Born in the 1950’s, I grew up in an era when life’s lessons were customarily gender specific. Boys were supposed to learn how to catch things, throw things, build and fix things. There were manly behaviours to be emulated and feminine pursuits to be eschewed. I don’t recall ever being discomfited by the parameters of my role when I was young. At the age of four I was content to wear my six-gun and cowboy hat, and I wore the chaps from the outfit (though, somehow, I had the notion that chaps were on the sissy side) because I was told it was not gentlemanly to disappoint my mother who had worked so hard to sew the ensemble. At six, I was mortified that I, a tin-soldier in the school Christmas play, had been compelled by my teacher to wear a pair of black, girl’s tights and sport lipstick lips and apple-cheeks. This had nothing to do with soldiering, honour or bravery! I tried every trick in the book to stay home sick, but to no avail. My teacher and my mother (who said I looked cute) were in cahoots, and I knew it!
Practical lessons were another matter. My brother, almost nine years my senior, was too much older for me to tag along. My father was also frequently unavailable; as a locomotive engineer for the Railroad he worked irregular shifts and he often ‘doubled-up’ or booked back into the ‘pool’ early to earn extra money. There were few opportunities for actual instruction or even observation, and much of my information was gleaned second-hand from stories and conversations around the kitchen table. It was over dinner that I learned the ping-pong table was not a suitable substitute for a sawhorse, was entertained by debates on the length of time a shaft from a hockey stick would prevent the front seat of my brother’s 1960 Pontiac from plummeting through rusted floorboards, and was told (many times over) how easily one could strip the threads of a bolt or the head of a screw by giving it one last tightening twist.
My father, in particular, had a difficult time fulfilling his role of master to a willing but inept apprentice. He had an awkward, almost combative relationship with ‘things’. Inanimate objects conspired to thwart his efforts at even simple projects or tasks. It was as if they were imbued with a vexatious life force that delighted in frustrating him to the point of bursting. And ‘burst’ he regularly did – usually into a stream of anthropomorphic oaths that began with the phrase “You bastard, son of a …” Occasionally these eruptions were accompanied by a well-placed kick, hail of blows from a hammer, or other percussive remedy. The neighbours learned to be on the lookout for my father’s travails, for comedic relief was always welcome in this working-class suburb. And he did not often disappoint.
Arriving home from work late one afternoon, my father spied our metal garbage can, empty, lying on its side on the boulevard. It was early March and an inch or so of hard snow crust covered the ground, the product of a warm noon-day sun and colder north winds that had moved in later. Lunch pail in hand, he walked back down the driveway, grabbed hold of the metal handle on the garbage can and, in a single motion, turned, straightened and headed for the house. At least that’s what was supposed to have happened. For the can did not come with him, and he was rudely snapped back to a stooped position, wincing from the abrupt recoil. Putting down his lunch pail, my father, a robust man who did not shrink from a challenge of strength, seized the handle with both hands and heaved. The can did not budge. Repositioning his feet and squatting to use the full upward force of his legs, he tried again – but the metal receptacle held fast to the ground. He eyed the situation carefully while he caught his breath, then took another tack entirely. He stomped the garbage can flat.
My mother was not amused. But she had learned long ago how to bide her time, to let things cool off, to wait for the fresher perspective that comes from eight hours of sleep. Then, choosing her moment carefully, she would strike. And so, long before the next garbage day, my father was made to hammer the garbage can (rescued from the clutches of ice by my mother with a pail of hot water) back into some semblance of a cylinder. Little did he know that he was forging something much more than a reclaimed waste bin with a top that never again quite fit. Our battered garbage can became a family symbol, a statement to the world (to the neighbours, anyway) that reason and restraint ruled over irritability and impetuosity.
As spring gave way to summer, my father could be seen pulling – again and again, sometimes fifteen or twenty times in a row – on the starter cord of our Lawn-Boy. The air would be ‘blue’ long before the engine coughed to life, spewing oily clouds of exhaust. With sweat now stinging his eyes, noxious fumes filling his lungs and the abrasive howl of the two-stroke engine accosting his ears, my father would commence to mow the lawn. It was a choppy affair, punctuated by moving the lawn chairs back and forth, discovering that the hose needed to be rewound, or removing a large dog turd or two lest they be flung across the yard and coat the underside of the mower. Invariably, the Lawn-Boy quit before the job was done.
