The Stuff I Don't Know: July 2012

The stuff I don't know could fill the province of Manitoba, and I happen to know that Manitoba is one big-ass province.

Here is a partial list:

I don't know how to fix anything. Oh, I can tell when a lightbulb has burned out (suddenly it's dark), or a battery needs replacing (the clicker stops working and I'm stuck watching Rachel Ray for the next hour), but if it's anything more complicated than that, I'm toast. I'm not proud of my ignorance in the area of manual repairs; it's just not in me. I believe those kinds of skills are usually passed down from father to son/daughter and ol' Sam was not, shall we say, particularly dextrous. Once during a New Hampshire Thanksgiving, our electric stove stopped working. Through trial and error, (I kept touching various heating elements until I found the one that didn't burn me) I was able to locate the part that needed replacing. I was then able to remove that part and replace it when the new part, ordered online, was shipped. I mention this because to this day that oven is the one and only household item that I have ever repaired. By the way, if you're wondering, that year's Thanksgiving dinner was cooked in our neighbor's vacant condo unbeknownst to them. I'm a bad fixer. I'm an excellent borrower.

I don't know how a car works. I know which buttons and pedals to push and I know what happens when you push them, but I have no idea why or how anything happens. Now, the question could be asked, "Does one need to know this information?" Obviously the answer is NO, since I've been able to get wherever I wanted to go in a car since 1964. That includes Eufala, Alabama. So why do I lament being saddled with this particular area of ignorance? There are several reasons. In any male conversation involving  horsepower, cylinders, brake pads, mufflers, universal joints, rotors, washer fluid, or octane, I must sit in a quiet corner and hope my name isn't called. When I bring my car in for repairs or maintenance, I must await the final tally and pay the bill with a smile. I can't ask "How come you did this?" because I don't know what "this" is. It's kind of like ordering dinner in Albania: Here's my credit card. Please do not ask me if I have any questions. One time Ada and I were traveling with our English friends, the Davidsons. Young Jamie, probably about 5 at the time, asked his dad to explain how an internal combustion engine worked. (By the way, young Jamie is bound for Cambridge University to, as they say, read chemical engineering. I guess the lesson took!) I was hanging on every word of Steve's patient and not at all condescending explanation. Unfortunately, he lost me at "turbine".

I don't know how to grow anything. If I tried to live on the stuff I've grown, I would have died of malnutrition sometime around 1972. I see other people, many of them barely literate, able to grow actual vegetables in their own back yards. As near as I can tell, there really isn't supposed to be that much to it. You need a seed, a shovel, dirt, and water. Frankly, I don't think I ever had the right kind of shovel. In our Hanover, MA house, I was forever trying to fill in the sketchy parts of our lawn. Each spring I would march down to the local Home Depot to purchase that year's can't miss lawn seed,  (for hard to grow areas) special fertilizer (for hard to grow areas), purified spring water, (for hard to grow areas) and sketchy-lawn-growing-shovel (for hard to grow areas). How proud I felt when the last bare spot had been dug up and gorged with wonderful new seed, dirt, and water. Every day I would come home from teaching and inspect these newly-fecund areas. When I spotted the first evidence of new growth, I would ask my family to raise a glass to honor and acknowledge my fertile, green thumbs. Alas those first spare thin strands would prove to be the only strands, a lawn rogaine experiment gone terribly wrong. All that was left for me to do was pray for winter to arrive early.

I don't know how to build anything. Let me amend that. I can build you a board. Just tell me how thick, how long, and how wide you want it and I'll take care of the rest; however, if that board needs to be attached to something larger, say a bookcase or desk or lunar transport, I'm afraid I'm going to have to farm the job out. I have good friends who have built their own homes. Let me clarify: they had a vacant piece of earth and a year later on that earth stood a complete house, with electricity, cable, and a porch. If I were given that same challenge, a year later that vacant piece of earth would be strewn with various sized boards. Nothing else, just boards. But in my defense, it wasn't always thus. Back in the fourth grade in Mr. Fairweather's wood shop class at the Sarah Greenwood School, I was considered something of a woodworking prodigy, a little pudgy Jewish Bob Vila if you will. My signature piece was a woodpecker-shaped doorknocker which I proudly presented to my Aunt Minnie and Uncle Albert at their home in Newton. That beautifully painted and varnished woodpecker adorned their back porch door for many years, forever ready to announce the arrival of unexpected guests. It wasn't Woody's fault that nobody, expected or unexpected, ever used that particular entrance when visiting Minnie and Albert's place. As a matter of fact, I believe that I am the only person to have used that knocker, which I did probably 3 or 4 hundred times every time we visited there. One sad day I went to see if Woody still had his spectacular knocking ability, and he was gone. Even the nail holes used to fasten him had been spackled over. When I asked what had happened to Woody I was given a doughnut and told to get lost. My ability to build things was gone. On the other hand, my ability to eat doughnuts blossomed from that moment onward.

In To Kill a Mockingbird Jem complains to a neighbor that lawyer Atticus can't actually DO anything. The neighbor gently scolds him and reminds him that there is plenty that Atticus can do, including making someone's will so airtight that....(I've forgotten the rest of the line, but you get the idea.)

I don't know how to read a legal or financial document. I've tried, I really have. I'd like to think that if I tried just a little harder, maybe I could get beyond the first paragraph. So far this inability has not caused me any great financial or legal hardship. Unless you count the fact that I can't enter Missouri or exit Arkansas.

So how can someone with such a dearth of common knowledge and skills survive in this crazy, wacky world?

I have a secret. It's spelled V-I-S-A!

Ain't life grand?
J