Assembled
A long time ago, I tried to build model cars. I liked the way the small parts in the kit were affixed to thin plastic stems all neat and orderly. I would twist off each part, try to follow the instructions, dab the glue on to piece the car together. At eight years old, though, I rushed too much, more in a hurry to get the car finished rather than to worry about precision or aesthetic. I applied too much glue on some parts, not enough on others, and the cars didn’t look like the clean, sleek images on the box.
***
Chaos theory says that even a minor difference at the beginning can make a major difference as time progresses. Maybe it would have made a difference had I laid out all the pieces and more carefully read the instructions. Beginnings are relative, of course, proportional to the length of the whole. Tend to the beginning to reach a meaningful end.
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When I was twelve, my dad’s blue, faux-wood-paneled Ford station wagon idled at the curb in front of our house. He usually wasn’t home before I returned from school at the end of the day. As I neared, he pulled away. Maybe he was heading back to the factory. Or to the Star Club. I waved. He waved back with a flick of his right hand, a “be right back, see you in a few” gesture. He may have clicked his dentures, a habit he developed when irritated. I spied the brown cardboard boxes in the back, “Seagrams” printed on the side of one and “Coors” on the others. I didn’t realize then that the boxes were stuffed with his clothes and didn’t know that he would never live with us again, that our relationship would be pieced together through sporadic visits for five years as the distance grew wider.
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Virginia Satir, the family systems theorist, wrote, “Every word, facial expression, gesture, or action on the part of a parent gives the child some message about self-worth.” I remember that wave. The set of his jaw and the unheard click of plastic teeth. We were connected by brittle pieces – non-sequiturs over breakfast, a Saturday drive to the mountains, unpredictable appearances and anticipated disappearances – hanging together on thin stems.
***
My father and I argued across the expanse of the car’s hood as we stood in my mother’s driveway.
He asked, “What’re you going to do after you graduate?”
“I think I’ll go to Colorado State.” I was 17.
“God damn it,” he admonished. “In this family, we work.”
The engine clicked as it cooled.
He hadn’t lived with our family for five years.
“In this family, we work.” The middle line of a haiku, seven syllables.
We wouldn’t talk again for five years.
***
Chaos theory says that things are difficult to control, unpredictable. Sometimes, trauma can be a quiet, quick wave of a hand. Nearly undetectable. Almost imperceptible. The butterfly effect. Not wings flapping but two hands waving. Sometimes, it is the sound of car doors slamming an end to the conversation.
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Henry Ford’s most notable achievement is not the actual automobile but the process for building one. Ford had witnessed “continuous flow production” in flour mills, breweries, canneries, industrial bakeries, and in the disassembly of animal carcasses in the meatpacking plants in Chicago. The assembly line, the core of the production, moved interchangeable parts along the conveyor belt from one station to the next. By February of 1914, Ford had successfully applied continuous flow production toward the assembly of the Model T.
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When I dropped out of college, I had to replace an alternator on the handed-down ‘63 VW Bus. Plastic models and tubes of glue hadn’t prepared me for this. How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of Step by Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot detailed the step-by-step process to replace the defective part. To reach the alternator, I had to deconstruct much of the engine. By late morning, the VW’s engine lay disassembled on the pavement. I pieced it back together. Finally, the bus fired up with the distinctive sound of the VW engine. I was mobile, and could find work.
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In 1977, manufacturing jobs in the U.S. hit an all-time high. I worked the swing shift. Tinted safety glasses, steel-toed boots. Later, at home, I pieced together words and lines, phrases and stanzas. I read Adrienne Rich and Yusef Komunyakaa, cummings and Plath, Stevens and Hemingway. I wrote about Jimmie and Leonard, Vietnam vets returning to the world, and pondered a life not so straight and defined as the assembly line.
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I first read Satir’s work after my father’s stroke. I was 24, a college senior, and for half my life I had tried to come to know my father through his dismissive gestures, the widening distance, the sporadic presence, fragmented conversations. Old cars gave way to the silver sides of the wheelchair that framed his shrinking, broken body. Now, he sat literally without words, his right hand limp in his lap. Satir says, “What lingers from the parent’s individual past, unresolved or incomplete, often becomes part of his irrational parenting.” Even after his physical presence died, my relationship with my father – incomplete, unresolved – continued. Endings can be as vague as beginnings.
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I’m 63 now, my father’s age the last time we talked before his stroke. I take long drives today and listen to the sounds of truck tires on pavement. I play old country songs on the radio. I cannot remember the sound of my father’s voice. With effort, I can conjure the image of my father’s wave from the blue station wagon. Satir wrote, “Your responses to the events of life are more important than the events themselves.” In long stretches over two-lane highways, mile markers blur. In the space between them, I think about my father. In the years of seeking understanding, I drove unknowingly toward forgiveness.