The summer of my thirteenth year on this Earth, I spent most of my evenings and weekends retooling a crapped out ‘67 Camaro with my father. When I say “crapped out” I’m holding back. The body was more bondo than metal. We rebuilt the camshaft and the crankshaft. Eventually, I think we replaced everything…twice. We built a pulley system in the carport. And I think that engine spent more time suspended above the car than actually resting on the supports. Looking back, I’m guessing my dad regretted the entire process…at least from any practical automotive standpoint.
The kicker of the whole ordeal? The car belonged to my older brother.
Yep. That’s the kind of sucker I was at that age. My older brother was too busy living the Euro-rocker lifestyle back in the eighties to bother working on his own car. But I just couldn’t resist the opportunity to replace the eldest son in my father’s eyes. So it was my slender hand that stretched into the oil pan to fetch a dropped blankety-blank or that reached around the back of the flim-flammer to hold the blick-black in place.
And the grand reward when the work was all done? Watching my older brother rooster tail gravel down the driveway after refusing to even let me tag along for the ride. (Selfish git. Oh, I kid, I kid…sort of.) Those were the good ol’ days.
Really, the reward was all the time I spent with my old man and the confidence he instilled in me that I could ratchet a wrench and set a timing belt. Now that I have my own teenage boys, I look back on that experience with different eyes. And I find myself looking around for some such equivalent asinine project to embark upon.
But cars are out of the question. Are you kidding me? You gotta have a computer science degree to even monkey under the hood anymore. And while I could revive a classic automobile, when pressed, I have to admit I haven’t spent more than twenty hours under the hood since that summer back in the eighties. I mean, I know how to change my oil, but I don’t even do that anymore. What’s the point when I can let the lube jockeys down the street do it for me while I write this? And the last time I changed my own oil, some granolas on the U of M campus yelled at me for dumping the spent crude down a storm drain. (How was I to know it was bad for the environment? We used to coat the driveway with the stuff back home.)
I need a project more fitting with my skills, and more timely within our culture. That’s when it struck me. Why not build a tiny home? First off, those are skills I already possess (mostly). Secondly, building a mobile trailer version of a tiny home kills two birds with one stone. Not only would it potentially be a glorious father/son bonding experience (the kind I will most certainly regret from any practical standpoint), but it would guarantee the boys have somewhere to dwell when it comes time to kick them out of the house!
I realize the downside of gifting my sons a tiny house is that they’ll still need to procure a lot on which to park it (and hook it up to all necessary utilities). That could end up being a sticking point, I’ll admit. Meh, I’ve got several more months to figure this out and kick the project off next spring. (If the wife is reading this, just know I have concrete plans, I swear!) That will give us two years to get the bad boy finished before the oldest son is ejected from the basement nest and forced to figure out this new hard-scratch American life we’ve engineered. As a bonus, by building one tiny house between the two of them, I pit them against each other in a battle royale to garner my love. Mwahahahaha. I love it when a plan comes together.
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