INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
On chilly Saturday mornings my father would fire up the kerosene heater and get the back of our garage warm
He&d turn on the old radio, constantly tuned to the local public radio station, and Wait, Wait, Don&t Tell Me or Harry Shearer would come
on, clearing away the static like a gust of wind through cobwebs.
&Get your old clothes on,& he&d say, sticking his head into the warm
I&d still be in my pajamas
I wanted to watch TV or play with my computer or read or do anything other than sit on a milk crate in a cold garage and fix the car.
But
If there was something to be done on the car back in 1985 — back when I was 10 and my Dad was still alive — we did it ourselves
Everything in those old engines was accessible
Nothing was packed in, nothing was covered in plastic cowlings, hidden away and out of sight
Back then you could follow the brake lines through the car just by laying underneath it
You could see which belts needed tightening, which seals were leaking, and what was going on with the spark plugs
We pulled out the oil plug and let black crude flow from the little hole like a solid thing into a cut off milk jug
We turned little screws to fix the idle
We gapped spark plugs, changed tires and generally did everything we could do that didn&t require a mechanic lift.
Sometimes the fix was
We&d jack up each side and put on his studded snow tires in November, just after Thanksgiving, so we could drive, the road sizzling under
us, to the Ohio River Valley and up slick hills to visit our cousins
We&d check fluids and top things off
We&d replace an air or oil filter.
And other times, when the problem was too big, he&d consult the Chilton repair manual
This manual held deep arcana about the Ford Fairmont or the VW Vanagon he owned
They made a manual for almost any car, like an O&Reilly book for mechanics
The books remained pristine in that grubby garage because that book held everything we needed to know about fixing everything in the car
He took good care of them.
When we pulled the manual I knew we&d be out there for a while
The kerosene heater would hiss as I rumbled through my dad stuff, pulling out old copper wire and magazines, avoiding the places I knew he
hid guns or old copies of Mayfair
I&d try to build my own things until he needed me
One year I was working on a banjo (it never played right) and another year I made a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher (I didn&t shoot my eye
The jar full of bolts he collected over the years, unsorted
He knew where everything was and he knew when he needed it
I was his assistant in the slow surgery he performed.
And I&d take part
I&d hold something while he twisted
I&d get my small hands in where his big hands didn&t fit
I&d hold the trouble light, a yellow caged thing that burned you if you touched the metal bulb cage.
Once I sprinkled water on the hot bulb
It exploded and he explained thermodynamics to me as he picked glass out of the cage and screwed in a new light.
When we were done, after
hours of slow, methodical work, he&d fire up the car and we&d go for a drive
The knock would be gone (or sometimes it would be worse)
The brakes would work better, the steering would be stronger, the engine would purr instead of lope
We&d drive down the street to White Castle or BW3 or just down to the highway to open the thing up and see if still drove
It always did.
Tools, not toys
The last time I did my own work on a car was in Fairfax, Virginia
My brake pads were going and I figured I&d replace them
I bought the Chilton, bought the pads and sat in a parking structure, jacking up the car with a little screw jack that threatened to
buckle.
I put them on backwards
Front pads in the back, back pads in the front
The car drove like crap.
I gave up and took it to the Sears repair center around the corner
That was in 1999 or so, back when Sears still ruled the malls around DC.
&Missssster BIGGS,& yelled the service guy over the din of daytime
He was laughing.
&We fixed it, man
You did a great job, though, really,& he said
He handed me a bill.
And that was that
An entire body of knowledge lost in a heartbeat
I haven&t cracked the hood except to top up my washer fluid in two decades
Why, when the car is more robot than mechanical horse
But those cold weekends weren&t a waste
I learned to riddle out problems, to dig through old books for good answers, to accept nothing at face value
The broken part is always out of sight — a seal, a cracked hose, a fracture in a piece of cast steel — and it great fun to suss it out
I learned to think through physical problems by solving physical problems
I learned electronics by replacing wires
I learned patience.
Fast-forward to today fashion for STEM toys
These toys are supposed to do all the work that my father did with me on those cold Saturdays
A little robot that runs around on the floor is supposed to replace building and learning
A box of parts that fit together like Lego and animated with a few lines of code should be enough for any kid to get a body of knowledge so
deep that we won&t be plunged into a dark pit of ignorance come 2040.
But the toys don&t work
I&ve been very critical of modern STEM toys because they are just toys
The only things I&ve found remotely educational are Scratch, with its BASIC-like mental syntax, and Adafruit products that require actual
Every other one, from the Nintendo Labo to the broken robot at the bottom of our basement stairs, is junk.
It our responsibility as parents
There not much opportunity to do that anymore
Education without a goal is empty
I learned by tearing down and building up
It hard to do that these days when everything is deeply disposable
I&ve vowed to show my kids the command line, the protocols and the code behind their favorite games
My son owns Bitcoin and he follows the price like a stock trader
My daughter builds Raspberry Pi things on a regular basis, understanding that she holds a computer, not a toy, in her small hand
We learn how to fix broken things, opening old gadgets from my childhood, cleaning the contacts, replacing the batteries
One of our favorite games is the Dungeons Dragons Computer Labyrinth, a game we resurrected with a little careful troubleshooting.
This
fiddling is obviously not the same as what I did with my dad
I doubt I&ll be able to recreate those mornings, as much as I hated them then and love them now
Maybe my days of cold garages and NPR are over
And maybe all our children deserve are Logo Turtles made out of injection-molded plastic
But I&m willing to bet that somewhere out there there a kid who wants to do, not be told to do, and at the end of the project wants to feel
the wind in her hair and smell a cold snap coming across the plains, crisp and clear and full of the future
And it our job to provide that feeling, no matter what
We can&t offload that onto a toy.
