Dad – Lo Vedo Life

A man and his garage

During their married life, my parents lived in two houses, and in each of them the garage was my father’s man cave. It was where he went to tinker, which he was remarkably good at. He solved many a household problem, even when the rest of us weren’t aware there was a problem. He’d go out to the garage and sketch one or two possible solutions, and then spend a great deal of time crafting this or that object, using whatever he could find to make the perfect gizmo.

While Dad was a good problem-solver and creative thinker, he was not the most organized guy on the block. Added to that, he was a child of the Depression, and like a great many Americans of that era, Dad simply could not bring himself to discard anything that might one day in the future have a remote possibility of being the tiniest bit useful. Bits of wire, a mind-boggling array of wrenches and hex keys, a great many items that had been torn, broken or moth-eaten, long-empty bottles of various garage-oriented fluids: he had in mind that someday, any one of these items could be the exact thing he would need to make a repair or to create something wholly new. He also had a pretty good idea of where everything was and could find what he needed almost immediately, even if he hadn’t laid eyes on it in years. Nowadays we call it hoarding, but I know some ranchers who call it the original form of recycling.