A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

Lawnmower Repair

42 Lawnmower Repair The neighbor was trying to start his lawnmower. No soap. The thing was dead. “Why don’t you start it the way my dad starts ours?” my son suggested. “How’s that?” the neighbor asked. “He kicks it and says, ‘#$%**&*.’” I hail from a long line of mechanical Neanderthals, from people fundamentally cross-threaded for mechanics. Other men reach for just the right box wrench and loosen bolts deftly. I can never find the right wrench, so I crimp on an oversized pair of vice grips and inevitably round the top of the bolt to the point where it will be stuck there for eternity. Either that or I apply enough pressure to make the obstinate bolt give way all at once, slamming my knuckles into some nearby flange, drawing blood and a few minutes of “#$%**&*.” Not for me the satisfaction that comes with knowledge, aptitude, competence, tenacious patience, and maturity. No. I learned everything I know about home mechanics from my father—including “#$%**&*.” At our house, the tools were kept in an old metal box—a tin thing maybe twenty inches long, a foot wide, and ten inches deep. It was designed to look like a wicker picnic hamper, with little paintings in a faux early automobile motif. But there was no holiday in the offing when that thing came out. L AW NMOW ER REPAIR 43 There was a sixteenth of an inch of oily grit on the bottom— iron filings and rust and gunk from projects past. The tools themselves were remarkably bad. A mixture of woodworking and mechanic’s devices, they were cheap, chipped, and rusting. Loose-jointed, mismatched, and diabolically malevolent. There were razor blades in there and spools of rusty wire and errant nails and tacks and stiff wire brushes to poke holes in your fingertips as you rummaged around. Surely tetanus lurked only an errant eighth of an inch away as you poked your pudgy little fingers in, stirring the muck, hoping the right bolt, nut, or screw would churn up. Then there was what was not in there—the right-sized socket, ratchet, screwdriver, or wrench. Whatever you needed was almost sure to be missing, no doubt hiding somewhere out in the lawn, where someone dropped it after making a quick bike repair and pedaling off. Not to worry. More often than not you would find it later, usually by running over it with the lawnmower. We Smiths started any project at a disadvantage, three steps behind any other kid on the block, with the wrong tool or a broken tool and a bad attitude. Looking back now, I can see I approached those jobs the way I played high school nose tackle. Every project was an opponent, something to be subdued as quickly and aggressively as possible. “Take that, you #$%**&*.” Nor are Smiths graced with great manual dexterity. We lack fine motor skills. To watch us work is to want to reach in and take over, to take the project out of our bumbling hands. We spent our formative years trying to reach in and take over from one another. It was not a good thing to do if whoever was holding the tool had had time to work himself into a frenzy of frustration. And so it went for years. Engine adjustments and carburetor tweaks befuddled us—especially those involving needle valves. If the manual recommended seating the valve completely, then opening it a quarter turn to the left, we would somehow find our- 44 L AW NMOW ER REPAIR selves going two and a quarter turns. Two and a quarter led to five. Eventually the entire #$%**&! mechanism would fly out of its seat, disassemble in midair, and come to rest under the workbench , way back under the workbench where you couldn’t reach it on your hands and knees. You had to lie on your stomach and poke at it with the handle end of the push broom. All these skills we learned from my father, a smallish, intelligent , introspective man who applied his own logic to home repair projects. Not for him the simple, straightforward thinking that allowed the human race to come down out of the trees and invent civilizations. My father was a thinking man, and thinking required a certain left-handed, outside the box, Rube Goldberg approach to home repair and maintenance. If he couldn’t get the result...