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Ambition should be made of sterner stuff

I suppose it was a confidence thing, a pride thing, and I was sure I could do it. But don’t we all start off that way -thinking our brains will work the same way as the last time, years ago, that we tried a similar task? I mean why would it be any different? We evolved to learn lessons as we age -it’s why elders are so respected even after they retire: they can work things out from first principles or from the mistakes they made the first time they tried it.

The problem, now that I remember it though, is that I had a friend to help me the last time. I remember I’d had trouble identifying the parts in the reams of instructions and diagrams on the sheets supplied in the box. He was a mechanical engineer however, and they practice for just such contingencies; ordinary people do not. I count myself amongst the ordinary folk whenever I feel an excuse is called for, or I’m getting on a bus or something. It’s one thing to be able to melt into a crowd, or shrug when asked difficult questions, and yet another to have to admit something embarrassing to yourself when there’s no help around.

I wonder if it’s the stress of not intuitively grasping the methodology required, or as with so many other lengthy sets of complicated instructions that have confronted me over the years, a penchant for setting them aside for another time. Of course that is all well and good for things I could ignore without starving, but barbecue assembly is another matter: either piece it together, or fry steaks on the stove; it’s an existential thing. I agree with Sartre that existence necessarily precedes essence, but its corollary suggests that a functioning barbecue necessarily precedes a decent hamburger.

Some people are just not philosophically inclined, though. A retired colleague of mine stopped by the house intent on dragging me out for a walk in the rain, and before I could clean up the scattered detritus of the torn-apart cardboard shipping container I’d lugged home from the store, he wandered into the living room and noticed various unidentifiable things lying fallow on the carpet. Some were still clothed in their plastic bridal garments, while others, less ashamed of their naked parts, flaunted their metallic shapes like professional pole dancers waiting to perform.

“What is…?”

“Never mind Sydney,” I interrupted quickly to deflect his curiosity. “It’s just a work in progress.”

He scanned the carpet for some sort of pattern in the widely scattered parts and chuckled. “Well, I don’t really see any progress, G… You hiding some of it in the bedroom, or something?”

I shook my head, annoyed at his assessment of my arrangement. “What I meant was that I’m just trying to decide where to start -that’s all…”

His eyes rolled. “You just have to follow the instructions; there are illustrations for each step… See?” he added as he leafed through the first ten pages in the manual he discovered sticking out from under a row of metal bars still imprisoned in a set of plastic zip ties.

I hadn’t wanted to undo anything like that in case I couldn’t find them later. And anyway, I still hadn’t found the proper screws to go in their pre-drilled holes, let alone the specific type of screwdriver mentioned on the page he was waving in front of my face.

“What’s a ‘Phillips’, by the way?” I felt emboldened to ask. The instructions threw these unfamiliar terms around like physicists at a conference and that certainly hadn’t tempted me to plunge even further into the strangely simmering waters of the manual.

Sydney blinked and then stared at me as if he had somehow misheard my question. “Do you have no screwdrivers around the house?”

I pointed to the only one I had: one of those types that had a whole bunch of interchangeable choices inside the handle. I only used the flat head one, so I couldn’t remember what other things were in there -and certainly not their names.

He sighed theatrically, unhinged the handle, and extracted one of the pieces that ended in a little cross. “Behold, the Phillips, G.”

I smiled weakly. “I never go in there, Sid…”

“You just have to look at the screw and then choose the screwdriver…” His eyes twinkled with disbelief. When I still seemed puzzled, he shook his head slowly. “I mean, how hard is that, eh?”

I returned his shrug. “Really hard when you can’t find the screws they said were included, but weren’t…”

His eyebrows slowly creased his forehead, and his eyes rolled upward as if he couldn’t believe he’d actually wanted to go for a walk with me. “Did you open all the packages? Often they wrap them separately in little labelled plastic containers so they won’t get lost.”

I didn’t really mean to, but I couldn’t quell the sigh that suddenly surfaced at the enormity of the task that confronted me. There were packages of every conceivable size lying wherever whim had instructed me to put them: carpet, couch, stool, chair, table, and every counter I could marshal in the kitchen. And then there was the heavy and unmanageable top part with the metal hood and stuff that supposedly is meant for the summit of the as yet unassembled frame like a cowboy intending to mount an unreliable horse. I left it out on the covered porch -it was far too heavy to lift, and anyway it would scratch my hardwood floors even if I managed to drag it through the door.

Sid just kept staring at me, shaking his head. “You’re retired now, but I can never remember you giving up in the middle of surgery because you’d never seen anything quite like the dilemma confronting you.” The twinkle returned to his eyes. “That was part of the excitement of your specialty wasn’t it: finding ways to solve the problem…?”

I had to admit he was right; I missed that now…

“So, here’s another test for you, Dr. G,” he said, chuckling, and waving his arms at the parts scattered around the room. “And unlike the unusual disarray you used to find in the abdomen, this time you’ve even got a step by step instruction manual with labelled pictures of the parts.” He sighed and headed for the door. “I miss the challenges too, you know.”

I tried to grab him by the arm before he could leave. “So aren’t you going to give me a hand, Sid?”

He laughed and opened the door to the porch. “And deny you the chance of finally finding purpose in retirement…?” He stopped and turned to look at me from the porch. “And anyway, I was only the pediatrician. I just took care of the finished product, eh?”
He may have had a point.

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