Hands-On

 I stood there on the edge of responsibility, waiting to be told what to do next. I was holding a rack of fuel injectors. I knew this because I had been told. While I stood there waiting for my next instruction, I asked what a Fuelie Head was. It seemed like a good time and place for it, looming over the engine of a car and all. I was already pretty sure that a Hurst on the floor was a type of gear shifter, but Fuely Head was just some words in a Bruce Springsteen song. I had the context, but not the specifics. 

"What's a Fuelie Header?" I asked, breaking the thoughtful silence. 

There was a sigh as he put his ratchet down. "You mean a Feulie Head?"

"Sure. I guess so." 

"Cylinder heads. Used on the early sixties Corvettes." Back to staring at the engine that was still in pieces, judging from the frame I was holding in my hands above the open space where the top of the motor used to be. 

I was there, by choice, as moral support. The things I knew about cars were primarily those found in the lyrics of pop songs, mostly penned by Bruce Springsteen. I was trying to make sense of the various chunks of metal and tubes that were being shifted around in front of me. I was asking questions to appear a notch more clever than a rack that could hold the fuel injectors without having to be sentient. I was hoping that suddenly after being ignorant of such things for fifty-eight years that suddenly the scales would fall from my eyes and the mechanics would become clear to me. 

I was not expecting that they would be as clear as they are to my son, who was moving around the engine bay like a surgeon. A greasy surgeon who tended to curse when nuts slipped off underneath the starter he had just installed. As his father, I felt an odd displacement as the mystified one in this scenario. I had changed my share of sparkplugs and added my share and a couple of others' to the engines I had owned myself back in the day, but what I was looking at seemed like a central nervous system repair compared to the maintenance I had performed in my youth. I drove my share of cars into the ground, using them up past their freshness date. It never occurred to me that I might work on my car to keep it running.

My son was once more into the breech to resuscitate the car he had owned since high school. Several others had owned it before that, but that didn't mean he was going to let a little thing like a broken starter slow him down. 

I asked him if he liked this work as much as he loved putting together Legos back in his youth. I knew the answer. It was the one thing I did know that afternoon. He knew his way around that engine. With or without the Fuelie Heads.