Tinkering at Tinker

Author © Scott D. Zachary

       “Why can’t you fix a car? Or build a bookcase? Or fix a dripping faucet like your brother Steve?”

       I never responded to my mother’s stinging questions. I didn’t know what to say. Until now. Nobody ever got me started. But once I did, everybody run for the fences! And don’t stop there! As my Honey Bunny often says, “You never do anything half-way, Scott.”

       On this particular day in the spring of 1982, I was helping my friend and co-worker, Lieutenant Bartholomew (Bart) Wright move his family’s belongings from their apartment into the house he’d bought. I’d been wondering what I could do to my own newly purchased and featureless house to put my creative mark on it to make it my own. That blank wall between my living room and kitchen had drawn my attention. Handling, packing, and unpacking Bart’s myriad of woodworking tools lit the fuse of an enduring sparkle. A window box!

       I battered Bart with scores of questions about woodworking tools and their purpose as we traipsed back and forth lugging furniture, kitchenware, clothing, and tools, and tools, and tools. Initially patient, then annoyed, and finally exasperated, Bart relented, “Enough, Scott! I’ll loan you all my carpentry tools, and you can figure it all out.”

       So he did. And I did. Taking four days of leave the following week, I left sanity in its common echelon for six days.

       A friend of a friend was having custom cabinets built throughout his house, and I volunteered to clean up all the high-grade oak and ash scraps that had been discarded. I roughly sketched the outline of my imagined masterpiece on the wall and followed with a more precise penciled definition using Bart’s level and square. I took the plunge and whacked a hole in the wall with my hammer. That was my introduction to drywall or sheetrock or plasterboard, whichever you will. I didn’t know what it was called then, nor did I know the names of many of the tools I was using. I spent eighteen hours a day that week, teaching myself how to use them, including the reciprocating saw that I used to reverberate a rectangular hole through my kitchen/living room wall.

       I had no concept of weight-bearing studs when I sawed through the vertical two-by-four that hindered my progress. The light shining through the first cut assured me that there was no weight on it. I dashed out to the lumberyard and picked up quarter-inch diameter dowels to countersink behind the wood screws to give the appearance that my window box was held together with wooden pegs. I also purchased three- and four-inch diameter dowels that I shaped on Bart’s lathe to provide ornate wooden columns. All the seams were cut to within 1/64^th of an inch. I routed my own intricate design into the frame.

       I tested several stains before I found my favorite. Bart’s compressor enabled me to evenly layer my first woodworking project with ten coats of lacquer, a light emery sanding in between coats as the man at Ace Hardware had suggested. That made it appear as though an inch of water was sitting on the glossy surface.

       At the end of the week, Bart came by and admired my handiwork for a good twenty minutes, oohs and awes escaping his lips. He examined my pride and joy from every angle, admiringly running his fingertips along the contours of my masterpiece. I’ll never forget his twisted expression when he looked at me with utter disbelief. “From which galaxy do you originate? You didn’t even know the difference between a circular saw and a jigsaw last Sunday.” Gesturing regally, “And look at THIS!”

       “Do I get an A, Bart?”

       “A-plus with lots of extra credit! This is one of the finest pieces of woodwork I’ve ever seen, if not the best.”

       That’s where my expedition into the trades began.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       The old, decrepit man sitting in the wheelchair in front of the garage door looked so pitiful, always slumped over and alone. An even more elderly woman would wheel him outside and leave him for hours at a time. Mr. Wizzle periodically nudged me to go visit the lonesome man. Not wanting to butt into other people’s business, I refrained.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       My friend’s friend had offered to pay me to clean up the wood scraps left from his cabinets, but I had declined. Instead, I repaid him. He had complained about the clouds of mosquitoes shadowing his new house in the woods. I went to the library and researched which species of birds are the best at controlling mosquitoes and the type of birdhouse that would attract the insectivores. I repaid him for his contribution to my window box by creating a beautiful five-story purple martin birdhouse from the scraps. I designed it so that it could easily be disassembled each winter for cleaning. When I presented the birdhouse to him, he was wordless. Recovering his senses, he exclaimed, “Magnificent!”

       On my way home, I noticed an old rusted child’s wagon discarded alongside the road. The bed had rusted through, but the detached tongue and wheelbase were salvageable. I took them home and dusted them with my magic: a good sanding and several coats of silver paint. I created a new bed from the last of my donated wood scraps. Not having any pieces of wood large enough for the sides and bottom, I joined pieces of oak and ash using Bart’s tongue-and-groove bits so that the wagon bed looked like a jigsaw puzzle. The sides and bottom were also connected by notched tongues and grooves. The lateral sides were routed with “Precious Sweetie Pie” and “Tinkering at Tinker.” The back end was routed with “REAR END.” Finished, I wheeled my little girl all over the neighborhood in her homemade wagon.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Leaning forward in his wheelchair, the old man hollered, “Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!”

