The Puzzle

Enrolling at Emily Griffith was not necessarily of the incongrous nature it appeared to be. Although in recounting this decision to others later down the road I made it seem to be a clean start borne out of nowhere. But the truth was that it was a puzzle whose pieces were slow in being put together. By making it seem black and white, I added drama to my tale. It wasn't intentional, simply that I had forgotten, myself, where exactly the desire to change had come from. In hindsight, the seed was planted so many years before.

When I lived in Portland, freshly emancipated from the confines of school, I had a full head of dreadlocks, a semi-permanent hemp necklace and a girlfriend whose vegan proclivities rolled over into my denial of the pig and the cow flesh. I lived the ho-hum life of a 90's hippie who was content to spend his nights with friends around a dark and creamy pitcher of home-brew or taking in a dollar rerun with those same friends at the arty Bagdad Theater down the street from our house.

Although my gig at the coffee shop paid the bills and brewhouse tabs, I felt I was being surpassed by my compadres who gravitated toward jobs with futures. Yet, the fog of post-college was too thick to determine what exactly the final outcome of my life would be.

As the money was always too tight for anything extraneous I decided that changing the oil on my car was an easy way to save fifteen dollars better spent on beer.
It is with distinct clarity I can recall wandering into the street in front of our house and rifling through the trunk of my 1986, oxidized Chevy Celebrity for the emergency jack. Once found, I lodged the rickety thing under the pinch weld of the car and elevated it a foot off the ground. The pavement not being even, the vehicle teetered precariously on the jack and despite my serious reservations, I managed to loosen the drain plug and drain the oil. The filter was another matter entirely. I didn't seem to have enough room to get to it without putting my life in jeapordy. Being without health-insurance, as recent college grads are prone to be, even I recognized the danger of the situation. Somehow, with the car rocking wildly back and forth, I was able to twist the oil cylinder free and screw the new one into place. With a huge sigh of relief, I lowered the car and filled it with oil. My arm was coated with a shining black sleeve of grease where the filter had emptied itself and I walked back into the house where, amidst the smirks of my roomates, I changed from my petroleum reeking clothes into my proudly procured 70's hippie garb; and went out for a test drive in the ill-looking, but now well-running Celebrity. The two inch wide roadmarker of oil I laid down on that drive around the block could easily have been mistaken for a the grafitti of a drunken Department of Transportation worker, splitting a street into further division, except that their lines were yellow or white whereas mine was coal-black and slippery. Chances are, even if the city worker were drunk, they would have known how to tighten an oil filter before the angry red "low oil" light came on. When I pulled back into the driveway, and saw the growing puddle of black creeping out from underneath my engine, I pretty much lost my senses and ran screaming into the house with all sorts of colloquial profanity, derived from my father before me, spewing out of my lips. My roomates, many of whom appeared quite stoned, found this whole episode amusing beyond words (which was good because they couldn't really form any). One particular roomate took pity on me and with a olympic dexterity and without use of the scissor jack, reached into the wheel well and gave the filter one more solid turn. Ego bruised, but with problem solved, I did what I had done for years prior: I made the determination then and there that I would not get beat down with humiliation, but rather learn more and avoid the embarrassment and frustration of that moment.

This was not an easy process. I was, after all, the son of a man who filled his crankcase with coolant (or his radiator with oil, he won't exactly admit to either). And there were setbacks (as when I installed the doughnut spare tire backwards, on the side of a highway, with rain pouring down and semi trucks howeling past and the the blight of a hangover hammering at me and a friend hounding me as I did all of this, about how his flight to Germany was leaving in exactly 45 minutes! + Added Bonus: Tire Shop Mechanic's comment: "I've never seen that before!") OK, admittedly there were more than a few setbacks. But the more I fumbled, the harder I tried.

When a engineer friend of mine visited over the summer, someone who found pleasure restoring cars, I spent the entirety of a 5 hour hike grilling him about how engines and transmissions worked. When my beloved Chevy Celebrity vomited coolant after a concert one night and was towed into a shop, I made the mechanic explain in depth how water pumps worked. And so it went. With every breakdown, of which there were many, I learned more and more.

When I moved back to Colorado I began making a habit of doing the minor car repairs for our family. I replaced belts and batteries, alternators and radiators. I moved into that place where I truly became knowledgeable enough that I was dangerous. In fact, I became downright cocky. In replacing an alternator on my 1992 Honda Accord I discovered how tie-rod ends come off, and at the same time made a name for myself in the neighborhood where I grew up as the the greasy guy who had his car on jack stands next to the elementary school for days on end and who was so profane that mothers and children went a block out to there way to get past (that job eventually got redone by a professional mechanic by the way!)

But, I began fixing friend's cars. I actually made them believe that I could do it (uh, their cars ended up going to professional mechanics as well). At least with each ridiculous error I made, I learned something new and stuck another Haynes manual on my bookshelf. The love/hate relationship with this work stuck with me, not because I was particularly handy, but simply because I enjoyed learning and I enjoyed helping. I was always someone who would get bored with something if I had to do it to long, and wanted to always have something else around the bend to educate me. With car repair, I would never run out of challenges and new opportunities even when the walls felt like they were crashing down around me.