Life of Hardin Vol. IV, No. 2

Popular Mechanics


The surest thing to get a man out of the dumps is to give him a car to work on. There is something about tinkering with the machinery, getting his hands dirty, figuring out just exactly what the problem is that lets a man know he is a man. The first thing to lift his spirits is the frustration that smacks him in the face when he opens the hood to take the engine apart and discovers that his model car is the only one of its kind that placed the water pump in a position unreachable without first removing the engine. With this sort of thing to deal with, all other thoughts save the desire to fix the car with a sledgehammer and then wring the neck of the designer are eradicated. This is actually an extremely satisfying frame of mind.

The second thing is a euphoric state of accomplishment when the engine runs again after the hoses are replaced, the power steering pump removed, a new radiator has been put in, the carburetor rebuilt, the transmission flushed, the leaky clutch master cylinder repaired, the oil changed, the new and highly specialized tool purchased, the power steering pump bolted back on, and the brand new head gasket is nestled snugly in place, all undertaken simply because it was discovered during a routine spark plug change that every peripheral system was on the blink.

In Paraguay, all these joys of car work have been taken away. No house, and especially no apartment building, has a place for a guy to work on his car or even change his own oil. There is no store where a man can wander the rows and gaze at the gleaming racks of lug wrenches, crescent wrenches, socket sets (metric and standard), torque wrenches, two-ton jacks, precision screwdrivers, pliers, impact wrenches, or that stuff that magically removes the grease from your hands without water. Every little burp or knock calls for a full blown trip to the car dealer.

The simplest thing such as changing a flat tire is a job for professionals. They are the only ones with tools or the place to work on a car. Take my own case.

My brother had a flat tire on his car. It was parked on a cobblestone road with a slight incline, so it couldn’t be jacked up there. We had no air tank to fill the tire enough to drive on it. So I pulled it around the corner as slowly as possible onto his narrow carport that bakes every day in the hot sun.

The car in place, we opened the back to get out the jack. The jack was not in the proper place. The jack was not in the improper place. There was no jack in the car. There was no lug wrench in the car. The Paraguayan government requires that each car has a fire extinguisher and a set of orange hazard triangles, but it does not require that each car carry a jack. At least, when your car has a flat, you can put out your hazard triangles so that no one will slam into you while waiting for a tow truck.

My brother had a jack in another car. He had a lug wrench. We got out the wrench and tried it, only to find it was too small. We couldn’t even remove the spare tire from the back of the car. So we drove in my car to a service station. They had a four dollar lug wrench with an interchangeable tip. So we bought it and drove back.

I lay down on the ground and jumped immediately back up, thereby avoiding third degree burns on my rear quarters. I put a towel down and laid on it, then slid the jack under the car. Then my brother and I took turns cranking the jack. The jack had a knob, like a large screw, that had to be turned so that it could be raised and lowered. It took about one thousand turns to raise the jack to its full extension, but only about five hundred or so to get it back down. One would think this would make the jack taller each time it raised a car, but it didn’t. No matter how many times we raised the car, it never got high enough to lift the tire. The jack was simply too short.

There are no cinder blocks in Paraguay with which to block up a car. There are no jack stands. We walked across the street to borrow some ceramic bricks. First we piled some of them under the jack. Still too short. Then we stacked several of them up to hold the car while we put more bricks under the jack. The moment the car frame touched the stack of bricks, the bricks looked at me and cried, “We will explode in a million tiny pieces in your face if you do this thing!” So I did not do it.

My brother and I got back in the car. We drove back to the service station. They just happened to have a two ton jack, the pump kind, which we immediately purchased. This, we thought, is the answer. This is the miracle drug. I lay down on my towel. I slid the new jack under the car. I raised it up.

It was exactly as tall as the other jack. Obviously these are the jacks sold to idiots who want to do their own car repair. The real jacks are reserved only for professional mechanics. It ensures their job security.

We left the car on the second jack and stacked up more bricks. We put the first jack on the bricks. We raised the car again. Still no good. So we took the second jack and used it to jack up the suspension arm on the flat tire. At last it was tall enough. “Quick!” I said. “We may have taken three-and-a-half hours to change one tire up until now, but from here on out we make record time, before the jack breaks, or the spare goes flat, or the engine spontaneously combusts, or the earth opens and swallows us whole!”

The old tire came off. The spare went on in a flash. And then, as I was in the middle of raising one jack so I could lower the other, with my head and shoulders beneath the side of the car to remove the bricks, a boy walks up from the street. He comes right over to the patio gate, sticks an arm through it, looks right at me and says, “Do you have any money?” He held his hand up, his fingers circled like a coin.

“What?” I said, though I heard him perfectly.

“Money.” He flattened his hand, palm up.

I said, “Are you kidding? I’ve got a car sitting on my chest, and you’re asking me for money? You don’t even have the gumption to pick my pocket when I’m trapped and couldn’t stop you if I wanted, and you want me to hand it over? Run along and terrorize someone with four good tires.”

