My grandfather, Mr. W. D. Jolly, had a unique perspective. He was certainly not what you’d call an
optimist. His views on the human race
were not as a rule favorable. He was
however a ‘half-full’ kind of guy.
This was particularly true with regard to household appliances
and the like. He came from an era in which
things lasted a lifetime. Where most
people would see “broken” stuff, he would see things that “needed repair”. It was a subtle but very substantial
difference. He saw devices that, with
a little assistance, had their functioning lives mostly ahead of them. As they suffered breakdowns, he would
attempt to nurse them back to life, like a sick calf. He treated them with great care and affection. “Ain’t hardly nothing wrong with it,” he’d
say. This would generally belie the
fact that the machine would not perform the task for which it was created. He wasn’t talking about output here. He was talking about totality. What he meant was that 99.9% of the parts in
that sewing machine were fine. It was
just some little spring or doo-hickey in there that needed replacing.
There was usually considerable opinion within the family that he
throw the offending appliance away.
This was particularly true if it had been to his workbench more than
once. He was a certifiably good fixer,
but in truth his repairs were not always permanent. His repair parts were seldom factory approved, and his methods
were mostly trial-and-error.
Most things in his house needed to be jiggled or whacked to get them
started or keep them going. The radio
needed a good solid thump on the right side to come on. To get the front door
to open, you had to lift up on the door knob and kind of hump it with your
hip. The dryer door was held shut with
a bungee cord. The lawn mower wouldn’t
start til you took the air cleaner off.
You had to push the toaster handle down three times before the bread
would stay down. No more, no less. Somebody was always yelling: “Grandpa, the
toilet won’t flush!” “Lift up hard,
then push down,” he’d yell back. And it
would always work. He was like an
interpreter for mute machines. He
understood their language. And he
didn’t try to force his appliances to live by his rules. He understood and lived by theirs.
This lifestyle demanded a
fair amount of patience. Mr. Jolly had
a sufficiency of that. The starter went
out on his truck, and it was at least a year before he got around to replacing
it. He just always parked on an
incline. Fortunately, there were
plenty of hills around, and his emergency brake worked fine. He was a man who,
either by inclination or necessity, never seemed to be in much of a hurry.
He often took walks around the perimeter of the town dump. This was a form of relaxation for him and a
source of spare parts as well. He was
astounded at things people threw away, and as often as not he’d come home with
treasures.
I remember the clock he
brought home. It was a standing brass
figure of a cherub or something, buck naked, with curly hair, doing some kind
of ballet thing. The clock was in its
belly. Mr. Jolly saw this thing
glinting in the sun and was immediately drawn to it. He waded into the pile, picked it up and cleaned it off. He knew art when he saw it, and this was a
find of the first order.
He then looked at it mechanically. It seemed to be intact, so he wound it lightly. It immediately began to run like...well,
like a clock. He brought it home like
he’d found a Tiffany lamp, polished it up a bit and gave it a place of honor on
the mantle.
My grandmother, Mrs. Jolly, was less thrilled than he. “It doesn’t have any hands,” she pointed
out. This was technically true and had
in fact escaped his notice. But it
dampened his enthusiasm and affection for the clock not a bit. It was a perfectly functioning clock. Never mind that it didn’t actually tell
time. By this point in his life, he was
less interested in time as chronology anyway.
It was more of a philosophical concept.
He grasped more than most that time was relative. That clock satisfied his temporal needs
perfectly. He loved to hear its
rhythmic ticking. To the day he died,
he wound that clock everyday. “Best
damn clock I ever owned,” he crowed.
Well it about drove my grandmother crazy. She had her own distinct views on art. And that clock was well outside the
parameters. And, as it turned out, she
was more of a stickler for function than my grandfather. Everything in her house should pull its own
weight, she reasoned. And that clock on
her mantle, ticking so smugly but refusing to divulge the time, was beyond
useless. It was useless and bragged
about it. It took pride in it.
She would have thrown it out, but the dump was obviously not a
safe repository. Mr. Jolly would just
have found it again and probably uncovered something else even more tasteless
and less useful in the process. No,
that clock came with the territory. I
can hear her sigh even now.
In truth, there were other parts of the territory she was not
overly fond of. Whacking radios and
jiggling toilets was not a way of life she would have chosen. It lacked a certain refinement she was used
to. But to my knowledge, she never even
mentioned it to Mr. Jolly. She
determined early on that if tolerance was a virtue, her husband (and, by
extension, that clock) was her ticket to sainthood. She may have made it too.
Though it didn’t seem to have given her much pleasure. I suppose her rewards are in the Hereafter.
My grandfather on the other hand derived great pleasure from
junkyard finds and household maintenance.
The price appealed to him, that much was true. But it was more than that.
They appealed to his sense of cosmology, I think. The Universe was a place in which nothing
ever really got thrown away. And it was
his job, his particular human skill, to put things together in various
combinations to do work. Or to
amuse. To do both at the same time was
High Art.
Mr. Jolly certainly had a talent in that regard. We have inherited a number of his things,
and they have the definite stamp of the artist. They kind of work, and
they are oddly amusing. And when I see
Beau Baylor coming home from our walks with his pockets full, I suspect they
are not all we have inherited from Mr. Jolly.