My Dad often said ‘Take your time and do it right, or don’t bother doing it at all’ to me when I worked in his garage or on my own projects. Not long ago, I said the same thing to one of my young computer repair students, and was inwardly taken aback as I heard my father’s voice coming out of my mouth.

My Dad was a self-employed auto mechanic who never got past 8th grade, now enjoying a much-deserved retirement. He had to drop out of school to work in his father’s garage support his widowed mother, brother and sister in the depths of the Great Depression. He worked there all his life.

He was a prisoner of old ideas in many ways, and our first clashes were over my participation in the civil rights movement. He never voted much–’they’re all crooks’–but he liked Kennedys, then George Wallace, then Reagan, and finally, Al Gore.

But he knew I wasn’t likely to change my ways, and that I got my stubborness from him.

To make a long story short, he’s mellowed over the years, I’ve got him to use the word ‘colored’ when talking about Blacks (at least in my presence), and he hates Bush and the war with a passion, even as as he flies a dozen flags and five big yellow ribbons on his porch. (He’s a vet from WW2, purple heart and all).

But he let me know not long ago that even if he didn’t always understand or agree with me, he was always in admiration of how I, and my generation generally, didn’t just accept things as their fate, but tried to make the world a better place. His generation, he explained, because of their harsh times when young, placed great value on their family’s ecomonic security above all else. In our fights, he said, it wasn’t always the issues we wrangled over that really motivated him, but an underlying concern for how I would survive, and what might be done to me by ‘the crooks in charge,’ that worried him most.

So your story touched on these things, too, even with different time, place and circumstance, and caused for some reflection on my part on my own life. Thanks for telling it.