Auto repair is the long tedious labor a mechanic will employ to only charge you a billion dollars an hour to sort and find your auto’s malady.
Repair auto is the insightful labor of a mechanic too proud to let someone else charge him that billion and is determined to do the honors himself. Teaching a young man that trade is a right of passage for a father and son. Either the impetus is the valuable transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next, or to keep a young man from getting totally impaled by the sleazy opportunistic mechanic down the road.
My father was the teacher and I was the student.
Never was his classroom more open than when I got my first car. That 1978 Lincoln Mercury Zephyr that was about the purchase price of a round trip ticket to Alaska during a global pandemic was a sweet ride, or at least I thought. I’m not sure of the name of its color, but banana cream pie would have been correct. Nothing screams sexy more than a short black twenty-something knucklehead driving a large Chiquita on Main Street Middleburg, VA with two matching sets of hub caps. The Level 42 cassette tape pressing the entire factory sound system to its extreme limits didn’t add to the sex appeal.
My dad is a very learned man when it comes to cars, always has been. If I didn’t know any better, he was probably born with a socket wrench in his baby hand. But what he possessed in auto knowledge, he lacked in tact. His auto repair tutelage was tantamount to a Singaporean caning.
That “son of a gun” would ride me like a rented mule when it came to my car. “Did you check the oil lately?” he’d say. “When was the last time you checked your fluids?” or “You check the air in your tires?” blah, blah, blah. He was frickin’ relentless.
It got to the point that all I wanted to do was shut him up. To accomplish muting his pie hole, all I had to do was check all the fluids. So, to get him back, I did one slick thing, I checked all the fluids. Maybe that was his plan all along.
The real agony came when he wanted to show me how to fix something. Trust me, there were plenty of opportunities. With a banana yellow “hooptie” from a lonely single entrepreneur used car lot on the back road outskirts of Winchester, VA, there was no shortage of practice.
I’d love to drive it one more time however I am certain I’m a tad too late. It’s probably repurposed into a very heavy garage shop file cabinet by now, with a faint hue of banana peering through an inch of grit.
Diamonds are created via pressure. I endured my share when it came to cars.
Thanks for the sparkle Pops.