The practical man's workshop

My father was a man of great practicality. 

And frugality. Extreme frugality.

Some might say he was a “cheapskate,” but that is true only insofar as a man who mows hell’s own five acres of crabgrass and creeping vine and brittle blue shale with a ninety-nine-dollar Walmart pushmower may be considered a “cheapskate.” 

Maybe having a half-horse pushmower was a luxury to men like my father. Maybe he considered riding mowers a little too snooty.

As I think about my 52-inch zero-turn with its big Kawasaki engine, all I know is I’ll never know.

Sometimes I take stock of my own manly riches and compare myself to my father.

My mowers are parked in a sheltered row and plugged into trickle chargers. My tools are organized in a four-foot rolling workbench, ratchets and wrenches in one drawer, wood-working and other implements in another. Motor oils and fluids and consumables sit together on a shelf, and spare parts are in labeled boxes.

Compared to how my father kept shop, it is pure extravagance. Hedonism, even. 

He never owned a shop, anyway. My father would never have spent thousands of dollars on an enclosed garage. Think of how many pushmowers that would buy... 

For my father, and many men of the old generation, nature provided its own storage solutions.

If you needed a crowbar, it was always hanging in the union of a dogwood tree by the driveway. The jack and tire tools were piled together beside the old pumphouse — from the first well, not the second. His twelve-foot aluminum ladder, more bent and warped than a snake-bit preacher, was always hidden by tufts of broomsedge out by the power pole, but if you needed it you could hack it loose with a few strokes of the rusty slingblade that had been passed down to him by his father, or perhaps the Pilgrims.

Fuel cans? He was not a man to spend twenty dollars on a fuel can. Gasoline went into discarded milk jugs, one gallon at a time.

In his later years, I tried to bring some conveniences into his life. 

When he got himself a pickup truck, I bought and installed a diamondplate toolbox for the bed. I proudly showed him the opposing gullwing lids as I handed him the keys. Dismayed, he asked, “did you drill holes in my new pickup?”

I bought him a battery-powered drill and a heap of drill bits and socket adapters to replace the one corded drill he had used all my life, a five-pound steel weapon of a handrill held together with black electric tape. I tell you, without exaggeration, it threw lightning bolts from the chuck whenever you used it.

I built a simple rolling workbench in the carport and nailed a sheet of pegboard to the wall. I organized his pliers and screwdrivers, gathered his sockets together into a single handheld job box, hung up his saws and one lonely spare mower blade. I bought a five-gallon fuel can. I brought the jack in from the pump house.

I backed over the ladder and twisted it even more. I said nothing, and he blamed the power company trucks.

But my improvements came too late. My father was in his late 70s, and a combination of Atrial Fibrillation and vertigo and ministrokes slowly beat him down to nothing. The tools were organized, but unused. The gas in the new fuel can went stale. He finally did buy a riding mower, late in life, but it slowly rotted from disuse until he gave it to me to overhaul and operate.

The night he died, I sat beside his deathbed to attend him and we watched old episodes of Trucks and Horsepower TV. We watched men tear down old motors, salvaged from junkyards, to clean them up and reassemble them into capable powerplants, their muscle charted on line graphs of horsepower and foot-pounds. 

Every two hours, I filled a syringe with liquid morphine and leaned over to squeeze the dropper into his mouth. He was sleeping deeply, in a long a cycle of agonal breathing, last conscious sometime the previous afternoon. He never saw me, or the television. He died just before three in the morning. The hospice nurse was there within the hour, and the funeral home came to take him away at sunrise.

By then, the television motors were reinstalled into farm trucks, or everyday halftons. Practical vehicles, denuded of chrome and glossy paint, fit for practical men. Frugal men.

My father would have liked that. 

I like to think, when they were finished filming those television shows, the mechanics washed their hands, swept the shop floor, and hung their tools from a low tree limb.