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Reprise

"Papa", he said--Papa is his name for a grandfather--"how'd ja do that?"

 You can forgive me, if you want to, for repeating that line from an earlier entry, but ever since he asked, I have been thinking about Jao's question.  He is not yet four years old, but he is getting there as quickly as he can.  I have been thinking about his question because I have so seldom been asked just that.

 "How did you do that?"

 I am one of those old geezers who has collected old tools and bins of nuts and bolts.  I bought a Delta table saw from someone's back yard in Waterloo, Iowa about forty years ago.  I finally had to let it go on our last move back to Tucson, so I took it to an auction firm in Decorah, Iowa.  The saw had moved with us, at least once--perhaps twice--to Tucson and back to Iowa, but finally, as was true also for a sleigh from Norway and a long ladder given to me by a neighbor moving to Texas, I had to leave a lot of tools behind:  no space, no place.  
I have been shambling about, ever since, wondering where my tools are.  I finally bought a replacement shop vac, not long before some garage reorganization revealed where the earlier one had been stacked, still in its moving box.  Today I almost bought a small, portable table saw.  Last week it was almost an air compressor.  

 Every packrat like me, every old codger like me who has enjoyed building things, finally has to recognize that none of the kids, none of the neighbors, wants either the tools, or the hard-gained secrets about how to make things.  Jao might have been the first of any of the succeeding generations who, unprompted and unexpectedly asked, "How did you do that?"  

"How," he might have said, had he been four or five or six, "did you make sixteen rafters meet in the middle, up in the air?"  

 By the time he is four or five or six, he might not care, any longer, because there will be other kinds of things to fascinate him.  Not many of the kids want to learn how to cut a rafter, or to build a table or a Hoosier side cabinet.  He will wonder about computers, because he already knows more about how to manipulate digital data than I do.  But just for a moment, a few days ago, he asked his (grand)papa how to make something.  Something arcane.  Something they do not often teach in school.  

 I almost told him.  I had to think quickly because he talks fast, so I just said he should bug off.  

Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 7, 2016 at 2:47 PM

    I do not get to your writings every day--but on those days I do--you make me think about how I travel on my journey--and I most often find your writing peaceful. And there are not many things going around in my life that I classify as peaceful. Thank you

    ReplyDelete

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