"The Beauty of This, Son..."

Pop and me

My dad, Elmer Taylor Thompson, dumped the name about the time he could understand that  “Elmer” was the person the family meant when they asked him to go help run the cows or chase a pig back into the pen.  “I’m going to be ET,” goes the story from his mother, the diminutive Sina Messersmith Thompson.  She weighed 100 pounds, loved to talk about politics and family matters, and cook for her large family—11 in all.  She drank coffee but never touched liquor, and the closest she got to swearing was the puzzling phrase, “I swan...”

Dad lives on in our minds and hearts because of  his wisdom and humor.  One of his  favorite phrases was, “the beauty of this son,” which was usually the cap on a repair project that consisted of a coat hanger, pliers, a jack knife, a piece of string, and “electrician’s tape,” the all-purpose precursor of the now ubiquitous grey Duct Tape.  [He was MacGyver before his time.]

Dad confessed privately in one of his letters, his usual rambling meditations about what he called “the human condition,” that his “real” dream was to have been an inventor.  He had dreams, but the less important ones never came true.

We never saw him build anything amazing from scratch.  His specialty was repair.  The issue was ingenuity—the Oakie challenge, the shoots and blossoms of what we loosely called “Yankee ingenuity.” A little glue, some electrician’s tape, a piece of coat hanger--and the toilet flushed.  Cost? 2 hours, 20 cents worth of supplies and the joy of once again “beating the system.”

Dad always carried pliers, a jack knife, a scripto mechanical pencil, which he would only “loan” a desperate child trying to finish fractions.  When he gave you money or handed you the pencil, he was painfully reluctant—but he always came through.  He taught us the value of things.  Looking fondly and intently, he would say, “I’ve had this pencil for three years.”  Opening the wallet was a ritual—slowly, carefully, as if he were memorizing the particulars of a dollar bill, saying farewell to a real friend, a painful parting. He was amazingly generous, but somehow the ritual always gave one pause. “Do I really need to buy this?”

His summit of the Mount Everest of repair projects was a middle-of-the-night leaking toilet—once again.  He took a tennis-ball can, put a fish hook in the ball, and placed the can over the drain-hole. All quiet on the Western Front. “You see the beauty of this son..."


[Publisher's Note:  Editor is out of town until the 25th, so posts will be sporatic until my return.  Stay tuned.]