Driveway School

A Broken Car, My Dad, and Pablo Casals

Photo by Shraga Kopstein on Unsplash...

The car won’t start.

I’m home from college during a break, sitting in the bumperless Ford Gran Torino in the rutted driveway of the house with the floating door and the rotting wood with the peeling paint and the picture window covered in a plastic tarp flapping in the wind.

I turn the key, but nothing happens. I stare at the dashboard that tells me nothing, and mocks me in silent defiance.

I don’t check the battery, because why would I? Other than assuming there is one, I don’t know what it does other than charging. . . something.

I don’t open the hood. I sit there, a smart-ass college kid with no idea what’s wrong with this “Found-On-Road-Dead” (FORD) machine, fully expecting it to answer for its recalcitrance.

I turn the key again and pump the gas pedal, no doubt flooding the engine, which I’ve heard my father say is a consequence of doing so when the car won’t start.

Right on cue, my father comes out of the cellar door next to the garage door, not the floating door, and yells, “STOP!”

He doesn’t ask what I’ve tried. He asks what’s wrong, and when I tell him I don’t know, he says, “What do they teach you in that goddam school anyway?”

I can imagine him thinking his brother Ralph’s boys, my cousins Tim, Tom and Joe, would know exactly what’s wrong with the car and already have it fixed.

Then he reaches inside the driver’s side window and, in front of me, because he knows I don’t even know how to do this, pulls a lever that pops the hood open. He goes to look under the hood. He reaches in, mutters, and does. . . something. . . and tells me to try it again. The car, of course, starts.

I don’t know what the problem is. . .something about spark plugs. . .but I do know it takes him less time to fix it than it takes me to admit I can’t.

He closes the hood and looks at me with what I think is a mixture of self-satisfaction from fixing the problem and contempt from having a son whom, as he likes to say, “Can’t find his ass with both hands.” Then he pulls out a rag that magically appears out of his back pocket, wipes his hands, says “Good to go,” and goes back inside.

I’ve been turning that scene over in my mind for 48 years without knowing quite what to do with it, and I think it’s because it isn’t really about the car. It’s about two different kinds of knowing, existing within three feet of each other, in the same driveway, and only one of us had any idea what to do with our hands.

My father learned mechanical things the way 13 generations of Thornes before him learned soil, weather, and livestock. He knew those, too, along with plumbing, carpentry, electrical work, operating heavy machinery, pouring concrete, building a drainage system, doing complicated math problems, and how to shoot the eye out of a squirrel (sorry, Rocky) from a hundred yards away.

William Thorne (the “e” fell off and is probably still bobbing in the North Atlantic Ocean) came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony from England in the 1630s, started and worked a farm in Lynn, Massachusetts, was expelled for being a rebel, obtained land grants in the Gravesend, Jamaica, and Flushing areas of New Amsterdam, signed his name to the Flushing Remonstrance, and started a line of farmers and Quakers who worked land in the New York area for the next 325 years.

Every one of the Thornes in my direct line, as far as I can trace it, made his living with his hands and his back, and almost all of them fought in whatever War his country handed him, from King Philip’s War through the Second. Then they went home. Every generation but one went home to the same dirt.

My father was the one who didn’t. He grew up on my grandfather’s dairy farm, joined the U.S. Army infantry at eighteen, fought across Europe, won the War, and was then sent to fight in Japan while the ash was still settling from the bombs. Two years of the most consequential work a young man can do, with an ending stamped on it, a victory attached, and medals to put in a box in the closet.

He then returned to his father’s farm, one of two million farms that had already died in the prior ten years and was now clinging to life, bounced through jobs as a gandy dancer on the railroad, a truck driver, and a garbage collector, before landing on a maintenance crew in a milk bottling plant, a job he worked at and hated for the next 24 years. He lost that job when the company fired him one year shy of getting his pension because he was missing too much time at work due to his alcoholism.

Thirteen generations of men who knew what to do with their hands produced the one who came home from winning a war and found himself with nothing left that fit them.

