Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

A Passion but no Aptitude

A Passion but no Aptitude

Yesterday I worked on my truck putting the door panel back in with the switch. The first thing I discovered is that when the window went down the switch popped out. When the slide came down it pushed on the wires coming out of the back of the switch and popped it back out through the plastic bracket. To fix it will require relocating the switch on the panel somewhere where it is not in conflict with the rising and lowering glass.

Anyway today I am taking the truck to the collision shop and getting the bumper straightened. Some time in the distant past someone slammed into something and bent the bumper up on one side. I don’t think it bent the frame further back because it drives pretty straight without a shimmy.

I wish when I was a boy my father had taught me about cars. One of the reasons he didn’t was because he wasn’t automotive inclined. He was woman chasing inclined. My older brother got the gene. The only woman that ever showed any interest in me as a lover was my wife. She is very affectionate. Not only did my Dad know nothing about mechanical things he was gone much of the time. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining. My father didn’t screw me up like some fathers of my friends. Sometimes they smothered their sons wanting to live vicariously some weird sort of a second childhood. Others were physically or verbally abusive. My old man left me alone and I was give a full opportunity to do what ever the heck I wanted to. His dream was that I would go to West Point but that was a loser. He settled on sending me to a State supported Military College. Best thing that ever happened to me…met my wife there.

After retiring we moved back to what had once been the family farm in Wisconsin. I went back to tech school and learned how to fix trucks…sort of that is. The instructor made a deal with me. Said if I never used him for a reference he would see to it that I passed the course. I was the worst student he ever had he told me once but the most persistent. I was the only “Old Fart” to ever finish the course.

I loved tech school. I loved it but I had no aptitude for mechanical things. I had the passion but not the talent. I have a form of dyslexia I don’t tell people about. I have trouble with left and right, backwards and forwards and positive and negative logic. I’m a pretty good computer programmer but there are certain aspects my mind just can’t do. For example, negative logic. In technical school every week the instructor on Friday had “The Twenty Station Challenge.“ The object was to walk up to a station on a work bench, look at the object and explain what the requirement called for. You had twenty seconds to complete the task.

This was a dyslexia’s nightmare. For example one of his favorites was having a set of wrenches with one missing and the student had to identify the missing wrench. I was incapable of solving that problem…finally I always wrote “The five/sixteenth is missing…“ I had a one out of eight chance of being right.

The way my brain learned to work to get me through life was what I refer to as the six month magical interlude. I would take a course and try my best to learn the material and do miserable grade wise. Then one morning six months later I would wake up and know how to do it and exactly how to do it. It was that way in Welding, electrical, hydraulics and air and amazingly in languages. I actually had an aptitude for languages not that any of my teachers would have ever guessed. By the time the light came on the course was over and they were long gone.

I need to tell you a language story of what happed to me in Germany…