“My Generation”

A few years back and some long hour after two in the morning, hunched over a cheap, disassembled travel camera, my work lit by the only bulb of a tiny back-room in Barcelona, I became a man. I was abroad then, seeing the world, and documenting everything from personal growths to facial growths. So I was left rather frustrated with this bad, mechanical luck, and spent the better part of that evening blinking at the obvious: my camera was broken and needed fixing. What was more obvious was that if the camera was to be fixed, I would be the one to fix it. Amidst that late-night frustration, tiny tools, and my larger hands around them, I thought of my father.

My mother’s favorite compliment for me was, ‘you are your father’s son.’ It was the kind of thing she reserved for when I got good marks on a paper, or won an argument, or was especially dirty with some garage project. My mother and I both admired my father, and she was constantly reminding me (still does) of what kind of man he was. He belonged to The Greatest Generation, the generation that fought in World War II, the generation whose ingenuity, self-reliance, and work-ethic redefined our nation into a superpower. Through my father, my life was filled with the men of this generation, role-models of an honest method. They did it simple; they did it straight. Get the job done, and do it well. “No man ever died of hard work,” I’d hear one quote to the other. I strove to be a man like them, a man of accomplishment.

My dad’s buddy Ray, a red-faced, navy man who was probably the inspiration behind the phrase, ‘swears like a sailor,’ turned his father’s small manufacturing facility into a multi-million dollar trailer-hitch empire. Uncle David laughed like a bear might if it had moved to Texas and married a girl named Dorothy. He worked for the CIA and helped create the WWII program that used Native American languages to send coded messages. My dad’s business partner Carl always shook a hand with nobility and a promise, and when he quoted Kahlil Gibran by heart, he smiled at the end. My Uncle Robert has traveled the world over twice, has a friend in every country, and introduced me to Mozart, Chopin, and Joshua Bell. My father…my father was a medic on Iwo Jima. His stories of those days are of saving lives, and of his life saved, and of the harrowing truth of his life in war. He taught me to break problems apart, and leave frustration aside. He had a way of asking brilliant questions that made you see how interesting everything could be. Once, at the family dinner table, he looked our desperate golden retriever straight in the nose and asked it, “Dog, what is it like to always be hungry? Don’t you ever tire of it? And if you tire of it, are you then more tired, or still just hungry?” He loved words and we’d explore the dictionary like the lines of a map. He was always curious, always a gentleman, and could fix damn near anything.

But that night, in Barcelona, he wasn’t there, and I was, and still, my camera was broken. I went through it all. ‘Wont turn on, means no power…batteries still good…must be a short. It was in the rain two weeks ago. But no, it still worked then…hmm. But what if there was still water in it?’ I started pulling things apart, things that were orange and unmarked and hard to remember if I’d had to. ‘But what if the water slowly seeped in, like a drip maybe, and had caused an oxidation in some of the circuitry? That might cause a short.’ I pulled back another layer of orange. Then, there it was, white, flaky, water-warped metal. I scraped away, exposing good, fresh conductor. ‘That should do it.’ I closed it up, put the screws back, and held a breath. “click….WHRRRR, scooga, ba ding!” it buzzed on! I held the blinking camera by my face and looked into a mirror. I smiled. I took a photograph and blinked from the flash. The picture is simple, my face reserved, accomplished, and pleased. I was a man.

Originally written on September 20, 2006