Photo Credit: © Can Stock Photo / Nejron
My dad was handy. He did many favors for people because of his skills, and I rarely remember him refusing anyone. He wasn’t especially “trained” or anything, but he just had a logical mind when it came to appliances and mechanical things. He always advised me to “at least take it apart” because the fix might be simple enough to immediately see. For many years I was continually looking over his shoulder: indeed, that was true more times than not. Sometimes we would take the back off a washer or dryer, and two frayed wire ends would be sticking up; we would simply spin them together and throw electrical tape over the whole fix, and the unit would run another 10 years. Sometimes it was a lot more complicated. I recall one time when we were working on an old washing machine and couldn’t get it to start no matter what we did. An hour later, I realized we had never plugged it back in. As soon as we did, it whooshed to life. We wordlessly smiled at each other and said nothing.
People often called our house for Dad’s advice. I would hear him on the phone, “No, no, you gotta open up that flue or the smoke will back up into the house,” or “No, no, if you don’t run a tank of Hi-Test once in a while, that stuff will build up and the motor will stall.”
It seemed as if he knew everything. One day I asked him, “Geez, Dad, how many favors do you do for people? If you ever collect on all that people owe you, you’ll be rich.”