I wonder sometimes how I learned to love mechanical things so much. I learned recently that
one of my first and cutest words as a young child was "TWAIN". I must have loved railroads
from infancy!
These days we are asked to consider how we raise girls differently from boys. We give girls
dolls. To boys we give guns, cars and trucks.
Dolls would have had no chance with me. I liked anything with WHEELS and WORKS. Things
which WHIRRED and WHIRLED when you WOUND them. Things you could start and they
would carry on.
My Father-in-law, fed up after years of living with a wife and three daughters, gave Marilyn a
model car towing a house trailer for Christmas. Marilyn was not given a boy's training in the art
of working with metal and wood. She learned everything about fabrics and thread. If it were possible to build a house out of denim she would. [Her Mother
did.] She had thought by the shape of the gift package that there was a large, thin doll for which she could make "dress-up" clothes. She was bitterly disappointed.
My Father was not mechanically-minded at all. Dad's education on the family farm in Ireland
seems to have been entirely devoid of training in the use of hammers and saws, or wheels and
grease. His father or brothers must have done that part. Dad only learned to use a hammer when
he was nearing retirement and then not as a friend, but as a hostile but necessary enemy.
But I LOVED anything mechanical. My passion was not accompanied by any particular skill in
understanding how things mechanical worked. But certainly included many of the venal sins:
curiosity, coveting and envy.
I suppose at first it was anything - with wheels.
I remember a great red wagon, 
which introduced itself to me Christmas morning with its two battery-powered headlights beaming. If you had a good imagination you might realize that this
red wagon was build to look like a 1934 Chrysler Airflow. You needed to have a REAL good
imagination to know that. It was only 40 years later that I figured it out.
And cars and streetcars.
I loved to look at them and ride in them.Streetcars. I wanted to be the Motorman. Never
interested in being the Conductor. [Who wants to just take up tickets and ring a bell?] The action
was up front hanging on to that handle which could be spun around, this way and that, speeding
up and slowing down the streetcar. Could life offer any greater promise?
Wheels were magic.
Get a pair of old roller skates and separate the front ends from the back. Nail them on a board,
attach an orange crate, a couple of handles and you had a fine scooter. A scooter with a storage
place up front for anything you wanted to carry. Or fasten another board crossways, with skates
nailed on the bottom, a string to your hands and you had a car. Shoes were the brakes and the
roads were your world.
Adding machines.
Some Sunday mornings, as a special concession, I went with Dad to the Bank. He had some
work to clear up. I had the adding machines to run. They were tall, pedestalled giants with their
internal workings visible through glass.
You sat on a stool to run them, and they produced a
wonderful track of figures on paper I could take with me. Not as good as running the streetcar,
but not bad!
And trains. 
How many times we were taken to the C. P. R. station to see where Grandpa used to work. The
smell which was extremely romantic to me, I now know was the smell of the gas released by the
burning coal mixed with steam. And hadn't Grandpa "invented" the use a tractor pulling some
baggage-carrying cars?
And boats.
Steering the ferries. Wouldn't that be great? Peering through the window of the wheelhouse on
the North Van Ferry, my coveting and envy roused itself again. Twenty years later I did steer a
boat, in fact it was the tugboat, "the Master". Most of the magic had gone out of it by then,
particularly when I fell asleep in the wheelhouse.
Even clothesline pulleys were interesting.
If you have a spare one you could run a rope through it and think what you might lift if you had
two. String was not big enough. It wouldn't stay where it belonged but got caught at the axle.
Watching Teddy McCann crash!
One day Teddy McCann was going to launch himself off his back porch, with the hopes of being
held aloft only by a wire over the clothesline. Quite a crowd of us had gathered. Knowing it
would likely be semi-fatal we all wanted to get on with it. Brother Doug stopped him before it
was too late. I always wondered why he had to do that. Spoiled the whole day for me, I know.
And furnace pulleys
We had a sawdust burner furnace, and the way you control the heat [or pretended it was possible,
because I only remember two results - too cold or too hot] was with two rings in a holder in the
hall upstairs. Pull one and you "increased the draft". I forget what the other was for. What was
exciting was the yards of chain which followed from pulley to pulley in that mysterious region of
pipes and cobwebs above the furnace.
A real mechanical car!
Once a young man came into our kitchen with a mechanical car. I don't remember his face or
name. He might have been anyone. The car I remember very well. It might have been 4 inches
long, and it was connected to his hand with a long black snake of a rubber cable. He could make
the car go, and steer it with something in his hand. Well, be still my heart! No one had anything
greater. Life had nothing more to offer. As usual it was something I could only love from afar
with a great craving for it to be mine.
Radio Shack has nothing to offer me today as vital and important as that little car was to me then.
Sorry, World, you are too late. You had your chance when I was ten and you blew it!
Brother Doug had a friend who was magic for me. His name was Bob McDonald. He could make
things, and make them work. He and Doug strung telephone wires for their private phone over
the great estate which separated our house from his. They would phone on the regular phone to
tell each other to phone on the private phone.
My Penrod was Bob McDonald
Meanwhile my mind was filled with the stories from my favourite book: Penrod and his Pals.
Do you remember Penrod, who was always making something interesting in his woodshed
"office"? Bob McDonald was Penrod. He had an electric train.
It filled a room. One Halloween I
was to go to Bob McDonald's to be "minded" by his Mother. [At least that is what less devious
minds than mine were thinking!] I had only one thought in mind.
The electric train. Disaster struck - she said we couldn't touch it with Bob absent. Love from afar again.
Unrequited Love for Mechanical things!
Unrequited love seemed to always be the order of the day for me, when it came to mechanical
things. It was always, "You cannot touch, because it belongs to someone else."
Today there is probably a psychological name for my love for anything which wheels and whirrs.
"He has a need to control", might be one verdict. But no! It is far more innocent than that! It is
not really a control of people I have always wanted. Not even a control of the thing itself but just
to see it respond to the connection between us. To have it work! To see it work! To work with it!
That is the end in life.
And if this love of 'seeing things work' be evil, then the verdict needs to be very much more
damning. For it is a love within me as great as all outdoors.
THE END!
by Gordon Laird, Dec 21 86
Updated to September 8, 2003
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