Yesterday we packed-up the family and drove to my parents’ house for an Easter dinner. It was great to see the entire crew, watch my parents try to deal with so many grandchildren all at once, and to thoroughly trounce not one but two of my brothers at crokinole–overheard during the beating: “I know you’re not this good” Yes, yes I am. “I think there is something wrong with this board”…but I digress.
What really affected me was the conversation I had with my grandmother. She had brought an article to read to us about how much the world has changed for those born before 1945. For fifteen minutes she enumerated a list that included: television, computers, frozen food, sex changes, rock music, and a hundred other things so common you’d hardly think to mention them now.
The conversation meandered to my brother’s recent problems with his furnace, and the hilarity [ed: he didn't find it funny] of multiple repairmen, each more inspiring than the last, but all unable to produce any heat. It was at this point that my grandmother joined the two threads together and started to talk about what is most different today, namely, that you can’t fix things.
She told about how my grandfather made his living repairing radios, toasters, fans–anything and everything electrical. He’d only received a 4th grade education in Scotland, before he had to start earning a living to support the family. She described how their entire house, with its mechanical and other systems, was kept working through his creativity and persistence. When the well pump went, he made a new one out of parts from three others. When he read about television for the first time, he built one out of radio parts. When a friend’s furnace quit working, rather than letting it go to the dump, he brought it home and scavenged parts that later made his own work again. He was passionate about reusing things creatively.
When he died, the same year I was born, my grandma told us that she wasn’t sure how she’d go on. Not only did she have to deal with the loss of her husband, but also, she was now left with dozens of systems that had been made to work through love and patience, systems for which there was no manual. Nothing was new; nothing would work on its own for very long. She can remember the well pump going first, and sitting down starting to cry, knowing that she wasn’t able to do what he’d done. “But then I’d hear it–don’t give up, you can’t quit, don’t give up–and it was him, urging me to succeed, willing me win as he had won.” She fixed the pump, and one by one, all the other systems too. For years she carried on what he had begun, without training, without really knowing how.
I found this all very emotional, especially from a 90+ year old woman who still lives on her own, still rides the bus to get her groceries so she won’t be a bother, still helps the ‘old people’ in her building whenever she can. She said she couldn’t believe how today it isn’t possible to fix things like my brother’s furnace, how everything is disposable, unfixable.
I realized at that moment how much I understood what she was saying. My grandmother has never used a computer and doesn’t understand what the Internet is. But I was finally able to tell her what I do: I take things that were never meant to go together and work with them until they fit, patiently refusing to give-up even when it’s not clear I can make it work. Where she and my grandfather worked with pump motors, I work with source code. It might not be possible to fix a furnace any more, but you can still fix software–open source software.
I told her about Mozilla and a dozen other projects and when I’d finished explaining this to her, she smiled and let me know with a look that she was pleased. “He’d have been so proud of you.” It gave me comfort to know that I’m not so far removed from my ancestors. Some things only change their form, but live forever.
Deep in my soul there is something of that man, patiently working with things he didn’t understand, knowing that ‘impossible’ isn’t the same as ‘hard,’ an internal voice urging me to never give-up, not to quit; the same voice with which I teach: don’t give up, you can’t quit, don’t give up. I would have liked to have known him.
22 Comments
That was a really touching post. Your grandfather sounds a lot like mine, always tinkering, always fixing…
Yeah, I agree. Some of our ancestors were really resourceful. I think our species thrives thanks to this kind of people, recreated in every generation. I hope you’ll keep fixing the parts of the world you know best and I thank you for it.
Thanks for such a nice writeup, it gave me much to think about… I wish I were half the handyman my dad is; he never ceases to amaze me.
Damn! It’s a once-a-year thing that anything on the Internets actually brings tears to my eyes. This post is so true and your grandma put it so well.
In my youth, technology was a glorious, physical thing: Apollo rockets, the Concorde, atomic energy, cool new engineering everwhere. Great, physical, manly, even gigantic. What have we got now? Stuff for pygmies: Microchips, DNA, test-tube stuff. Give a toddler a hammer and ten seconds of unsupervised time and it’s all gone. Even as an engineer, the most physical you’ll ever get is moving that f*g mouse around the desk.
I admit that open-source has brought new thrills, compared to the rest of present-day cutting-edge tech. But wouldn’t you rather cooperate with hundreds of dedicated volunteers from around the world building a colony on Mars than shuffling around some lines of Java? I sure would.
I hate the 21st century. Stuff sucks. People are wimps. Stuff makes them so. Just a week ago I kicked my son-in-law for not knowing how to open the hood of his own car! And he’s an engineer, too. Of course, once the hood was open, I realized that my fury was futile. Nothing left to fix there.
Wow – your post really reminded me of my grandparents. They both passed away 10 years ago now, but they had the same spirit as yours I feel. Both made do with what they had, lived and prospered through the great depression.
My grandfather taught me to take things apart, figure out what each component added to the design, what the intentions of the engineer really was, make things more “pure” to the intent. My grandmother taught me to ask questions – not just memorize a formula for example, but understand what each part meant to the sum.
I miss both of them, but I will always remember what they taught me; I use the knowledge every day.
Thanks for making my day!
