Wearing diapers and swinging wrenches
Circa 1970
Most
people can’t remember when they were really young, I mean really,
really young but it’s different for me. I remember parts of my
life from when I was two years old, maybe from when I was even
younger. These aren’t always complete memories, they are more
like bits and pieces but they are crystal clear and remain so to this
day. I remember images of the Vietnam War during the early
1970’s, I remember images of the various space flights, the political
unrest, the protests, the social changes … I remember Walter Cronkite’s
voice and David Brinkley’s voice as well on the evening news. I
watched all of this as it occurred and I did so with wide open blue
eyes while sitting in front of an old console style Zenith color TV …
the kind of console TV where when you changed the channel you flipped a
big knob that had a very profound “chunt” sound to it as it moved from
one notch to another.
The
very early years of my life were spent watching color TV while drinking
warm milk from a bottle, watching all of the news and social events
unfold in the world around me and sitting in real cloth diapers secured
with huge metal safety pins that had cute plastic animal faces on
them. The safety pins were supposed to be child proof and
impossible for a child to open (thus stab their tiny little self with
the huge cactus needle-like pin) but my mom probably lost track of all
the times that I managed to open my child-proof safety pin secured
diapers. It was a challenge for me, to figure out anything around
me that was mechanical … and to escape from anything that was
restrictive or confining. I mean, even at an early age my parents
should have seen what was coming for them on down the road …
I
can’t remember the exact year that the following event happened but I
do remember that I was still in diapers, which means that I was
probably a year and a half old, living in Birmingham, Alabama with my
family at the time. We were renting an older, small house until
our new, much larger house could be built. The year was between
1970 and 1971 which meant that Nixon was still in the White House,
MOPAR was burning up the roads with the Rapid Transit Authority and
America was still waging war in Vietnam. I was still the only
child (my sister wouldn’t arrive until the next year … she was a new
for ’72 model) and thus my parents gave me their full share of
attention. Suffice to say that I was more than a handful.
My
father, back then, kept his prized collection of hand tools in a
surplus, olive drab US Army .30 caliber metal ammunition box. The
surplus ammo box was dented and still had some of the faded yellow
military stencil lettering scripted on the side, that much I remember,
enough to make out what was once in it … that is, if I could have read
at the time. The surplus ammunition box was full of every tool
that my dad needed; open end box wrenches (in a custom metal carrier
built by my mother’s father in his welding shop), adjustable wrenches,
slotted and Phillips head screw drivers, a gimlet, a midget slotted
screw driver, a sheathed full tang Bowie knife, needle nose pliers, a
hammer and whatever else my father had at the time which wasn’t all
that much given the rather small dimensions of the ammunition
box. What blew my mind as a child was that my dad was
always pulling something out of his tool
box that I swore hadn’t been in there before and that I swore wouldn’t
all go back in again when he was finished. In
hindsight, when I think that everything that my father ever needed to fix
anything in our lives resided in a greasy, dented, faded, olive drab surplus
Army ammunition box, and when I look at my two huge rolling tool kits in my
garage each stock full of well worn tools, I find it all a bit strange that
my father did so much with so few tools and that I need so many tools to do
what little I do. Yes, I believe that there was some kind of special magic
in that old surplus Army ammo box, just like that big top hat that Frosty the
Snowman wore.
I remember one
Saturday afternoon I was spending time outside with my father. He
had been cutting the yard with a light blue big wheel Yazoo push mower
when something had happened to one of the wheels. I can’t
remember what the problem was but my father wanted to get the wheel off
to make some kind of repair to the Big Blue Yazoo (as I used to call
it). I remember sitting there in the driveway of the rental
house, next to the fresh cut green grass slathered Big Blue Yazoo and
watching my father working hard trying to get the small front wheel off
of the lawnmower.
I was content to rummage around in his old surplus military tool box, grabbing out tools and looking them over.
My
father must have felt some amount of pride at what I was doing even
though he also probably thought that I was just playing with his
wrenches and had no idea what I was looking at or what any of the tools
were actually used for let alone how to use them in any worthwhile
capacity. Remember, I was about a year and a half old at this
time, still wearing diapers and drinking from a bottle.
After
about ten minutes of toil and frustration, my father became so
disgusted with the Big Blue Yazoo that he stepped into the house to
cool off and get something to drink, leaving me under the careful watch
of my mother and grandmother who were doing a bit of light yard work in
and around the front of the house where I sat. Having seen what
my father was trying to do, and understanding what needed to be done, I
picked up one of the wrenches out of the tool box and began to remove
the wheel from the lawnmower. I can still remember the feel of
the course screw drive under my tiny fingers, the greasy feel it left
as it spun in the case and I matched the width of the wrench jaws to
the bolt on the wheel of the lawnmower.
Five
minutes later, my father returned with a glass of ice water for him and
a bottle of fruit juice for me. I held the wheel of the lawnmower
up for him, the very wheel that he had worked so hard to remove, along
with the nut that had secured it to the lawnmower.
My
father was speechless … and to this day, he still cannot explain how a
one and a half year old, in a cloth diaper, and left alone with a box
full of tools for which the one and a half year old knew nothing about,
managed to use an adjustable wrench to remove a stubborn lawnmower
wheel that my father had previously spent ten minutes trying to remove
and could not.
It’s one of his favorite stories to tell, even to this day.
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