He needs to work on his timing. Had he only been there an hour earlier, he could have made a quick ten dollars as a jack stand.

Life of Hardin Vol. IV, No. 1

New Year's Resolved

All my life I have heard people ask, "What are your New Year's resolutions?" I can state, to the best of my knowledge, that I have never replied to that question with a list of items I intended to improve about myself starting Jan. 1 of "X" year. However, this does not mean that I have never tried to improve myself. I have. Sometimes with success, though some would argue. Sometimes without success, as many will attest. It just has always seemed to me that Jan. 1 is a bad time to make resolutions with the goal of self-improvement.

For one thing, the principal resolution seems to be "I resolve to lose 'X' number of pounds." The program to achieve that goal is starvation, crash diets, or eating less and exercise. All of these go out the window for me at midnight. There is always a bowl of Rotel dip that needs eating at a New Year's party, and the first often calls for a second once the hour has passed.

For another thing, I've always seen New Year's resolutions as a cop out. They seem to be an excuse to put off changes, or to indulge beforehand. "I don't mind gaining 20 pounds during the holidays. I'm going to start my new work out regimen on January first!" In October: "My New Year's resolution is going to be to quit smoking, so I have to get rid of all my cartons now." In July: "I need to invite more friends over to my house." "I need to visit with my family more." "I need to learn more about 'X' subject." And I'll get right on that as soon as the New Year rolls around.

The new year is no better a time to start self-improvement that today. In fact, it's worse, because when those resolutions fail, we can wait out the next 10 months before we have to start over again.

Lucy Van Pelt (of "Peanuts" fame) often made New Year's resolutions for other people and handed them out. I will refrain from doing that, and will instead remove the beam from my own eye. (Although Paraguayan men could have this resolution: "I resolve, next Christmas Eve, to not get so drunk I can't see straight, shoot firecrackers until 3 in the morning, and wander the streets shirtless and sweaty until sometime around noon Christmas day." But they'll have to make that resolution. I won't do it for them.) Here, then, is my list of resolutions, gathered over the course of many years, not for New Year's, but for every day. The moment one is broken, it starts again.

I do hereby resolve:

To exercise regularly and eat fruits and green veggies to keep my body in a reasonably healthy physical state.
To eat Rotel and/or chocolate on occasion, when I feel like eating them, without feeling guilty about it.

To monitor myself daily for flaws and correct them.
To look for the good and the potential in the people I know.

To read a wide selection of literature for enjoyment and the expansion of my mind and vocabulary, including but not limited to the Bible, philosophy books, history books, various classics, Tarzan novels, Dashiell Hammett and other detective novels, funny papers and comic books (possibly the best expanders of vocabulary out there), and "The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits."
To not read any more Hemingway, ever.

To be irritated with myself, gripe at myself, talk to myself in the mirror, and kick myself around when I do something stupid; then immediately forget about it and go on.
To forgive mistakes in others, before they ask, as easily as I forgive myself.

To not put up with excuses or whining for more than about 60 seconds.
To help someone to no end as long as they will try.

To bend over backward to grant any reasonable request.
To flatly refuse to grant any demands.

To not fear death, seeing that death, a necessary end, will come when it will come. (That's from "Julius Caesar" by Shakespeare. See resolution #3 above.)
To not fear life, because those that are with us are more than those who are against us (II Kings 6:8-23)

To do my best in everything, to know I've done the best I could, and not care what someone else might think about it.
To be proud of a job well done, whether done by me or someone else.

To be so funny it hurts.
To laugh with people and not at them, including myself.

To realize that twenty years from now they'll all look like molehills.

To keep my cars clean and in the best shape possible (don't laugh), to keep my clothes organized, my music and DVDs arranged and alphabetized, and to wear out all of the above plus other possessions by use rather than neglect or mistreatment.
To share rather than let people go without or let something go to waste and not be upset when someone borrows something and doesn't put it back exactly the way I would have.

To be thankful for the gifts I've been given.
To realize I am owed nothing.

To pay attention and be observant to where I am, what I am doing, why I am doing it, and who I am with.

To clean up after other people's messes as others have cleaned up after me.
To show other people how to clean up their messes and other people's messes.

To take care of my family.
To treat everyone like family.

To do my best in everything and leave plenty of unfinished business when I go.
To be ready to go at any time.

To refuse to see the attraction of "Gilmore Girls", John Mayer (though he can play a guitar. I'll give him that), cornbread dressing, turnip greens, holiday fruitcake and pan dulce (which is sort of the Paraguayan equivalent of fruitcake, but older and fermented), soccer, skeletal supermodels, Nicholas Sparks books, the designated hitter rule, Starbucks, countertop brickabrack that has to be moved before you can dust, Larry the Cable Guy, or bluetooth headsets.

To not make one of these lists next year or any other time, for that matter, since it can all be summed up anyway in two sentences:

"Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength," and, "Love your neighbor as yourself." (Mark 12:30-31)