       I walked over to him. “Can I help you with something?”

       He manipulated a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket with the stump of his amputated left arm and extracted a cigarette with his tongue. He gestured for me to light it. I did and lit one of my own.

       “My name’s Scott. What’s your name?”

       “R...R...R...R...R...R...R...R...”

       An elderly woman walked out of the house and heard the man stammering. “Shut up, Richard; nobody wants to hear that garbage.”

       Richard slumped, his cigarette hanging from his mouth.

       “Hello, ma’am, I’m Scott.”

       “Ruby.” The old woman eyed me disdainfully and went back into the house.

       I continued talking with Richard, encouraging him each time he stuttered on a word. Sometimes it took two or three minutes for him to complete a short sentence. Richard explained that he’d had a stroke which paralyzed his good arm. The other arm had been amputated after a hunting accident when he was a teenager. Richard told me that Ruby was his mother.

       I began to visit Richard every day, except on rainy days when he wasn’t outside sitting in his wheelchair in front of the garage. His stepfather, Jack Privett, threw in his two cents on one of my visits, proclaiming, “Drugs and alcohol caused his stroke. He got what he deserved.” Neither Ruby nor Privett ever addressed Richard as a human being. He was their burden and nothing more.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       My house sat on nearly two-thirds of an acre. Bubber and I planted a garden on almost a third of that. My new tiller bounced up and down on the hard clay. We planted 36 tomato plants and harvested about as many tomatoes that summer. Everything else, the potatoes, corn, green beans, squash, cucumbers, peas, and jalapeños didn’t fare that well in the hard clay soil. My neighbors gloated. I felt silly.

       Privett had worked the soil in his garden for several years; the man on the other side of my property had worked his ground for more than twenty. I was shamed, then frustrated, and then all-out determined to do better the next year, much better.

       I took a soil sample to the Soil Analytical Laboratory at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma. For twenty bucks, they told me exactly what to put into my garden to maximize its productivity. They suggested a ton and a half of lime, which the farm store delivered and I tilled into my garden. Their analysis stated that my garden was void of nitrogen, and their report recommended that I evenly distribute two 100-pound bags of 40-10-10 fertilizer across my garden. This equates to 80 pounds of nitrates (nitrogen), 20 pounds of phosphate (contains phosphorus), and 20 pounds of potash (contains potassium). Being the zealot that I am, I figured that if 80 pounds of nitrates would help, then double that would produce twice as much. I did follow their suggestion about picking up bags of weedless grass clippings in the well-kept parts of town to help break up the clay. I tilled the grass into my garden along with piles of leaves from my yard.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       I didn’t know the first thing about speech therapy, but I was providing it for Richard. I also knew nothing about physical therapy, but I began providing that, too. On each visit, I’d slowly and repeatedly extend his right arm while massaging the severely contracted muscles. Then I’d do the same for each of his legs while we smoked in front of their house. Richard’s arm and legs increasingly limbered, and he began to move them himself little by little.

       Privett would occasionally pull into the driveway in his old beat up pickup truck, get out, and inject his sour comments into mine and Richard’s conversation. “If you don’t accept God, you’ll burn in hell.”

       “I’m not interested in your god.”

       I don’t remember how Privett prompted me to tell him that my wife was a Jehovah’s Witness. That was a mistake—a big mistake! Privett began pompously preaching to me and giving me tracts that showed pictures of people burning alive. “This is what’s going to happen to your wife—and you—if you don’t smarten up.”

       My wife’s religious proclamations about not celebrating birthdays, Christmas, and all the other holidays had already disgusted me toward religion. The more I witnessed Privett’s religious condescension, the more my contempt for religion became unbounded.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       I had never even dabbled in auto mechanics unless you want to count the time in Germany when I replaced the broken throttle cable by jury-rigging my VW Beetle’s throttle lever with booby-trap tripwire strung from the engine compartment around the outside of the car to my driver-side window. The tricky part was holding the tripwire spool in my hand with my arm out the window and learning to coordinate pressing the clutch while slacking the tripwire to ease off the gas and then yanking it to accelerate—all while remembering to shift in between and steering with one knee.