At least summer brought some rewards of the season. One could sit in the backyard, relax and have a beer, and marvel at how much better a hot-dog tastes when cooked on an outdoor grill. Gas barbecues (other than expensive built-ins) were unheard of in those days. The standard neighbourhood issue was a charcoal burner, usually a large round metal dish on legs, with an adjustable-height grill and a metal top of some design. Ours, with its turquoise cowling and small thermometer on the warming compartment, was particularly smart.
For optimal cooking efficiency and flavour, the recommended routine was to spray a little barbecue starter fluid on the coals, light and wait until they settled into an even glow. But this was easier said than done. If the coals were damp or of inferior quality (and I’m not sure my father ever managed to find a bag of coals that were not) they would often fail to catch. Adjustments would be made to account for the wind and attempts to kindle the coals would begin anew – often resulting in a barbecue that imparted a certain oily tang to the food.
It was a beautiful late summer evening when my mother asked me to check on the readiness of the barbecue, which my father had gone to prepare 30 minutes prior. I recall thinking that the shadows were already longer, and the light more golden, than at the same time of evening just weeks before. As I approached my father from behind I noticed a familiar tension in his shoulders and neck and I thought I heard him mutter something. This did not bode well. I found him squeezing a steady stream of starter fluid onto a bed of cold black pieces of charcoal, only one or two of which showed any trace of grey ash from previous ignition. The fumes, thick in the air, made me cough. “Stand back!” was all he said, and I didn’t need further prompting.
It’s a good thing that my father was using matches that evening, rather than his trusty Zippo lighter. He stood back a few paces (I stood back much further) and flicked in a lit one. With a great ‘whoosh’, the ensuing fireball came close to engulfing him, and he hastily retreated to stand beside me. As we watched the flames lick out of the seams of the metal housing, and the turquoise paint bubble and sear black, and the billowing oily clouds of smoke drift slowly across the neighbourhood, he turned to me and said “I think those coals will start now, don’t you?”
The barbecue cleaned up reasonably well. With the soot washed off there were still a few patches of turquoise, and we hadn’t really used the thermometer anyway. Before its next use, however, my mother insisted on the purchase of an electric fire starter – an equally frustrating but immeasurably safer alternative to getting our damp, inferior charcoal lit.
Safety was a consistent theme in my upbringing. It was as if my parents recognized that our clan had an inbred blind spot for danger – a genetic predisposition toward early extinction. With every new ‘close call’ there was, at the very least, a sober discussion at the dinner table reminding us all that peril awaited the unwary, the inattentive, the heedless. Amongst all the stories and lectures, there was one that stood out, however.
My father had noticed that something was eating holes in the asphalt of our driveway and he suspected that his car might have a leak in the fuel tank. He crawled underneath the family sedan – a 1964 Plymouth Belvedere at the time – to confirm his diagnosis, then considered his options. It wasn’t really the sort of job that required a mechanic’s skill, training and tools. And so my father, always trying to economize, decided to save the cost of labour and undertake the repair himself.
The following weekend, he parked in the garage, donned his overalls and crawled underneath the car to remove the faulty gas tank. Like most old cars – especially those wintering in urban areas where salt is used on the roads – the underside of the Plymouth was coated in oily dirt and flaking rust. My father diligently worked through it, wiping the debris out of his eyes and mouth from time to time. And then, long before it was expected, the fuel tank suddenly broke free of its restraints and dropped heavily onto his chest. I write ‘heavily’, because a nearly full 15-gallon tank of gasoline will weigh over 90 pounds. Yes, he had forgotten to remove the fuel beforehand and, worse still, had refilled the night before.
Finding himself almost pinned in the cramped quarters beneath the car, he gradually maneuvered the tank across his chest and tipped it off and to the side. A stream of gas slopped out onto the garage floor, soaked his overalls and headed down the driveway. It was at this point, still not entirely free from the tank, that he spotted the old ‘trouble light’ lying on the floor under the car. Some cold gas had splashed onto its hot bulb and the lamp had begun to ‘smoke’!
