The Long Stitch, No. 11

I could carry a drink before I could carry much else. That was the job — out to the garage, one at a time, to my father and my brother and whichever men were out there with them that day, hood up, elbows deep in something. I was small enough that it was a long walk for a person holding something full.

There were other reasons to make the trip. We had animals on the farm that had nothing to do with farming — cats, dogs, and a peacock named Charlie, who had strong feelings about where he was permitted to be, which was everywhere. Going out to the garage meant going out to all of it at once. The work, the company, the animals underfoot.

I was turning a wrench not long after. Big block engines. Corvettes, Camaros, Mustangs. I still think they are the most beautiful things anybody has built.

If you have never stood in a garage with a classic car taken apart on the floor around you, I can tell you exactly what it smells like. Oil. Fumes. Grease. And underneath all of it, warming, the leather from the interior. I can call it up in a second, sitting in my kitchen in Florida in August.

There was a lesson in all of it I did not understand at the time.

Nobody handed us instructions. You got the thing in front of you, and you took it apart, and you paid attention to how it came apart, because that was the only record of how it went back together. You learned an engine by disassembling one. You learned what a part was for by removing it and seeing what stopped working. My father let me watch, and then he let me do it, and then he let me get it wrong.

I get asked where I trained more than any other question. People expect an answer with a name in it — a school, a program, someone I studied under. The honest answer is a concrete floor in rural North Central Florida with a car in pieces on it.

I have never taken a class in construction. What I do instead is take the object apart. Sometimes with a seam ripper, sometimes only in my head — turning it over, following the seam around the corner, working out which piece was cut first and what order the whole thing was assembled in. Where the leather turns. What is hidden and what is load-bearing. Then I put it back together my way.

It is the same skill. It has always been the same skill. I just moved it indoors.