment. An engineer by training, Daddy created objects for his own pleasure and our use. My home today bears witness to his creativity: a chandelier turned from a storm-felled tree in the front yard, four tables, a copy of the metal Robin Hood that hung from our driveway lamp post, and one decorative, humorous critter.One of my brothers is also an engineer by training who works as a businessman, directing the same business my father co-founded some 62 years ago. His workshops have always been immaculate, with barely any disorder or splatters and splotches on his floors or surfaces. His tools are carefully cataloged on peg board, aligned as neatly as entries by an expert accountant in an official record. Like Daddy, he loves his tools, but unlike Daddy's, his are orderly and locatable by others.Lately, I have been thinking about my own tools and my own habits of tool-keeping. I am more like my father than my brother: I cannot keep them organized neatly. Like both, however, I love my tools. Although I have never been able to afford the best ones, which both of them seemed to do, I respect my tools, especially on days like this one when I use them.
Good tools -- the right tools for specific tasks --, whether top-of-the-line or just short, make quality work possible and working joyful.
I love my tools.
