Every Saturday morning, my husband had a ritual he followed without fail – run, shower, eat breakfast and then check the oil, tire pressure and windshield wiper fluids in my vehicle. I have a priceless photo of his legs sticking out from underneath the car accompanied by a 2-year-old’s legs – our youngest boy who followed his dad everywhere. Our 5-year-old grandson follows his father everywhere and is starting to help out with chores, doing things just like he sees his father.

Parents are always teaching their children skills they think they’ll need in life, passing down knowledge they learned from their parents. Most of the time, we parents don’t think the lessons are being absorbed.

But children do watch and learn, and I did the same with my parents.

My dad was a resourceful parent, always full of surprises and bursts of imaginative ways to do almost anything. There were only three things Dad needed to fix anything – black electrical tape, duct tape and a hammer.

My brother likes to tell the story about a lawn mower we had that stopped working one afternoon.

A little background – my Dad never bought anything brand new. A born salesman, Dad loved haggling with someone to get the best deal possible. Hence the reason we always had second-hand lawn mowers and vehicles.

One afternoon, the old mower stopped working. My brother tinkered and sweated over that mower, and then Dad came over to see what was going on. He said he needed a hammer to fix the problem.

Long accustomed to Dad’s ways with hammers, my brother thought the old guy would come back from the tool shed with one of his beat-up hammers.  Dad did better than that – he came out with a sledgehammer, gave the lawn mower a ringing blow and, low and behold, the mower started.

Inventiveness was Dad’s strong suit, and most of the time, he’d solve the problem. But sometimes, his ideas were off the chart.

Years ago, my parents lived on a corner lot with lots of trees. There was an old pine tree near the driveway, and one of the bigger branches, in Dad’s opinion, needed to be removed.

The branch was high up, so Dad hauled out his rickety metal ladder, pulled his van up underneath the branch and then put the ladder on top of his van.

I glanced out the kitchen window and saw him sawing on that branch and realized what was going to happen – when he finished sawing all the way through the branch, the heavy branch would fall directly on his windshield.

Instead of going outside and sounding the alarm, I called my sister, barely able to tell her what was going on because I was laughing so hard – seeing my Dad on top of his van standing on a wobbling ladder as he sawed away was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen.

But I realized I needed to tell him what the end result would be, so I ran out, stopped him and explained what was going to happen if he kept sawing. He looked at the branch, looked at the tree, looked at his windshield and agreed I was right.

So he leaned the ladder against the trunk of the tree, moved his van, tied a rope to the branch and told me to pull hard as he went back to sawing.

I did exactly what he told me until I realized that when he sawed all the way through, I’d be pulling on the branch and that huge hunk of wood would hit me square in the face.

I immediately yelled at him to hold up, and he thought I’d lost my mind for stopping him on while carrying out an incredibly good idea.

Once again, I explained the laws of gravity. He saw what would happen and then grudgingly agreed to let the branch fall to the driveway on its own.

I thought about that afternoon when I was standing on a kitchen chair last night and grabbed the hammer to use the claw end to retrieve something from the top shelf in my closet.

My dad would be so proud.

 

This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.