Warning: Heavy nostalgia on the horizon. Take shelter as necessary.
After a month of procrastination, I finally managed to get my Jeep inspected this week. The deadline was the last day of February, so my writer's mind interpreted that as "the drop-dead deadline must really be the first week of March." It took even longer than I expected because at the first two service centers I went to, I was told that either the guy who did the inspections was "out" for some indeterminate amount of time, or that they just no longer did inspections.
You'd think someone would, like, take down the "STATE INSPECTIONS" sign out front in that case, but who am I to judge?
I finally ended up at "Japanese Auto Service," a little gas station/shop a few blocks from my house. No fuss there -- they just rolled the Jeep right into the service bay and got to work. I sat down in the "waiting room" on an old back seat doing duty as a couch. It was so relaxing and comforting -- it's amazing how quickly the smell of grease and car grime, or the sight of a shelf of Chilton auto-repair manuals, or a box full of random used car parts, can instantly send me to my dad's shop back home.
Dad actually had two shops as part of "Bugg's Body & Frame." There was the frame shop, a corrugated metal building behind our house where a complex and terrifyingly loud system of chains and pneumatics straightened out the undersides of smashed-up cars. Over the hill behind my grandparents house was the body shop, where all the body repair work and custom paint jobs took place. The body shop had once been, I believe, a small dairy barn, but milk cows had ceased to be a part of my grandfather's herd long before I was born. These days it still houses some old cars and other detritus left over from when my parents moved away -- my uncle stores farm equipment in and around it as well. (If you look very closely at the picture, on the left you can see the cinder-block paint room my dad added on. Things have changed a lot, though. There even used to be an outhouse on the left side as well, but that was dispatched in the late '70s, if I recall correctly.)
It's the body shop that holds the strongest memories for me -- even though "Japanese Auto Repair" is a mechanic's shop and not a body shop like my dad's, it was still similar enough to send me back. Although my dad's shop was never filled with the sounds of a Korean learn-to-speak-English tape repeating, "No, it's a compact disk" or "Yes, it's a purse." But even if I didn't understand the language, I'm willing to bet a good amount of money the conversations are still the same: cars, wives, engines, girlfriends, trucks, cars, idiot customers, etc.
Once I was old enough to handle a few power tools without totally endangering myself and everyone around me, I started working in my dad's shop. Unsurprisingly, I was not very good at it. I don't have the steady hand required for spray painting -- my dad's work with paint was flawless, and I remember how proud I was when one of his jobs got featured in Hot Rod -- and I lacked the patience for sanding and prepping the cars. The one thing I excelled at and enjoyed doing was stripping paint, particularly from the fiberglass Corvettes that were my dad's personal specialty. Fiberglass was tough work: you couldn't leave the paint remover on too long or it would eat into the fiberglass itself, but if you worked too fast you risked gouging the surface with the blade, which then required more repair work. It was work that fit my attention span just about perfectly.
So, sitting in the shop this week waiting for my Jeep to be done, I did what I always do: entertain thoughts of what it would be like to work in a shop. This is a completely silly flight of fancy -- I remember distinctly approaching my dad when I was in fifth or sixth grade, completely in tears because I was convinced that he wanted me to take over his business when I grew up. He reassuringly told me I could be whatever I wanted to be, advice that perhaps took a wildly different direction than he expected, but hey, kids, what're you gonna do? So, the thought of taking up a life of heavy lifting and joint-damaging labor is pure and utter nostalgia. But it's nice nostalgia, if just for a few minutes.
The downside: my comfort level, dreamy haze and instinctive trust of men who do the job my dad did render me completely susceptible to whatever shop guys tell me I need. Yeah, sure, go ahead. How much? No problem! This is why I need to do my own car repairs. Really, I've got the jack and everything. Now if I just had a garage...
Bonus item that I can't figure out how to work in otherwise, but I just love remembering: Even before I started first grade, I have some memories of my dad's first years with the shop -- before it was "Bugg's Body & Frame," he had a business partner and another name for the shop I can't remember. I do, however, remember the slogan that his partner came up with and had painted on a huge red billboard next to the highway in front of our house: "If a mule kicks it, we'll fix it!"
As soon as the business partner was gone, so was the billboard.
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