       Bart mentioned at work one day that he needed to tune his car, and I asked him if he would teach me. He said he would love to as long as I did the work because he hated getting his hands greasy. Bart brought his Volvo by the house and proceeded to teach me the principles of operation for an internal combustion engine.

       He instructed me on how to clean and re-gap his spark plugs, adjust the point gap setting to the specification of .020 inches using a feeler gauge, and change his oil. Then he repeated the process with me on my Chevy Malibu, first presenting me with a gift—a timing light! “It is such a good feeling to hear the crankshaft of a well-tuned engine purr like a kitten,” as Bart would say.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       “Are you ready to try walking, buddy?”

       Richard hesitantly grinned. I walked to the door, knocked, and Ruby appeared on the other side of the screen.

       “Would you like to see your son take his first steps? Watch.”

       She stood there without responding.

       I’d been working with Richard for a couple of months. I knew he could do it. I touched his shoulders with my fingers to let him know that I was there to catch him if he stumbled. “Let’s go, Richard. Let’s do it. Just like the little train.”

       Richard slowly stood up from his wheelchair, shaking.

       “You can do it, buddy.”

       “I can do it. I know I can. I know I can.” His speech was fluid, without hesitation.

       Richard took a lurching step. And then another.

       I turned my head to see Ruby’s reaction.

       She was gone.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       Dan Mayo, the husband of one of Bubber’s religious friends, and I hit it off big time. Dan had worked in Air Force Civil Engineering for fifteen years. He knew the practical end of all the trades, and I would soon begin teaching him the mathematics and sciences behind them. He told me that he was working part-time remodeling bathrooms on the weekends. I volunteered to help him for minimum wage so I could learn plumbing, electrical, framing, and all the other trades involved. He underbid the first job that I helped him with, so I told him he didn’t need to pay me since I was receiving enough pay through his teaching. Most of Dan’s remodeling jobs went all the way down to the framing studs and joists. My favorite part was when Dan would say, “Scrap the bathroom, Scott,” and I instantly applied my enthusiastic Sawzall, crowbar, and sledgehammer.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

       The spring rains in Oklahoma are torrential. Our yard was solid clay; therefore, the soil couldn’t absorb the frequent cloudbursts. The angle of our backyard directed the current toward our house. Bubber tried to mop up the water sluicing through the sliding glass doors, barely keeping up with the watery onslaught. When the downfall eased, I looked out and saw the source of our problem—Privett had constructed an earthen dam across the back of his yard, angled toward our property. He had solved his problem of the rains washing out his garden by making it my problem and giving me double the usual runoff. Privett’s unabashed self-proclamation echoed in my mind: “I’m a good Christian, but...”

       By the time we had cleaned up all of the water that had coursed into our house and I had showered, it was eight o’clock. I walked over to Privett’s house and knocked on the door. Privett opened the door and invited me into his living room.

       “The dam that you constructed to keep the water from washing out your garden diverted your water runoff onto my property and flooded my house. Please stop channeling your water into my yard. If you would like me to help you build a French drain along the length of your property to channel your runoff into the ditch out front, I’d be glad to.”

       “GET OUTTA MY HOUSE!!!”

       I turned toward the door to make a quick exit.

       “Get off my property, and if you ever come back here, I’ll...”

       Hearing Privett’s voice approaching me rapidly from behind, I turned back toward him to defend myself.

       He stopped abruptly.

       “I thought so.” I opened the door and departed.

       My boss, Captain Jones, called me the next day from Tinker Air Force Base. “Scott, I received a phone call a few minutes ago from a man named Jack Privett. He claims that you went over to his house after ten o’clock last night. He told me that you were drunk, that you threatened him, and that you frightened his wife.”

       “Milton, you know that I haven’t had a drink for three months. Privett built a dam across the back of his yard to divert his water runoff onto my property. Double the usual runoff flooded my house yesterday. After cleaning up the mess in my house, I went over to his place. He invited me in, and I asked him politely to not divert his water onto my property and even offered to help him build a French drain to solve his runoff problem. He viciously threatened me, and I left as fast as I could. There were no threats on my part. And it couldn’t have been after ten o’clock. The Jack Van Impe show came on as I walked in Privett’s door. That show starts at eight o’clock.”

       “I have no reason to doubt your word, Scott. I know you’re on leave, but I’ll need you to come into my office and make a written statement about everything that transpired yesterday.”

       “Yes, sir. I’ll be in your office toute suite.”

       By the time I drove to Captain Jones’ office and wrote my statement, there was no turning back. All of my missiles were locked onto Privett, and I had pushed the button labeled “FIRE”.

Click here to read Part 2 of “Tinkering at Tinker”