Machine Age

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

My husband loves machines. He often displayed considerably more affection for them than he did for his children when they were growing up. Of course, to be fair, machines seldom talked back or refused to show up for curfew. I have always believed that when he passes on to the Great Junk Yard in Heaven, every machine in the house will stop dead in protest—like the grandfather clock in the old song.

His mother told me that when he was so young he hadn’t started elementary school yet, he decided to see how a wind-up alarm clock worked. Once he’d taken it apart, there was no telling–because it never worked again. After he learned to drive, his parents bought him a little roadster as transportation. He spent many happy hours in his driveway adjusting this or upgrading that on his car until one day, it just quit. His dad had it towed to a local garage, and after some serious inspection, the mechanic concluded that the vehicle had the “worst case of tinkeritis” he’d ever seen.

Until I married him, I had never given much thought to machines as objects of affection, but my husband pampered them, indulged them, and spent hours in their company. (Still does now that I think about it.) Years ago, we gave our little Volkswagen bug to my brother and his wife when we had to buy a car with more seats. Unfamiliar with Volkswagens, my brother failed to put oil in it when it registered a quart low, and in a motor that only took two quarts, the engine had no choice but to burn to a crisp. It took my husband years to recover from the details of that horrible death.

While it is lovely to have a fix-it man in residence, my husband is congenitally unable to let any machine suffer a peaceful and well-deserved demise. Especially cars. “Let’s not trade it in,” he tells me. “It just needs a couple of days of attention, and it’ll go another 1,000 miles. Easy.” Which explains why the afternoon when I called home to announce that it looked like the transmission had fallen out of our 10-year-old VW bus and was laying unresponsive on the asphalt, he laughed.

Our auto mechanic neighbor happened to be visiting at the time. From the phone booth at the business nearest my collapsed vehicle, I could hear my husband and his buddy enjoying the description of an amateur. “Of course, it didn’t fall out,” he said. “It’s probably just  a rusted section of tailpipe or a piece of the undercarriage that was cracked by a rock you drove over.” (In his worldview, cars never intentionally betray their owners. When they quit working, the blame can always be laid at the misuse by humans. Mostly his wife and kids.) But he and our neighbor good-naturedly agreed to bring their tools and meet me to see “what I had done to our car.”

Truth was, I had a certain affection for that old bus. I felt a responsibility to protect it because it had always patiently suffered the rigors of carrying eight kids everywhere, so I sat on the curb next to it, blinkers flashing, and waited for rescue.

My two would-be-saviors pulled up, climbed out of the neighbor’s truck, grabbed the toolbox out of the back, and headed over to let the experts assess the problem. Simultaneously, they squatted down next to me and peered under the car. There was a long moment of silence. Stunned faces turned back in my direction. “That’s not the transmission. That’s the drive train,” my husband looked at me accusingly.

“Details.” I dismissed his argument. “It still fell out.”

Our neighbor had been shocked into silence. Now he started muttering something about how he’d “never even heard of such a thing, much less seen it happen.”

“What did you do to it?” My husband glared at me.

“Nothing. I was driving along, and there was this loud clunk. Then the car refused to move another inch.” My husband was obviously suspicious, but the evidence on the ground under the car was clearly in my favor.

We towed the van home where closer inspection revealed that the drive train had been held on by four major bolts. Three of them had sheared off, so when the fourth one went, the drive train threw in the towel and laid down on the job. Permanently.

But did we buy a new car? Nope. We did, however, buy four new bolts. And my husband coaxed that van to keep moving for a couple of more years. Which is unassailable evidence that humans aren’t the only species that benefit from a little patience and a whole lot of tender loving care.