Fixing Fixable Things

This could be an installment of ‘How to Fix Things,’ except somebody else would have to write it. I don’t know how to fix much of anything that isn’t made either of edible things or of some kind of fiber/fabric. When I was growing up, the fix-it department was manned by the guys in the family, and the dad taught the sons what to do, and the sons grew up and worked construction in the summers, and then after high school went to work building or fixing things or maybe went to engineering school to learn how to fix more complex things.

Nowadays, however, that kind of education seems to have gone by the way. You might have had the foresight to have married an engineer or a dad-educated fixer, but more and more, nobody seems to know how to fix anything. (If you have access to a recently educated engineer, of course, they’re good with computers.) Fortunately, our household has a resident fixing person (both things and computers) and today he has been working on replacing the log retaining wall, which has as a matter of course in the wet Northwest pretty much rotted out over the past two decades. What interested me most about this is that, after he dug a trench and laid a carefully-leveled gravel base for the new cement blocks, he disappeared to the local equipment rental place to rent a gravel compactor. Who even knew there was such a thing as a gravel compactor to be rented? Or that gravel couldn’t pretty much compact itself. It’s a small, vacuum cleaner-like (in looks--bur probably only to me) device that vibrates a lot to move itself along and makes a lot of noise and, presumably, compacts a storm up underneath itself.

The next thing you know, there’ll be a new wall there. But what are we going to do in this world where that kind of knowledge is rapidly disappearing in many households? Point Roberts was noticeably filled with people who knew how to fix and build things around the house when we first moved there, but the many new and younger people who have recently moved in may be less handy in that respect as a matter of generational change.

A friend who lives in a real town told me about her roofer’s story: business was going so well that he had a whole crew of roofers, rather than just him and a couple of guys; then he got a second crew of roofers, and a third; and then, after that, he expanded again by getting a crew of handymen. People who need their roofs fixed also need a lot of other things fixed, it turns out. Imagine that: a business that sends out all-purpose, household handymen to respond to household needs. Awhile back, Point Roberts got its first house cleaning company, and now the person who began that is starting an elder home-care service. Maybe next she could organize roving crews of handymen with gravel compactors at their beck and call!