Whether or not one believes in divine providence is a personal issue. But, as my father reached across the garage floor in a panic to turn off the trouble light, something reminded him that the lamp, a battered antique with frayed wires, always sparked whenever it was turned on or off. With the air filled with fumes, the floor covered in gasoline and a big tank of it sitting right beside him, turning off the light would have guaranteed us a prominent spot on the local evening news. Instead, he stretched to the limit and gently pushed the lamp as far away from the pool of gasoline as he could, then hastened his efforts to get out from under the car. Gingerly, he unplugged the light at the socket and removed it from the garage. The immediate risk of explosion and premature cremation now over, he turned to look at the asphalt driveway, now soaking up more gasoline than the small leaks from the tank would have deposited in five years. For a fleeting moment, he thought “God, I need a cigarette!”
Genetically speaking, it was my mother’s side of the family that held all the cards for craft. Her father had been an accomplished amateur tin and silversmith, and her brother was a ‘fitter’ for the R. A. F. She had cousins in the plumbing business in England. My mother was often the one to correctly interpret confusing or ambiguous directions, to determine when things were backwards, to provide nimble fingers when they were needed, to save projects from ‘hammer-time’. My brother, the first-born, inherited this coveted genetic material and can turn his hand to almost any task required around the home, his car or boat. I, on the other hand, slowly came to realize that, in this aspect of life, I am my father’s son.
And so it was with some trepidation that I approached my first ‘shop’ period in grade 6. Once every two weeks our class was bussed to another public school – the only one in the area with the requisite facilities – for the girls to work with real ovens and sewing machines, and the boys to learn about basic wood and metalworking. My father had pronounced it a great opportunity and, signing the consent form with a flourish, told me how lucky I was, how I would learn the correct and safe way to use power tools, how I would become skilled at making useful things for around the home – like my brother.
Alas, the shop teacher was a compelling representative for the notion that psychological profiling of individuals who work with children is a prudent idea. He seemed to revel in his power over the ignorant and inept 11-year-olds who were sent his way. He thought it highly instructive, not to mention tremendously amusing, to test how well a paintbrush had been cleaned by wiping it repeatedly back and forth across the face of a student. To his new batch of students he delivered a brief speech that ran along similar lines to my father’s pep talk about what I would gain from the experience. Then he showed the ‘safety film’.
It is well that the film, a government production, was shot in black and white. For twenty minutes we saw a multitude of fingers flying from hands and blood spurting and detritus shooting into eyeballs and flames and other such scenes of battering, maiming, mutilation and disfigurement. In one example – of what can happen when the blade of a table saw is set too low – a six foot long 2 x 2 kicked back and shot right through the stomach of a man loitering behind the saw. I swear that it looked like pieces of his entrails were hanging off the end of the wooden projectile, which now protruded through his back! Feeling distinctly nauseous, I turned away for the remainder of the reel.
Apart from being a wonderful training vehicle for aspiring special effects mavens – for it was far more gruesome and realistic than any horror movie of its day – the film did not exactly achieve its intended purpose. I, for one, was not just cautious, I was scared witless of using any of the machines in the shop. But even more terrifying was the potential humiliation should I actually fail shop class. And so I swallowed my anxiety and managed to complete a series of puerile projects including a clunky wooden salad bowl, lopsided salt and pepper shakers, a warped metal cookie sheet for baking, and that ever practical, finely-crafted example of human ingenuity, the balancing belt hanger.
When the shop program ended the following year (the budget for bussing having been cut), my one and only experience of ‘professional’ training ended with it. I suppose it could have been worse. A friend of mine who landed a summer job in a machine shop as a teenager, recalls being shown the ‘quick way’ to do things by ‘the one-armed guy.’
My knowledge of other important skills is similarly lacking. A plunger represents the extent of my understanding of plumbing, although I once watched the ‘rooter’ man extract 3 plastic knives, an assortment of straws and a variety of other material best not described from our kitchen drain. As for electrical, it cost me $180 to change a light-bulb one day last fall.