I experienced something similar without any of the excuse of history’s largest War to explain it. I graduated from college having spent four years as an athlete and a student, two roles with scoreboards attached, two ways of knowing exactly how you’re doing. Then I walked out into a world with a diploma, a body riddled with injuries, and no scoreboard, bounced through a string of jobs that didn’t fit, and eventually landed 30 years into corporate work that, if I’m honest with myself the way I’d want any of my ancestors to be honest with me, ate at my spirit the same way that the plant ate at my father’s.

He got out of the War and said, in effect, I did my job, now what do I do? I got out of college and asked myself the same question. Neither of us had a good answer.

Here’s where it gets complicated, and where I don’t want to pretend I’ve resolved anything. My brother came out of that same house, carrying the same blood, the same thirteen generations of toughness and stubbornness and intelligence and hard hands, and it didn’t land the same way for him. He didn’t make it through one semester of college. He spent years after that losing to the same appetites that had a hold on our father.

Whatever got passed down the line didn’t come with instructions, and it didn’t guarantee the same outcome twice, not even inside one family, not even inside one house. Although he does know how to work with his hands, and plant things in the dirt and grow them, and he is good at those things, whereas the best thing I can do with my hands is type and tell stories.

He and I did produce great kids who continue to amaze me every day. So it comforts me to know that cycle, against all odds, has been broken.

I don’t know what I inherited that let me get further out from under the free fall than they did. I have guesses. A degree that existed for me and never happened for them. People I could look up to and learn from. A stretch of economic road that had more on-ramps than in 1947. I also have two harder inheritances, and I’d be lying by omission if I left them out.

I have to contend with complex post-traumatic stress disorder and many of the unhelpful complications that go with it. That’s the result of the chronic trauma, abuse, and violence I experienced in my family and neighborhood throughout my upbringing.

I also have the same addictive personality trait he carried. I partied on and off in my younger years the way people in this family seem to for much of their lives, hard and without much thought for how it would all turn out. But by the time I was 28, I decided alcohol and all other mood- or mind-altering substances would no longer be part of my life; they hadn’t been for five years already, but that is officially when I put a fork in it ever happening again. At the same time, I continued to eat too much, exercise too much, work too much, daydream too much, and practice too many of the seven deadly sins. But on a relative scale, I’m what you might call fairly normal.

What stopped me wasn’t willpower I can take much credit for. It was fear. I looked at my father, brother, uncles, cousins, friends, and neighbors, and I was scared of becoming like them.

Somehow that fear did what nothing else had. I don’t say that as a victory lap. I’ve still got some of the defects of character that produce the appetite in the first place, though a lot less, and a lot less sharp, thanks to years of working on myself. I aimed the appetite somewhere else, at some insatiable need to do and be better.

I don’t fully understand why the fear took hold in me and not others. Something in that inheritance built men strong enough and wise enough to stand under a hood and know exactly what was wrong, generation after generation, until it didn’t, and I still can’t tell you where the wire got cut, or why it stayed connected in me and not in them.

I’m sure grace and luck also were factors; two more things for which I can claim no credit. Nonetheless, I’ll gratefully accept them.

What I keep coming back to is the driveway. That otherwise innocuous event holds a lot of meaning for me.

My father knew what was wrong with that car before he’d even finished asking the question. I still don’t have that instinct for mechanical things, and at this point I’ve stopped pretending I ever will. But I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to develop something similar for my version of what he did with that car, for whatever’s not working.

I’ve worked hard to develop some sense for what’s actually broken instead of figuratively sitting behind the wheel, waiting for the trouble to explain itself. Whether that came from 13 generations of stubborn Thornes, from fear in my 20s, or from both, I honestly can’t say. The older I get, the less sure I am of the difference.

As I write that, I think of Pablo Casals, the world-famous cellist, conductor, and composer who practiced his cello for several hours a day well into his 90s. When he was asked why, he said, “I believe I’m making progress.”

Many are aware of that Casals quote, but I wonder how many know he also said this: “A broken car can be fixed, but a rotten heart can’t.”

I’m relieved I don’t have to fix either.

And although I may not be Pablo Casals, I, too, believe I’m making progress.