Tools of My Father...

Like most kids of my generation I didn't spend a lot of one on one time with my dad. Dad's as a whole weren't as hands on as they are now. Sure you did stuff as a family, but just you and your dad hanging out? Not really. Not then.

My mom and I got one on one time for a stretch during my 7th and 8th grade years. She didn't work on Fridays during that time so I often didn't go to school on Friday and we spent the day running errands together. I honestly have no idea why she decided to do that, but yes, my first ditch buddy was my mother. She had no idea what she was creating.

Anyway... my dad had two jobs for most of my life. He worked 7 days a week. A day job and a night job. The days off from his day job he still had his night job to go to and vice versa. It was a constant grind. During the week he would do his day job, come home have an early dinner, take a nap, get up sometime in the night go to his overnight job, get home in the very early hours, take another nap, get up and go to his day job.

That was my dad until I was around 13 or 14 and he was able to let the night time job go. So you can see that even if he had been one of those really involved dads he wouldn't have had the time to hang out with us one on one.

Unless you were fixing something. I spent a lot of hours "helping" dad fix things. I joke that a lot of that time was spent pouring over Chilton manuals seeing if the extra screws we had leftover from rebuilding a car part were to something important. My dad was an inventor and a tinkerer. He made all sorts of gadgets we had around the house to do chores. A lot of those I'd see many years later in "As Seen on TV!" spaces. But instead of crafted out of wood and spare parts they would be made out of cheap plastic. But his brain worked in that direction. What would make this thing work better? What tool would be helpful here? And then he'd make it.

He fixed things in the same way. What isn't working about this thing? Let me stare at it for a bit then make something to make it work.

He and mom were kids of the depression. You fixed things instead of throwing them away. And if they couldn't be fixed you saved them to salvage parts to fix other things. And since he and Mom were never rich (see the worked two jobs mentioned earlier) he never stopped fixing and creating. And I got to help him make things.

Brent bought some planter boxes to hang on our front railing. They were supposed to fit small rails but did not. We looked at them and couldn't see how to adjust them down to a smaller size so figured we'd just use them as planter boxes on the ground. Today I was in the garage working out and looked at the bracket and thought to myself, "Are you your father's daughter or aren't you? You can figure out how to make these boxes work the way Brent wants them to."

So I picked up the brackets and studied them for a bit and then, I have to admit, I did something that would have shocked my father to his core. I read the instructions. Brent had kept them from when he first built them so I looked through them to see if there was something we were missing. And there was. You could put the bracket together in different configurations depending on what size you needed the finished product to be.

I went back and forth to the porch to figure out the sizing a few times and finally got it worked out. Then Brent came out and refinished to box and we went to hang it up and...it was a touch too small. Well shoot. The medium fix was too big, and I had made the small fix the largest it could go and we were still just off a touch. I showed Brent where I had adjusted and he said, "If we take out one set of the screws it could work." And it did.

And I had to laugh. Just like working with my Dad. Leftover screws and all.