It started out as a simple job. The bulb in the outdoor fixture that illuminates our front door had burned out. We had moved into the 40-year-old house about a year prior, and this was the first exterior light that needed attention. I quickly discovered that the fixture had been attached to the aluminum siding on the overhang by two odd wood screws that were barely holding it in place. The original hardware was long gone, and someone had jury-rigged the arrangement. Although I could change the bulb, there was no way that I could put the cover back on and have any confidence that the light would remain in place. I decided that the fixture, a cracked, rusty relic from the original contractor, would have to be replaced. It was Sunday, but the Home Depot superstore close to our house was open.
Thirty dollars later, I returned home to effect the repair. I made sure the light switch was in the off position, pulled the old fixture downward and unscrewed the electrical wires. It was cramped quarters, and as I readied the new light to be wired up, I managed to knock together the bare ends of the wires protruding from the overhang. There was a brief spark and a slight tingle in my hand. Nothing to worry about, or so I thought. But when I flipped the switch in the front hallway to ‘on’, the bulb remained cold and dark. I checked my wires. They certainly looked fine. I tried another bulb in case the one I’d installed was defective. When I realized that none of the inside hall lights worked either, I got that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, and headed downstairs to look at the breaker panel.
None of the breakers was in the off position, but I knew that sometimes a switch could be deceiving, could look like it was on when, in fact, it just hadn’t flipped all the way to the off position. Of course, few of the breakers were marked and I had no idea which one controlled the circuit I wanted to check. Enlisting the aid of my wife and daughter, I spent the next thirty minutes flicking breaker switches while they identified what outlets and lights were going off or on. All the breakers seemed to be operating properly. I was stymied, and dusk was approaching. Putting aside my chagrin for the moment, I hauled out the Yellow Pages and searched for an electrician who would come on a Sunday evening. The dispatcher who answered the phone explained about the $150 minimum charge, and told me that an electrician would be at my house within two hours.
It was mildly gratifying to watch the professional, after hearing my story, go through the same sequence of tests that I had done. He stripped down the breaker panel, tested it with his equipment and pronounced everything sound. Puzzled, he asked if there was any other room where the power was out, and I replied that the bathroom off the hall was also affected. The light bulbs in my house might have been unresponsive, but it was clear that one had just gone on in the electrician’s head. With me in pursuit, he marched up the stairs into the bathroom, found the grounded wall socket, pressed the ‘reset’ button, and turned on the lights. Bingo! The fact that my embarrassment (not to mention a $150 bill for 15 minutes work) had been caused by a former owner wiring this circuit incorrectly was cold comfort. For one thing, it made me wonder what other ‘do-it-yourself’ mistakes might be lurking in our home.
In some cruel twist of fate, my physical appearance has been known to put people in mind of a well-known host of a home improvement television show. I look like I should be a proficient all-round handyman. Salespeople are taken aback when I ask for a price to include assembly and installation. Neighbours are puzzled when I stump around the yard pushing our motorless ‘reel’ mower, or decline the loan of an electric hedge trimmer when attacking the privet, or shovel the snow with an actual shovel. My father-in-law, who built a large house for his family mostly by himself, finds it difficult to make conversation with me. Appearances to the contrary, I do not own a workshop or shed full of tools and, unlike his sons and other sons-in-law, have built nothing more complicated than the odd item from IKEA. (Nor do I follow hockey or watch wrestling – his other passions).
I suspect I am not the only man who has anxiety attacks when something breaks in the home. And tromping through houses with a real estate agent has confirmed that many renovations and home ‘improvements’ are accomplished with great enthusiasm and no skill whatsoever. When a sales manager at Sears refused to sell me the last of an item in stock – the ‘floor model’ – because it was already assembled, it was apparent from his rabid reaction that I’d met the man who had personally gone through hell to put this thing together, and he wasn’t about to do it again. No, I am not alone.
I am also heartened to see evidence that gender stereotypes are collapsing and non-traditional roles are on the rise. The popularity of Amy Wynn, one of the carpenters on The Learning Channel’s Trading Spaces, and Mag Ruffman, the offbeat star of A Repair to Remember and Anything I Can Do, is representative of our gradual acceptance that men are not the only ones who can wield a mighty power tool. I, for one, welcome their entry into these areas of the male domain. After all, guys like me need all the help we can get.