Layers

Photo: Toronto, Queen Street, The Bay, Sept. 16.

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This afternoon Jon and I went to look at a house for rent. Afterward I took the Sunfire to Jiffy Lube. I have put 8,000 km on the car this summer; it has served me and the girls well.

The head mechanic waved me into the open bay, guiding the car into the slot with hand gestures. He was blond and heavyset, slack-jawed. His words came in a stream of vowels.

"I nunno," he said to the young female mechanic calling from a pit underneath the car. She had plucked eyebrows and dark-rimmed glasses. How could she understand his shapeless words in the echoing garage over rattling tools, the buzz of a printer spitting out bills? She shouted something back at him, her syllables articulate but muffled by machinery.

"Mo prob," he said.

They pulled long coiling orange tubes down to pump the tires. One mechanic held aloft some kind of gauge that looked like an intravenous bottle. They pored over the engine, tinkering and staring.

One morning when I was a little boy, Mom and I stood on the front porch waving at Dad as he pulled out of the driveway, turned down Pelissier Street and headed to work. I asked Mom what he did.

"He's an engineer," she told me. So I believed my father worked on a train. I wanted to do the same thing someday.

Later he took me to "the shop" to show me. In the room next door sat Pappy at a cluttered desk, in the same leatherbound swivel chair here in this office beside me, now more tattered, with one arm missing, the stuffing poking through a hole in the back. In those days our family had not fractured. Dad worked side-by-side with his father at Waffle's Electric in Windsor, and my uncle managed the office in Etobicoke. Dad showed me through the back of the plant, where motor winders in greasy overalls repaired equipment for Windsor's large automotive plants. I saw how they wound fresh copper wire, fiery bright, around the old parts.

It was only one aspect of my father, that he understood these things. He had intended to become an aeronautical engineer, in fact he flew a plane long before I was born. He wanted to work on the Avro Arrow, but his dreams changed when the Government quashed those plans in submission to American diplomacy. Canada would have had the most advanced jet of its time.

Dad was a draftsman. You can still see it in his watercolour paintings, precise portraits that capture the essence of a face: my daughters, my five nieces and nephews. My brothers were both mechanically inclined, too. Bob works on pumps. Mike builds log homes.

For some reason I didn't grow up that way. I got all Dad's artistic abilities, none of the mechanical sense. I have to ask him to write out exact instructions so I know how to prime the pumps at the cottage, run the generator.

We are all becoming. This is the process of entelechy, becoming complete. Our lives are roses unfolding,* each petal caressing the ones within as they unfold, revealing more toward the centre.

Years ago I bought a book about do-it-yourself car care. I wanted to learn how to change my own oil, touch up spots on the body. I started reading, but the book got lost in the shifting and tearing of life. Now I don't even own a car. Besides, the new ones are too elaborate for anyone to learn about on a whim. They're full of computerized systems, and can only be repaired with more computers.

The girl in the pit under the car wore a green hard hat over her tinted orange hair, pretty shadowed eyes with long lashes. When she had finished changing the oil, she rolled a curtain across the top of the pit, to prevent heavy objects from falling and injuring the workers underneath. She shouted something at the slack-jawed boy and he called me over to pay the bill.

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*I adore this song:

Dirait-on

Abandon entouré d'abandon,
tendresse touchant aux tendresses…
C'est ton intérieur qui sans cesse
se caresse, dirait-on;

se caresse en soi-même,
par son propre reflet éclairé.
Ainsi tu inventes le thème
du Narcisse exaucé.

~Rainier Maria Rilke

MP3 file (Lake Zurich Concert Choir)

See the translation.

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Sunday word association

1. Diminishing:: Returns
   
2. Fed up:: Frustrated
   
3. 3:00 AM:: Sleepless
   
4. Interfere:: Nuisance
   
5. Often:: Masturbate
   
6. Hay:: Roll
   
7. Prediction:: Divination
   
8. Homophobia:: Deadly
   
9. Booty call:: What
   
10. Enunciate:: Vowels