Mr. Fix-it

When I was six, my Dad gave me my first pocket knife. It was stainless steel, with a hook to connect it to a key chain. It had a bottle opener, a file (which I have never quite understood), an icepick, and, of course, a large knife. It wasn't until I found this knife many years later that I understood why anyone would give a six-year-old a knife to play with. It had been dulled down to near butter-knife sharpness, the tip filed off and smoothed. It was so hard to open it, that my parents had probably figured I would loose interest after a while, and go back to playing with my "little boy" toys. They figured wrong. This determined little boy not only played with that thing, but it became the instrument with which I almost destroyed our home.

Dad was an electrician in the Coast Guard, which meant that not only was he a professional in high-tech helicopter radars and batteries, but he also regularly tended to the electrical work that was necessary in our house. I used to watched dad install ceiling fans, rewiring things, and working with his meter and other tools on a fairly regular basis. As I've written before, my father has always been my hero. I used to imitate him all the time. When he was studying for the tests that the Coast Guard gives in order to gain rank, I would quietly come into the kitchen, sit down next to him with his notebooks and highlighter, and open my big book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes and stare at the pages, concentrating as hard as he was. We sat there in silence for as long as 15 minutes with our foreheads resting on our open palms.
Another example of this that comes to mind is this: Dad was a smoker until I was about fifteen. When I would ride in the truck with him as a little kid, I always carried a cut-off, plastic straw in my pocket. When he would light up and roll down his window, I would reach down and take it our while rolling down my window too. We would go down the interstate, with our elbows hanging out the window taking occasional drags off of our cigs. I don't remember Dad making much eye contact with me when I did that. I think that seeing his eight year old kid pretending to smoke a neon green plastic straw to be like his daddy made him feel bad about smoking.
*Side note: Parents, your kids are watching. That whole "do as I say, not as I do" thing doesn't work. By 18, I had retired my straw and moved on to the real thing--a guilty pleasure I still struggle to control. (Though I don't think it's my parents fault I tried cigarettes, I think they had some influence.)

Anyhow, the instinct to "fix" things was bred into me by my dad. And one day, as my three-year-old sister played in my room with me, I took it upon myself to "fix" the light switch on my wall. I took out my stainless steel pocket-butter-knife, and slid the blade behind the fixture. It fit so perfectly, no resistance at all. I had pushed it about an inch deep, when I heard a loud POP, and about a dozen little sparks shot out from the wall and floated gently down to the carpet. I jumped back, somehow avoiding any painful electric shock. I knew I had done something real bad, especially when I saw Angela's eyes double in size. I reached up and grabbed the knife as it hung from the fixture. Again, how I didn't get electrocuted is beyond me, and probably one of those times when God goes out of his way to protect us from our own stupidity. Angela shot out of the room, down the stairs, and into the garage where Mom and Dad were talking. I followed, a little slower than she.

I remember thinking to myself, "Well, everything's fine. The sparks didn't catch anything on fire. I'm not dead. Do I really have to tell them that I had done something to create an indoor fireworks show?" Too late. Angela chimed in with her amazingly cute little speech impediment (it's a good thing she was cute, because I could have killed her), "Mommy, fy-yoo" (that's "fire," in English).
Needless to say, I didn't see my knife for years after that. I think I was 11 or 12 before I got another one, which, of course, I used to destroy or defame countless other things around the house: furniture, carpet, the wood on the porch, a tree or two. But no electrical equipment. My ambitions of becoming an electrician like Dad had been thoroughly quieted.