Weeks after my father’s death, I peeked into his wood-scented workshop in the basement of my childhood home. I was unsurprised to see projects in progress. There was, for example, a collapsing leather loafer, clamped in a vice, with the repair gunk,“Shoe Goo,” daubed on a splitting seam. The message was clear: Innovation and skill can mend almost anything.
In a time of so much breaking and un-making, I want to talk about the menders who show us the way forward.
My parents, children of the Depression, knew how to make do. In my 1970s childhood, I learned to saddle-soap my shoes and polish them afterward, a weekly task I loved for the transformation in my small hands. So much was out of my control in those years, and so much worried me. I was aware, from Newsweek photos, of children like me terrified and suffering from the Vietnam war. I began to recognize the racism in schoolyard taunts in my working-class Denver suburb. But learning to polish my scuffed Buster Browns was proof that, even as a child, I could improve the damaged world.
My father was a union pipe-fitter by trade, but a Leonardo da Vinci by disposition. He could survey a pile of discarded scraps and conjure a mechanism designed to delight. In his calloused hands, any shard of metal might be up-cycled into a whimsical, whirling weather-vane to charm my mother. A faded-thin pair of Levi’s might be cut into patches for other Levis, or re-imagined as a holster for a pellet gun, ready to chase rabbits from the garden. In Dad’s view, any Folgers can, with cotton rope, could became stilts for neighborhood kids to clomp around on during boring, sun-blasted summers. Or, he might solder the cans into a leaf mulcher, powered by a salvaged electric motor, painted for fun and slyly labeled, “A coffee can product.”
Once, in a difficult patch in high school, I stepped directly onto a long sewing needle that I must have dropped into the moss-green carpet of my bedroom. The needle broke, half of it lodging deeply at the base of my toes. I was afraid to tell my parents; the accident seemed to prove that I was incompetent, untrustworthy — everything I feared was true. So, I limped along for a few days, the pain sharpening, until my best friend alerted a teacher and I was driven to the urgent care center in a nearby strip mall. The receptionist called my father from his construction worksite, and he arrived in time to hear the doctor pronounce that the needle was embedded in muscle and could only be removed with surgery. My dad held my hand — not mad, after all — and drove us home in his tool-heavy truck, his brow furrowed.
That evening in my bedroom, with a teenager’s talent for misery, I ruminated on the trouble I’d caused. But then Dad knocked to come in, the wheels of his mind almost visibly whirring, as he held up a heavy horseshoe magnet from his workshop. “Let’s try something,” he said, bending to rest my inflamed foot on his knee. He hoisted the magnet a few inches from my wound and told me to wiggle my toes. Mystified, I did … and felt a muscular tug. I fluttered them again, and the broken needle — an inch of silver menace — shot out of my foot, through the air, and stuck the landing on the magnet. My pain, impossibly, vanished, and I leapt up, both of us shouting, fisted arms raised in triumph. The misery that the white-coated doctor failed to address, my blue-collar father, with innovation and the tools at hand, healed in a twinkling.
A dozen years ago, I was trapped on an airplane next to a muscled and chatty middle-aged man named Tobias. He flashed his multi-dialed wristwatch and monologued about being an “important fixer.” He was, he confided, a “global deal facilitator and problem solver,” words actually printed on his business card, which I saved. He boasted that most people had no clue about the mechanisms of the “truly wealthy” who really ran the world. Kids in those families “went to any college they wanted,” he claimed. That unsettling conversation haunts me, as the Epstein files unspool, and more patriarchal abuses are revealed every day. I think now that Tobias was right … and also very wrong.
For every breaker of trust, or bones, there are community choruses outside ICE hotels, assuring the mercenaries inside that “it’s OK to change your mind.” For every liar and violator, there are many more menders whose internal mechanisms run on justice. That guy from the airplane? He went to prison. And, as my father reminds me, there’s no infection too deep for an inventive and motivated majority to heal.
Music: "It’s OK to Change Your Mind” sung by anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis
