A few weeks ago, I pressed the button on my Honda Civic’s key fob to open the trunk. Nothing happened. Well, not nothing exactly. The trunk made a click sound, but where it normally pops up, it just stayed closed. I could manually open the trunk but the door was heavy instead of light as a feather as it usually is and once open it would often come crashing down on my head when I was loading the groceries. Ouch.
Upon closer inspection, I saw that one of the two torsion bars (no, I didn’t know what they were called until I searched YouTube) was broken clean off at one end. “Gotta get that fixed,” I thought and then promptly forgot about it until the next time I opened the trunk. Now more than two months have passed and I still haven’t attended to this. It is a small problem that doesn’t affect much except when you are trying to put things into or take things out of the trunk and then it is surprisingly irritating and inconvenient. But I’ve had other broken things to deal with that seemed more pressing.
Ever since Homo habilis started making stone tools about 2 million years ago, humans have been dealing with broken stuff and just as then, there are two approaches to the problem. One is the throw the thing out and get (or make) a new one and the other is to fix the broken one.
For millennia, the preferred way was to repair. Most of the time it was cheaper (in terms of labor expenditure or currency of exchange) to put a new edge on your stone axe than to acquire or to make a new one. Even in near ancient times, like my childhood, when stuff broke, you just got it fixed. Telephone stopped working? The phone company came over to your house and repaired it. TV on the blink? Probably a bad tube. Your dad (always your dad) removed the screws from the back, found the tube that wasn’t glowing and picked up a new one from the repair shop for a dollar or two and popped it in. Good as new! Which is to say fuzzy picture in black and white.
But during last 30 years, it has become more common when something breaks, to toss it in the trash, send it to the landfill, and buy a new one. Many modern things often can’t be repaired, were in fact designed to be unrepairable. Or even if they can be fixed, we tell ourselves, “it isn’t worth it.” By which we mean, we’d rather pay to have a new one with all the bells and whistles. With more expensive items like phones and cars we have even devised elaborate schemes like “leasing” and allowed ourselves to be convinced that they make good financial sense (they don’t) so that we can justify getting a new one every couple of years.
I prefer to get things fixed. Even today, it is still often cheaper to get something fixed, especially an expensive thing, than to get a new one. Plus, anytime you can fix something that is broken, you keep it out of the landfill for a while longer and a new one doesn’t need to be manufactured with all the environmental impacts of doing that. We keep most of our cars for 20 years or 200,000 miles. We bought our coffee maker in 2002. Even my laptop is seven years old and has had its battery, keyboard, and trackpad replaced. Still going strong, I might add. Not gonna lie – I upgrade my phone every year or two but then I pass along the old phone to my wife and her phone goes to one of the kids. Each phone has a long life and I have the latest technology. Best of both worlds – at least for me.
I have always envied folks who could fix things themselves. I have always thought of myself as someone who was not handy, and my culture milieu reinforces the stereotype that Jewish men are not handy. When I was working I justified “calling the men” (as my mom refers to it) to fix stuff because my time was “too valuable” to be crawling around under the sink.
But in the last two years I have been trying to claim a new identity: a person who can fix stuff. Three factors are at play.
First, though I still consider my time valuable, I seem to have more of it than I used to. Not having to commute to and work in an office from 8:00-18:00 everyday has been a huge boon, and trying to fix things is a luxury that comes with the extra time.
Second, I am home a lot! When I was in Rochester, if something broke, I just reported it at the rental office on my way out the door to work. By the time I came home, it had been magically fixed. A stove burner that wouldn’t heat up, a clogged bathtub drain, a loose kitchen tile, a closet door off its track all put right by guys (they were always guys) earning their livelihood while I earned mine. Now, I don’t have a livelihood and I am at home face to face with the broken stuff day after day until I do something about it.
Third, YouTube! Whatever in your life is broken, someone has made a video showing how to fix it and posted it online. Invariably, they make it look easy or at least doable by mortals.
So back in March of 2020 I took my first tentative steps by replacing the fan in the bathroom. This involved not only standing on a step stool but also (simple) electrical wiring. I neither fell off the stool nor electrocuted myself and was thus emboldened! What followed was a flurry of long delayed home repairs. Here is a small sample of my home handiwork:
• I replaced the bulb in the microwave oven
• I replaced the faucet gizmos in the kitchen sink that was dripping
• I replaced the hoses under the kitchen sink that were dripping
• I unclogged the trap under the bathroom sink
• I replaced the oven glass (after breaking it while making pizza)
• I changed a flat tire by the side of a dirt road in Kansas at sunset
• I installed a new HVAC system in our house (okay that is not true).
I did take down one of the venetian blinds and figured out how to fix it but when I called the company to get the plastic part I needed, they were closed for 3 months because of Covid and I never got around to calling them again. So, my record is not without blemish.
Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition teaches that our world has been broken from the beginning. God’s energy was too powerful for this poor universe to contain and God’s light ended up scattered throughout creation like shards from a delicate glass knocked to the kitchen floor. It is the job of the human being to collect the shards and assemble them back into something resembling a glass. We are not permitted to just collect the shards and throw them in the dustbin. It’s God’s light after all. The task is not finished until we have fixed everything that is shattered.
The thing about fixing stuff is that the odyssey is never-ending. Things are always breaking. No sooner do you fix one thing than another breaks. I understand why it is so tempting just to chuck the worn thing that is not working and to get a shiny new one. But keeping the old thing going often makes more sense for your life, your wallet, and, of course, the planet and, I have learned, if you can do the repair yourself, it can feel very empowering.
Russian bombs are falling in Ukraine, the stock market is in a tail spin, energy prices are soaring, and the political chasm in America seems to grow wider every day. I’d like to be helpful, to do my bit in fixing these things but, truthfully, I don’t know how to begin. Today, I’ll have to be satisfied with ordering a new torsion bar for the trunk of the Civic and attempting to install it with the help of a kind dude on YouTube who made a video.
Right now, it is the only part of this broken world that this dad/guy has the confidence to try to repair.