On Fixing Stuff
Our garbage disposal stopped working. I could just leave this post with that and let you go about your business, but I have more to write about. We had to call a plumber to install a new one who also fixed some curious plumbing arrangements she found under our sink. One thing about living in a house built in 1941 is that any number of peculiar repairs can be found throughout the house.
One reason we had to call a plumber to do this job is that I can't fix anything. I'm no good with tools. I don't understand mechanical things. Growing up, my kids knew that if something needed to be fixed they'd better ask their mother rather than me. But the disposal was beyond her skills, so a professional it was.
This gap in my mechanical abilities has always been a source of embarrassment to me. I grew up in a blue-collar town and all my (male) friends and their fathers were handy. They could fix stuff. Bikes, cars, whatever. They just seemed to know how to do that stuff. I didn't. The idea that fixing or making something were skills that could be taught never occurred to me. Certainly none of those skilled (male) people ever offered to teach me. In fact, my incompetence with tools was often mocked or treated with contempt. Whaddaya mean you don't know how to change spark plugs? You're a boy, aren't you?
I was well into adulthood before I realized the reason for this unfortunate aspect of my childhood. My father was killed in a car accident when I was an infant and I grew up in a single-parent household. My mother was of the generation, and, let's be honest, I did too, where women weren't taught how to fix things around the house, that was a man's job. So, it wasn't that my friends just intuitively knew how to do these things, it is that they grew up in houses where they were taught how to do them. As a child and teenager, this honestly never occurred to me.
In fact, it wasn't until quite recently that I began to earnestly reflect on what it was like for me to grow up fatherless. But that is a post for another day.
Part of not being handy in this way is that I never really had the feeling of accomplishment that comes from doing so. Of "this thing didn't work and now it does and I did that." Or "This was just a pile of parts and now it is a working machine." The job is done, there is a physical thing that now exists or works that didn't before. And, then I began cooking.
The opposite of my inability to fix stuff is my ability to cook stuff. We went out with friends the other night to a Thai restaurant. For the first time, I ordered a dish called larb aka laab. It is the national dish of Laos but also has deep roots in Thailand. I had to give it a try. Larb is basically a pile of meat that you pile onto a lettuce leaf and eat like a wrap. Or, you know, skip the lettuce and have it with rice, or skip the lettuce and the rice and have just the meat. It was absolutely delicious. And, my first thought was, "I can make this." So I did. And it was absolutely delicious.
Making larb is not that difficult (see here or here) and I suggest you give it a whirl. It'll probably require a quick stop and your local Asian market for the proper herbs but that is always an adventure anyway. Cooking is where I get that feeling of accomplishment that DIYers get by building or fixing something around the house. Something wasn't there and when you are done, something is there that wasn't there before. Very satisfying.
As a closing thought, I'll share that larb is almost always billed as a "salad" I supposed because there is some greenery served with it making the meat/greens ratio about 100 to 1. I'm a midwesterner home of "salads that aren't really salads" and finding a culture on the other side of the world that tries to pass off what is obviously not a salad as a salad makes me very happy.
Once, I was at an international conference at my undergraduate alma mater, Iowa State University. On the last day of the conference, there was a buffet with traditional Iowa picnic fare on offer for the attendees. I happened to be going through the buffet with two French gentlemen. The first thing in the buffet line was, naturally, the salads. If memory serves, both ambrosia salad and Jello salad were on offer. These options brought the French scholars up short. What were these strange dishes? I burst into a big smile, "Allow me to explain to you," I said, "the ways of my people."
Dream Salad Recipe from the The Key To The Cupboard Cookbook by Ladies Aid of the Methodist Church, Farnhamville Iowa, 1939.
jpj stories by John Jackson is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
