Blog 3
One place that stands out to me when I think back to growing up and just life back home in general is our garage. It is situated not even a stone’s throw away from our back porch. It is most likely the first thing you see as you pull up our driveway towards the house. The building itself is pretty large, it’s become a family joke that the garage is a byproduct of my Dad’s midlife crisis. It’s a two-stall garage with two stories. From the outside its appearance is slightly similar to a barn, besides its pinkish colored siding that match the siding of our house. The color of the siding definitely tones down the “manliness” of the building. Unless you believe the saying that real men wear pink. The inside of the place is never as clean as my Dad and I would like and everything inside never seems to stay in the same place long. One thing that never moves though is the little radio situated on the windowsill that fills the space with staticky music. This is the place where almost any “project” starts for us whether it’s something as simple as mowing the grass or building a porch for my grandmother. But growing up I would be lying if I said I enjoyed my time in that place. It always seemed like my dad would drag me and my older brother in there at the most inopportune times, as if I had so many more important things to do as a kid. I could think of a thousand places and things I would have rather been doing than helping my Dad with any of the various things he would be doing out there. Holding a flashlight for him as he would be working on one of our cars was not a highlight of my day back then. But for as much as I hated that place as a kid, the older I get the more time I find myself spending out there. In that building, my father and I have definitely had our share of sweat and blood, not so much tears since I grew up. This is the place where my Dad taught me a lot about life and how things work. I’m not sure if he was aware of this at the time, I know I sure wasn’t, but the lessons in the garage were so much more than how to change the brakes on a car. They were lessons of the value of hard work and taking pride in what you are doing no matter how menial it may seem. These are things I have been able to carry with me throughout my life in all kinds of situations.
Neither of us are big talkers when it comes to anything remotely emotional. That has never been the way our relationship has worked. But I think there is an unspoken agreement nowadays, that we both value the time we spend together in that building, in the garage.
