DON’T PERSECUTE THE TINKERERS, CELEBRATE THEM

Yards may be ugly, but it is worth putting up with the mess, writes Lorraine Sommerfeld

Sometimes people work from home. Maybe you have no idea this is so, if it’s someone like me who quietly types in my kitchen and is only handy for receiving must-be-signed-for packages when you’re out. But maybe it’s something a little more visual, more in-your-face. Maybe someone has a few cars scattered around the yard, and maybe this is against local bylaws. Or maybe they just have one old car that hasn’t moved since Winston Churchill was in power, and you would like it gone.

I’ve been following the legal unfolding of such a case in Harbeson, Delaware (population: 973), where a local man has built an admittedly large (over 1,900 square feet, or 178 square metres) four-car garage, complete with lifts. The owner is a gearhead who now uses a wheelchair, and he lets his friends wrench in the space and he also does work for others — and doesn’t charge them. So of course his neighbours are suing him, and a judge just batted that out of the sky like an anti-aircraft missile.

This little story from a little town is actually much bigger than some bickering neighbours putting their snouts into another’s business, and it’s bigger than whether your idea of neighbourhood beautification involves more tulips than steel. This is about the contributions we make to our communities, and the respect we hold for those who aren’t just like us.

If you’re lucky, you have someone in your loop, either socially or geographically, who can fix things. I had Geoff Penney, one street over, who no doubt would have ended up facing down the lawyers of those Harbeson, Delaware, crankyfaces if they’d been his neighbours. The Penney house is on a beautiful street, a real estate hot spot, and his driveway usually sported several vehicles in various states of repair. His garage was a catacomb of many eras, a maze of the unknown to the untrained eye but a bonanza of riches to Geoff.

As housing prices started to climb, we’d often wondered who would start the ball rolling to get all lawyered up to strip Geoff down.

But time and again, nothing happened. I’d heard there had been rumbling years before my time, but nothing came of them. Because it wasn’t just that Geoff could fix old cars, it was that Geoff could make a house call and fix your fridge, that he could get you going on a snowy morning when no way was CAA gonna get you to work on time, and that he could unbreak the lawn mower your kid broke by running over something that to this day he won’t admit to — the kid, not Geoff.

Geoff was never without a rag in one hand and a wrench in the other, and conversations moved with the grace of an expert juggler. He could add in one, then two, then three people, all while fiddling with a chainsaw or peering into the back of a clock that had mysteriously stopped ticking off the moments.

He was fascinated by machinery, and it spoke to him. With Geoff, you didn’t have to “just go buy a new one,” anathema to anyone who has respect for quality craftsmanship, a hard-earned dollar or endless landfills. We need the tinkerers, the fixers, the engineers, the craftsmen and the mechanics. And we need these people so we can learn, or at least respect that which is growing scarcer every year.

We diagnose our cars with computers now, or perhaps more aptly, we diagnose our computers with computers. We’ve lost at least a generation of handing down the tools and the knowledge that did far more than change oil filters and swap out winter tires. We’ve lost the time and the stories and the bonding, between parents and children and between neighbours. It went with the territory of that guy who could fix everything and took as much delight as the doubting owner when something dead sprang back to life.

There is a middle ground between rusted out hulks littering the landscape and a landscape for learning and fixing those things that are broken. Just like all that glitters is not gold, all that waits patiently for repair is not rot.

Geoff Penney died just over three years ago. I knew then it would be a tremendous blow for his family and friends, but the loss to our little community continues.

So here’s to the fixers and the engine whisperers who live among us and support their communities in ways we sometimes forget to value in our rush to scrub this up and wash that down.

As for that judge in Harbeson, Delaware, somewhere Geoff Penney just pulled the cap off a beer for you, sir. Thank you. Driving.ca