Not handy

My dad hardly ever pays someone for a service he can figure out how to do himself. He's like MacGyver without the mullet, which is to say that he's almost as cool as MacGyver. For example, rather than call a tow truck to haul away his finally-dead Corolla with 220,000 miles on it, he dragged it behind another car. With a rope.

I was the guy steering the Corolla. It was totally awesome.

There's a certain admiration a son has when he can watch his dad under the hood of a car, pounding and cranking willy-nilly, and then roaring the engine to life. Or this: my dad invented a top-secret garage opener. I'd tell you how it works, but then I'd have to kill you.

The handy gene occasionally skips a generation, however, and I'm worried that it skipped mine. If we happen to have a son, I'll have to bone up on hose clamps and socket wrenches. I don't want to have to sit my son down and say, "This is who we call when a light bulb goes out," or "It's going to be really expensive for the man to fix our toilet, so you won't be getting a Christmas present this year."

Today my dad had a sailboat race (you read that right), so I took our hopeless lawn mower to the hardware store and learned it would take weeks to fix it if I left it with them. After I described the problem ("It, uh, doesn't start"), this 70-year-old guy said, "Well, I'm gonna save ya about 80 bucks, sonny," and handed me this bottle of mower go-juice or something and told me to siphon out the gas and then "splash a little of it" into the new gas.

When I signed the credit card slip (total of $11 for the magic juice and siphon), he was amused by my illegible signature. "Don't worry, sonny. I'm not gonna show this to anyone."

Later, the siphon introduced me to the wonderful taste of old gasoline, but then the serum worked: the mower started. If we have a son, he'll just have to endure his dad getting teased by the old hardware store guys every time something breaks and Grandpa's busy.