Outstanding in His Field

When I was in Mr. Helm’s High School geometry class, I spent most of evenings sitting at the kitchen table trying to solve equations. English class, I got. Everything was subjective, open to interpretation. Those teachers expected me to ask why, and boy did I ask.  Anything math based—well, those folks always expect two plus two to equal four, so I struggled.

My Dad tried to help. Like most dads of that era, he could, and did, fix anything. For instance, he could listen to a car engine and figure out what was causing the sputter. He tried to teach me, which consisted of me holding the light (usually in the wrong spot) and eventually handing him the wrenches he needed.

“Give me the 5/16s box end,” he’d say.

I’d look through every single wrench in the toolbox, trying to remember what “box end” meant, staring at the sizes marked on the shafts, and still end up handing him the wrong wrench three or four times. The past couple of years, I’m coming to understand exactly how frustrating this must have been for him.

Geometry homework sessions consisted of him repeating, each time with a bit more authority, “Use your theorems, you’ve got to know your theorems, your axioms, your postulates.” On Algebra nights the mantra was “balance the equation, convert the fraction and cancel them out, make it balance.”

At the time, I didn’t get it. No pictures formed in my mind. I loved the abstractions I found in books, the variety of possibility hidden in poetry. When the ubiquitous they started mixing numbers and letters—forget it. But, as the saying goes, the older I get the smarter my dad becomes. He passed Einstein genius level in my mid-thirties and is currently hovering in the Stephen Hawking range.

I struggled with a lot of subjects, struggled with a lot of things. I was, and am, hard-headed, obstinate, mouthy, and I love a good argument (a real, logic-based argument, not the who yells the loudest kind). I wouldn’t listen to him, to anybody—I had to figure things out for myself. Every gray hair on my pop’s head, I put there.  When I’d done something really stupid, which was almost daily, Pop would shake his head and proclaim, “if you put your brain on a razor blade it’d look like a BB rolling down a four-lane highway,” and he was right in a metaphorical sort of way.

But, those early lessons, both spoken and demonstrated, stuck. To this day, I remember a2 + b2 = c2, but I still wonder what made Pythagoras come up with that, and why. That do-it-yourself attitude I learned from him and it permeates everything I do today. I can look at a nut and pick the right size wrench in one or two tries. I’m every bit as stubborn, if not more so, than my Dad. Once I make up my mind I’m going to do something, I’ll figure out a way and I’ll stick with it until I get there. “There” is subjective—I’ll probably screw it up—but I’ll see it through.

I’m still nowhere close to the Mr. Fix-it my dad is and I know that’s something I’ll never attain. I’ve sorta always known that. Knowing that made me angry for a long time, it frustrated me, probably in the same way and just as much as my not understanding math and geometry and carburetors frustrated him. Every single trait in him that I envied, that we argued over, every trait that aggravated me, baffled me, frustrated me for so long, I use every single day as a writer, a dad, and a teacher.

And why is this all on my mind today? Probably because I received the last round of edit suggestions from my publisher’s editor last week and I’m earlobe deep in those revisions. There’s nothing really creative or glamourous about this stage of the process. It’s very much a “put your head down and just get the job done” exercise. It’s methodical, practical, utilitarian work. I sit at the table and I slog through line-by-line. Two plus two has to equal four. It’s being sixteen-years-old and trying to get through Mr. Helms’ Geometry class once again. If I asked my pops to help me with it, he’d be as lost as I was all those years ago. But he is helping me, and I know I’ll get through this round of revisions, and the book’ll be better for it. Sitting at the table tonight, I realized that, at least for this stage of the process, it’s all because of what I learned, am still learning, from him.

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