Another Day in the Country
Make yourself useful
© Another Day in the Country
When I was a college student in the same town where my grandparents lived, I was always at their kitchen table on weekends.
After church each week, I’d have dinner there — sometimes with a friend. Gramm always made mashed potatoes and gravy for that noon meal. Her food was always delicious.
“Make yourself useful,” she’d say with her usual briskness as I came into her kitchen.
I knew this meant to set the table. She rarely let me help her cook. It was below my pay grade in her book. However, I learned a lot just from watching her.
Once I was married, still living in Lincoln, Nebraska, and putting my new husband through school, I’d ask Gramm for recipes, and she’d wave it off, “I’ll make you some.”
As I was growing up, I never remember anyone coming to our house to fix something. If something broke, Dad would fix it, or Mom would throw it away. No one came to repair or clean the house — ever. We did it.
Unless there was a serious collision with the car — and I don’t remember a single one — my Dad would fix whatever was wrong with whatever vehicle we owned.
He’d grown up on a Kansas farm where you learned how to fix things. You naturally learned to make yourself useful.
We learned to help — with the meal, with the house, with the yard, with the animals, with the garden.
Strangely, in my family — who seldom played — work became fun. It became a contest with yourself to see how quickly you could accomplish something or how well you could do it.
I sometimes feel sorry for kids growing up today who have so many things ready-made. They’ll never know the accomplishing pride of doing something from scratch, of making something for themselves.
Luckily, I married someone who’d learned how to fix a few things, too. He’d worked for a farmer every summer of his high school years and learned some rudimentary skills for maintaining machinery.
For financial reasons, we learned to be do-it-yourselfers. Repairing things was necessary to survive and maintain some kind of middle-class lifestyle.
I think it was when my Dad was supervising the building of a church that I learned to help put up drywall.
That skill helped when my husband and I decided to build our first home, with a contracting crew to do the hard parts. Many years later, building another home in California, we were able to do even more and were pretty proud of ourselves.
In 1992, when my sister encouraged me to buy a little tumbledown house in Ramona, we came with an old blue suitcase filled with tools and a Reader’s. Digest “Complete Do-it-Yourself Manual” to help us reclaim the house and make it weatherproof. Of course, to make it livable, we’d eventually need more expert help.
When we first came to the country, we were spoiled. We had a fix-it guy I dubbed Tooltime Tim, who loved the challenge of fixing things for a couple of city slickers. When we lost him to cancer, we had to downsize. We’d lost a vital link in our “Three Musketeers” pyramid.
Having been a do-it-yourselfer all of my life, it’s hard for me to relinquish that role as I age — even though, clearly, I can’t really do the harder stuff.
For one thing, I don’t have the tools for repairing things anymore. For another, ordinary items are built for obsolescence these days, and that’s hard for me to fathom.
Surely you don’t throw out that computer, which still looks good and functions to some degree. What do you mean it’s outdated?
Really? It’s cheaper to buy a new one than to fix the old one? How can this be? Are you sure this can’t be repurposed?
I have discovered, living in the country, that a fix-it person with time available for repairing things is getting harder to find.
We’ve had a couple we’ve relied on through the years, but they are also growing older and have to limit their availability. They can’t help everyone.
I’m trying to imagine what the future will look like. Will the young folks of today ever aspire to be fix-it folks? Will they learn to be do-it-yourselfers like those we see on television now for entertainment?
My friends of a certain age who live in real towns with stores and gas stations say, “It’s a dilemma. A good handyman is worth their weight in gold.”
For a couple of summers now, I’ve had new porch boards waiting for someone with expertise. Then, miracle of miracles, I found a handyman.
He fixed my aging porch this weekend, and I was so excited watching the work progress that I almost forgot to write my column on another day in the country.