Barrel Strength

Yesterday, on the lawn of a small apartment building beside my house, stood a vacuum cleaner intended for the garbage.

I took it home, plugged it in and tried it. No suction. I inspected the bag. Clean and new. Then I saw that the access pipe was blocked with dust, indeed a foot-long cylinder of dust compacted in the pipe had to be removed before the machine would work, which it then did, perfectly.

I am no mechanical genius. I merely went beneath the hood, so to speak, and found an obvious thing. It took no insight into things mechanical to see that the pipe was blocked. Now I have another vaccum cleaner, which joins my other two: one for each floor of my house, two of them supplied by departing tenants from the apartment building next door.

On another occasion I picked up a handsome table lamp whose switch was wonky. I opened the switch and attached the wires to the terminals properly, which is a job for a small screwdriver. Voilà! Instant handsome desk lamp.

Are my apartment neighbours particularly clueless? Is this a function of being young in your first apartment, as many of them are?

Last year I was at a barbecue on the beach with members of the Club. Lawyers, businessmen, academics: accomplished people. One of the barbecues would not light. A group gathered around it trying to get it to light. You know what is going to happen: I looked underneath. The gas nozzle was not attached. Once attached, voomf! ignition.

So it is not just young twenty-somethings on their first apartment who  will not stop to examine why things do not work.

I am reminded of Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is a book-length inquiry into the same phenomenon, the mystery why so many people will not look beneath the hood. I guess you have to be in advanced middle age before you even notice how mentally lazy some people are. The fridge does not work. Throw it out! Then you find the fault lies in the wall socket, which had a  wire loose. How many usable things are thrown out for want of looking! For want of even the beginning of getting behind the dashboard.

And I confess my guilt: I have done the same. My mother has one of my perfectly usable lawn mowers because I bought another one in frustration rather than think of changing the stale gasoline  from the previous season. Duh! (Extenuating circumstances also aply here. It had always been a poor starter).

One of the  great lessons my father taught me was things work according to a logic. Carburetors and spark plugs get dirty. Air filters get dirty. Blades need sharpening. But more: we are frequently stronger than metal. Brass screws can be stripped in an instant by strong young hands wielding wrenches. As soon as you go to fix things, you realize you need seven different kinds of scewdriver: two Robertson squareheads, three flat heads, two Philips heads; two sizes of  grip-wrench, two sizes of needle nose pliers, two sizes  of large pliers, until you have filled a small tool box.

But mostly you need a spirit of inquiry.

I was sitting in a barstool in the Caribbean talking to a master carpenter from Philadeplhia, who had started out as a licensed psychologist. He said he had learned from a master. When you start out, the master said, you fill your tool box with physical tools to solve every problem you encounter. Over time, you increase the number of mental tools, tricks and work-arounds, which weigh nothing, and reduce the number of physical tools you need to do the job.

But you cannot start on that path until you look under the hood for the source of the problem.