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Father And Son

Guys grow up and get old. And somewhere along the way, we find ourselves doing stuff that our Dads did. They are the very things that drove us crazy when we were young. And being adolescents without working brains of our own, we resolved never…and I mean never…to be anything like the old man.
If we are lucky enough to survive the stupidity of youth, we transform into Dear Old Dad not just physically…which is bad enough…but mentally as well. It is one of the great life pranks.
 
And it happens to nearly everyone because, after all, God is a first-rate practical joker.
When I was a kid, I flat out loved television. The picture was grainy, the number of channels was in the single digits, the comedies were stupid and the dramas predictable. It was heaven in a glass tube.  What could be better than that?
My Dad didn’t watch very much television. Oh sure, he might sit through the evening news. But after that, he would disappear into his bedroom and check the stock market reports. Boring!
My mother and I would bask in the glow of the TV and peer through the fog of cigarette smoke that constantly engulfed the living room. Good times!
Dad didn’t want to be entertained. He wanted to keep up on news, politics and the market. And when he wasn’t doing that, he was fixing something. Dad was a child of the Great Depression. He wouldn’t pay someone to fix anything if he could do it himself. And he could fix anything. Anything.
A perfect example of his uncanny mechanical ability was the repair of his 1969 Cadillac. He had bought the car from my cousin who, as far as Dad was concerned, was foolish enough to buy a new car every two years. This model was one of the first vehicles packed with high tech features. It was a great ride brought down by an electrical short in the wiring harness. Dashboard lights flickered and it wouldn’t start.
 
Dad went down to the dealership and asked how much the replacement part would be. $400. That was a boatload of cash in 1974. There was no way that a guy who spent a good chunk of his youth hoboing his way across the country was going to fork over that kind of money on an overpriced part. No siree. Instead, he went home and took the dashboard off. He was going to fix it himself.
The insides of that dashboard were the most amazing thing I had ever seen. There was nothing but wire. It was like the bionic man. Spacecraft was less complicated. I knew my Dad was smart. But smart enough to get this modern engineering marvel back on the road? No. No way.
Of course, I was wrong. Dad pulled out his little Redi-Tester and systematically tested every single wire in the harness. He found two shorted wires, fished them out of the harness, measured their gauge and replaced them. He put the dashboard back in place, turned the key and varoom! The caddy sprang back to life. He never had another problem with its electrical system after that.
And that repair only took him three and a half weeks to complete. That was every night after work and every waking hour on the weekends.. How many hours? Impossible to say.
It was an amazing accomplishment. But a job like that was definitely not in my wheelhouse. I couldn’t be bothered with fixing things. I was much better at breaking them. Dad was a chemist…organized and patient. I was nothing like that. I was a crazy creative type. I wanted to be a playwright. You don’t get less practical than that.
My Dad and I didn’t have a single chunk of DNA in common. That’s what I thought at the time.
Fast forward a few decades. I am knocking on the door of sixty…the gateway to old age. Our refrigerator has decided to stop making ice or serving cold water. Over the past couple of years, we had a GE repairman out to work on the assortment of good looking but poorly built kitchen appliances. And I had enough of it. I had watched the GE guy fix the microwave on a previous visit. The repairman was a nice guy, knew what he was doing and was in and out in forty five minutes. But that bill almost sent me to the hospital.
When the refrigerator went on the fritz, I saw no reason to call in GE. Hell, I was a smart guy. Between my undergrad and doctorate I had eight years of college. I cruised through biochemistry. There was no way I was going to pay someone to fix something that I could fix myself.
Sound familiar?

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