Outside The Box

I am my father’s son. This is not to say that I do not cherish the many gifts and influences of my mother, but boys who are blessed to have a father in the home, one willing and able to provide the mentoring they desperately need, are bound to inherit some of his attributes and attitudes in spite of themselves.

Our father liked to tinker, and he despised waste. Though he could afford to replace anything that broke, patching and repairing were much more likely than purchasing when it came to keeping the household and farm running smoothly.

I think some of this tendency was a carryover from growing up during The Great Depression, when replacements for broken things were not always available, and often unaffordable when they were.

Dad’s sister, my aunt Hersie, was a wealthy woman in her senior years. When land was cheap, she bought property with the money she made selling eggs; money she accumulated over many years and hid in mason jars squirreled away in the henhouse because women were not supposed to manage the family’s finances or think about investments.

When Lake Chatuge was built, much of her land became lakefront, and she sold it when land was most assuredly not cheap, despite the efforts to relieve her of it by a few area businessmen, some in her own family, who thought they were smarter than she was.

She could have bought a house anywhere and lived like a celebrity, but the biggest purchase she made was to put a new roof on her house. She continued to garden like she always did, and hang her clothes out to dry on the clothesline. She sold tomatoes and squash at a little roadside stand in front of her house because she liked meeting and talking to people.

In fact, Zell Miller used to visit and buy her tomatoes, and when the highway department ignored her requests to fix the dropoff into her driveway, the one they created when they repaved the road, Zell told her he thought he might be able to do something about that. Within a week she came home from the Senior Center to find that a nice wide pulloff had been paved right in front of her produce stand.

Her thrifty nature never left Hersie. Tracey and I used to visit her when she had moved to assisted living, and once we took her a nice blanket to keep her feet warm. She gushed over the blanket, and then began to carefully put it back in the package. “Aren’t you going to use that?” Tracey asked. “I thought I would save it,” my aunt replied. When we left her that day she had to continue the long family tradition of giving us some kind of treat to take home, so she gathered some peppermints and reached into a drawer to retrieve a plastic bag from a collection saved from trips to the grocery store.

Today, we might come up with a new expression for thrift combined with the choice to fix and mend things instead of buying new ones. We could call it, “tinkerthrift.” I’ll wager that tinkerthrift is not just a learned behavior; it might also be epigenetic. My grandfather Ernest on my mother’s side of the family also tinkered in pursuit of thrift. During WWII, gasoline was rationed. I still have ration tickets passed down in the family archives. Grandaddy’s old 8 cylinder Studebaker was a gas hog, so he removed two pistons from each side of the motor and filled the cylinders with cement. Then he tinkered with the timing until the motor ran smoothly.

Both of my brothers are masters of tinkerthrift. I think Bob is never happier than when something breaks and he gets to research the problem, collect the pertinent how-to videos and then meticulously organize the work. There is definitely an air of triumph about him when the repair is complete.

William is an engineer who despises the waste our consumer society produces. When he finds a quality item that has been unnecessarily discarded or given to a thrift store, one that can be repaired with a simple diode or a thermal fuse, he reminds me of an angler celebrating a memorable catch. (All three of us brothers still grieve the demise of Radio Shack, which became extinct in large part because few consumers are interested in building or repairing.)

And now we come to the inspiration for this reflection on thrift and innovation. It began when I was replacing a locking hub on the front wheel of my old truck and decided to slow down the entropic demise of the steering linkage with a generous application of lithium grease to all the lubrication points. My grease gun was empty after about three pumps, and I could hear my dad chuckling because you’re not supposed to put your tools down until they are ready to pick up again the next time.

Most shade tree mechanics would simply take out the empty grease cartridge, insert a new one and continue on with the task at hand. Not so, the practitioner of tinkerthrift. A bucket of grease is a fraction of the cost of the equivalent amount of grease cartridges.

Unfortunately, the thrifty tinkerer is confronted head-on by the laws of physics when he tries to put grease into a cylinder. Pascal, Bernoulli and Newton himself are lined up and waiting to contribute to an epic sticky mess if you’re not careful, or if you are.

You can’t put a baseball bat in a coke bottle and you can’t force lithium grease into a closed cylinder. The cylinder has to be open on both ends for air to escape. This means that you have to disassemble the grease gun at both ends. You can discard the cylinder unless the gun requires the top of the cylinder to become part of the seal.

In any of these scenarios, you need a tool or device, tinkered or otherwise, to scoop grease out of the bucket and insert it into the tube or cylinder. Murphy’s Law states that the tool you brought to the party is not the one you need, but your gloves are now covered with grease and the wind has blown the newspaper you spread out to contain the mess into the woods, so you soldier on. (Murphy’s Law also requires that a glob of grease escapes your notice, falls, levitates or folds space to somehow attach itself to the bottom of your shoe to mark your passage and delight your wife at a later time.)

As I was soldiering on, scooping and splorking grease with the stick I had picked up to replace the ineffective 5-in-1 tool that was better at collecting than transferring grease, I heard my dad chuckling again. It occurred to me that the grease bucket I was using was one of his, salvaged from his old workshop.

“I am my father’s son,” I said out loud. Just then my stick encountered a rigid object in the depths of the bucket: It was a table fork.

I could hear my mother clucking her resigned but amused disapproval at the disappearance of her cutlery, but the fork, left in the bucket by my father for future use some unknown years ago, was the perfect tool for the job. I quickly finished packing the grease gun and continued servicing the truck, and yes. The fork is still in the bucket.