Rod Dreher wonders.
"It occurred to me last evening that when my father, who is 71, dies, an entire body of knowledge will die with him. He grew up in the rural South during the Great Depression. He can do any practical thing. He knows how to grow anything, how to kill and skin wild game, how to fix engines, how to fix plumbing, how to repair things around the house, how to maintain cars and power machinery, how to find water underground ... I could go on. He was the first in his family to go to college, and worked in a civil servant's job for his first career, and after retiring from that taught himself computer mapping, and will later this year retire from his second career as a creator of map databases. He is very far from a simple farmer. He believed that any self-respecting man should know how to be as self-reliant as possible; he never believed that having an advanced education excused one from knowing how to do practical things. He thinks it is degrading for men to be utterly dependent on others with specialized knowledge unless one had no choice."
I can do a lot of these things, though if I could fix cars we wouldn't have had the problems that have kept us close to home for months...
On the other hand, I am 56....
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My dad is 63. He's one of the youngest of the generation of family farming on 50 acres. I'm after him to write it all down. He's got such great stories but I'm afraid I'll forget them. As it is he keeps thinking of things he wishes he could ask his dad, who died 11 years ago. I gave dad a black notebook to write it all down in his scrawly left handed writing. My mom has an ancient computer and I'm after her to write down her story as well. She's your age, Steve, and grew up without electricity. Needless to say she doesn't like camping, ha ha. Even now I find out things about my parent's lives that I didn't know. I don't want it to disappear completely.
You know, just in case the power goes out, so I can feed us. I'm sadly useless without technology.
Rod Dreher sez: "It occurred to me last evening that when my father, who is 71, dies, an entire body of knowledge will die with him. He grew up in the rural South during the Great Depression. He can do any practical thing.
This set me to thinking as well .. I recall an entire lifetime of quiet, unassuming men who could do any practical thing. I think that growing up during the Great Depression was a part of that mystique (necessity is a mother, after all), but more than that, I believe that they came from a time when being self-sufficient was the modern day equivalent of a Ph.D. One either knew how to fix plumbing, wire the tool shed, milk a cow and keep a car running or one had to hand a part of one's independence over to a "repair man," or a "banker," or the grocer, etc. Women of that era were competent as well ... they grew Kitchen Gardens, kept a little egg money and could stretch one pair of boy's trousers through three owners with very little stress. I remember that my grandfather who was a mechanical engineer (Purdue Boilermaker) could also half-sole kid's shoes, and spent quiet evenings after diner on the front porch doing just that. He also drove a big, black Packard with a running board and kept that car running like a sewing machine.
A NYC lady friend of mine (Ed.D Fine Arts, Columbia) and I discussed one day how much we admired competent men. There is something so attractive about competence ... speaks to safety and protection, I expect. If I could find a competent man, I'd ask him to marry me!
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