I am burning incense in a special holder that was made from an old aluminum lawn chair. It has a wooden base, made from scraps left over from a carving project. It holds a lot of ash in a safe place, so it doesn’t blow all over the room. That chair also was used to make a trolley for two large trash cans. It has wheels that used to be on something else, and a nice handle for steering it down the driveway on Trash Day.
The guy who made these things was born in a sod hut in Oklahoma Territory. He only got through the third grade in school, but when he retired he was an executive at General Electric, where he had worked for many years.
He was very creative and inventive, as you can tell. He made a stereo system in our basement in the 1950s that included a Garrard turntable on a sliding shelf that retreated into a cabinet; speakers from a drive-in theater that were on a hinged door under the stairway so they could be moved at a 270 degree angle and aim the sound anywhere in the basement; and a slide projector that hid in an adjacent cabinet, with a movie screen that unrolled from behind a valence when it was time to show slides.
I know that I got my inquiring mind from him. I look at things and think about how they could be used in another way. It colors the way I look at problem solving beyond the physical world. It affects the way I use words, and ideas.
There are many things I don’t know about my father, but I do know that he was curious about how things worked, and willing to take risks and experiment. He created his own PowerPoint setup from a drafting table with a hinged glass top where he stuck three- dimensional numbers and letters that developed shadows as he changed the light source above them. He photographed them for use as captions of things that he sold for GE, and made slide presentations for demonstrations when he was on the road.
Even though he has been dead for nearly twenty years now, I find myself starting to call over my shoulder, “Oh, come and look what I found on the Internet! You’ll love this!” I know that he would be fascinated by how the computer works, and he would be willing to spend hours looking at photos of birds and articles about soil enrichment and tree pruning.
I wish I could show him the manuscripts I have written in Word, and the books that appear on Amazon.com and the journal articles that are on the Web. I wish he could hold in his hands the books and articles that have my name on them. I wish he could use a CAD program to doodle and design, making more of his inventive gadgets.
I find that the longer he has been dead, the smarter he gets. When I was little and he’d answer a question with “Well, that’s about as long as a piece of string,” it would frustrate me no end. But when I found those words coming out of my own mouth, I realized what a wise reply that was. He understood more about perspective and context than I had given him credit for. And when he talked about cost versus worth, he said, “Something is only worth what you can get for it.” I think about the huge box of my mother’s dishes in the closet in the basement and think that they are worth more to me than they are anyone else, so they escape being put up on eBay for another day. I learned “Never loan more money than you can afford to lose”, and “It’s not *what* you say, but how you say it.”
I salute you, Dad, with saltines carrying pimento cheese and tomato ketchup raised on high, and thank you for all the stuff you gave me. Maybe we can have a bowl of cottage with sugar on it for dessert.
Bright Blessings,
Spiral Crone
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