The garage floor solves the world while a moon landing is planned for the driveway
Saturday. My son-in-law arrived at seven in the morning with coffee and a look I recognized, the look of a man who has purchased something requiring assembly, and by eight we were on his garage floor surrounded by the exploded diagram of a Swedish storage system, four hundred parts, two ambiguous men in the instructions gesturing at each other, and one Allen wrench, included, as if in apology. This is the modern barn raising. The whole neighborhood no longer gathers, it is just two men, a diagram, and the slow discovery that panel C exists in two mirror-image versions distinguishable only after installation.
I want the record to show I respect the Swedes. Any nation that convinced the entire earth to do its manufacturing labor for it, in our own garages, for free, and to feel accomplished afterward, has achieved something Alexander never managed. We conquered ourselves and paid for the privilege and the meatballs. Strategy-wise it is the finest work since the Trojan horse, which, I note, was also furniture.
The Doctrine of the Extra Screw
We finished by noon, and the unit stands, plumb, against the wall, holding storage bins with a dignity I did not expect from particleboard. But there are, on the garage floor, four screws remaining. Four. And here the two schools of American manhood divide. My son-in-law, a good man, an engineer even, holds that extras are included by design, a tolerance allowance, and cites the parts count. I hold the older doctrine, which is that somewhere in that unit are four empty holes waiting for their moment, and the moment will come at two in the morning some February, and the unit knows where the holes are, and it is patient. We taped the screws to the back panel, the traditional compromise, a note to the future reading, we could not find your holes, godspeed. Half the furniture in this nation carries such notes. Archaeologists will find them and understand us completely.
During the assembly, per tradition, we solved the world. This is the actual function of the garage floor. The furniture is the excuse. Over four hours we covered his job, my knees, the state of the schools, whether anyone we know actually understands their own health insurance, consensus, no, and the correct way to teach my granddaughter to ride a bicycle, which is happening next weekend, and which we planned like a moon landing. Two grown men, one diagram already, drawing driveway maps in pencil, marking the grade, the launch zone, the abort corridors. The NHTSA bicycle safety pages counsel helmets and gradual progression, and we counsel those too, plus the ancient technique, the run alongside, the hand on the seat that lets go before it announces it, the lie of presence that every generation tells the next at nine miles an hour. My father’s hand let go somewhere on Chestnut Street in 1958 and did not report it for fifty feet, and I have never fully forgiven him and never stopped being grateful, both, which is the whole apparatus of being raised by someone, right there, at the moment the wobbling stops.
An Inventory of Garages
His garage, I noted while we worked, has entered phase two of the American garage lifecycle, phase one being cars, phase two being everything except cars, the cars having been exiled to the driveway to make room for the bicycles, the coolers, the drum kit of aspiration, and now the Swedish unit whose purpose is to organize the exile. We are a people who buy storage to store the storage. Somewhere in the third bin down is a box labeled cables, misc, and I did not have to open it to know, because I have its twin, every man does, it is the national junk drawer at scale, and its contents connect devices that no longer exist to outlets that never did. We keep it because throwing it out summons, within the week, the exact need for the one cable it contained. This is not superstition. This has been peer reviewed on every garage floor in the country. We also located, behind his winter tires, the wedding-present toolbox I gave him eleven years ago, and I am pleased to report it shows wear, real wear, paint gone at the corners, the good kind of gone, and a man learns more about his daughter’s marriage from the corners of that toolbox than from any holiday conversation. Things are being fixed over there. Somebody is showing up with the right wrench. That is the whole report a father actually needs, and it was filed in scuff marks, and I read it twice.
The Evening Ledger
Filed the day’s report with the satirical desk at Bohiney Magazine, and posted the weekly letter to Britain’s The London Prat, whose man reports the British equivalent ritual is the flat-pack wardrobe, assembled in a bedroom too small to open its doors once built, a design constraint he calls character-forming, and encloses a photograph of his own taped screw packet, dated 1997, still riding the back panel, still unresolved. Brothers in tolerance allowances.
Tally, one unit raised, four screws archived, one moon landing scheduled for a driveway on Chestnut, one box of cables, misc, left sealed for national security. My knees filed their complaint in triplicate around nine, and I have granted them Sunday off. The hand lets go before it announces it. Next weekend, it is my turn to not announce it. I have been training for this my whole life.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com