Woah, your grandfather made a TV out of radio parts? That must have been a hassle.
Great story, thanks for the read ^^
Are we better people for what we have invented???? We are lazer Our kids can’t go out because of smog,heat, Petafiles and there is no where for them to play we have built on every piece of land. The toys and games are so real that they think they are what they play. Pimos,gangsters, drug,dealers,car,thief. We played games but we used comen since we new this stuff was not real.We are not as good as our past we have no amagenation no want no common sense we can’t use our hands Our grand parents would not be proud, You would have never seen them hire an illegal to do there job or rebuild something when it broke.
Awesome post.
Your evocative post reminds me of Poppy & Nonny (my grandparents).
Your Grandmother remembers how life was before Modern Conveniences, Planned Obsolescence, and the proliferation of low-cost manufacturing. “Disposable / Unfixable” EVERYTHING makes no sense to me either.
KEEP THAT COM CHANNEL OPEN. ;-D
Your Grandmother brought the article to read to her family and took the time to name all the Changes listed in the article. As your brother’s furnace was discussed your Grandmother had an epiphany (I think?) and immediately shared her insight with her family — she double-dipped by illustrating her point using autobiographical details.
Sounds to me like she wants to share, like she has some things to say…
Betcha she’d be thrilled if you shared your post with her…have it framed.
I think she rocks.
Ed. Way to resist new-fangled inventions like spell checkers. You fight the good fight.
On a more serious note:
The post was very touching, and a bit depressing as we look around at the disposable culture we have created. I don’t think tinkering is dead, in spite of what the IP lawyers of large corporations want you to believe. Tinkering has broadened its horizons repeatedly over the years, from mechanical to water, to steam, to electrical, and now from analog to digital. It is not inconceivable that it will broaden even further to biological or nano-mechanical. Being able to master all of these fields requires broader knowledge and skills and puts them farther out of reach of the average joe… but collaborative technologies like the internet allow us to share specialized knowledge even more readily. Don’t know how to fix your furnace? Find (or create) a web forum on how to manage the 8 bit electronics commonly found in the standard furnace assembly. A good example would be when I needed to work on my Mazda mini van, the modern automobile is an icon to standoffish tech inaccessibility, I went to a forum caled “MPVManiacs” asked my question, and received my answer which fixed my problem. Am I a master mechanic? No, but I can use Google.
Self-sufficient tinkering is a mindset. That being said: the complexity of modern living requires specialization, if for no other reason than it keeps the specialists (something we are all becoming) employed.
Nice post, and excellent point.
However, you *can’t* make a TV entirely out of radio parts. You need a cathode ray tube, and radios don’t have those.
“Woah, your grandfather made a TV out of radio parts? That must have been a hassle.”
May be not too! Because during our grandparent’s generation, companies still manufactured repairable quality goods and not like today’s gadgets which are patently defective!
This is important.
When we all finally run out of fuel, who will come to fix the furnaces?
Lack of self-sufficiency means the difference between slow decline and fast collapse.
I haven’t played crokinole in ages.
If I had children I’d name my daughter Crokinole and my son Kurplunk.
Mozilla?! So are you responsible for the constant “Firefox has encountered a problem and must close! Sorry for the inconvenience.” ?!?!?!?!?!?! Thanks for that “update.”
While what you grandfather did was pretty incredible – building a tv from radio parts! – what your grandmother did was the greater story, imho.
At least he had the benefit of working with professional quality parts. She’s the one who had to figure out your grandfathers patchwork crazy homemade system and repair it. The former sounds more like open source software. The latter, more like working with hacked multi-developer legacy code…
Perfect, from a literary standpoint, a philosophical standpoint, and a technical standpoint. I once needed a jump start from someone when living outside of suburbia. The only lady who came around didn’t know what I was asking her to do. As in, had never heard of people doing what I was going to do.
She didn’t have cables (I did though), she didn’t know how to open her hood, and she was afraid I was going to kill her battery when she saw me hooking up cables to it, after I told her what I was hooking the cables up to.
I’m glad I read this.
Please move your footer 1 px to the left
I have never before seen such a perfect emotional distillation of this particular sort of pride. Thanks. Got a little teary.
Great story.. reminded of my grandfather and my dad.
You wrote an impressive story. Thanks for that.
With the best wishes from Germany
So there’s an NPR radio show, Car Talk, where two brothers, who happen to be MIT-graduate mechanics with ridiculous Boston accents, answer people’s questions about their cars.
The answers are usually like, “Oh, is it making this sound — PHTBBBBBBBBBBB? And only when you turn left? Aha, your right front brake coolant confrobulator bolt is stripped, that’ll cost you about $XXXX.”
But when someone calls with a question about an old car, pre-1960 or so, the answer is more like, “What you need is a squirt bottle full of water, and you spray a few squirts into the carburetor.” Then the caller frets about the possibility of ruining the engine, and they say, “Oh no no no no, cars of that era are virtually indestructible no matter what you do to them. Try the squirt bottle thing, and if that doesn’t work, you need to haul off kick it.”
I wonder if the engineering tradeoff here is “fuel-efficient serviceable” or perhaps “clean serviceable”… I suspect and hope it is not “cheap good”.
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Excellent post. Keep it up!