A Garage Full of Parts

My mom was telling me stories about my great-grandmother recently, and for just a moment she seemed to turn back into the little girl who loved her grandma.

There’s something funny about that. With your parents, you spend so much of your life trying to prove that you’re grown up. But whenever I saw my grandpa, I was about eight years old again.

My grandpa was the kind of man a little boy couldn’t help but want to follow around. He could fix almost anything, build things that didn’t exist yet, and had garages full of equipment whose purpose I could only guess at. There were old tools and new ones, heavy trucks, tractors, and pickup trucks with rifles in the back-window rack. He’d drive around the countryside with a couple of dogs, checking on the cattle, and I’d ride along whenever I got the chance.

At night, he might hustle you through a few games of pool or cards. He was famously competitive and had absolutely no interest in letting his grandchildren win. That made beating him mean something. If you won, you knew you had actually beaten him.

In my head, though, he’s still at the farm in the Quonset-hut shop, fixing a tractor.

As a kid, that garage seemed impossibly big, filled floor to ceiling with strange tools and equipment, everything from antique to modern. Almost by reflex, Grandpa would kick on the air compressor, let the tank come up to pressure, and before long the shop would be filled with the sound of impact wrenches, air ratchets, and die grinders, interrupted every so often by the crackle of a welder or the roar of an oxy-acetylene torch.

He welded so often that he seemed to walk around with his welding helmet perched on top of his head, ready to flip it down whenever he needed to tack something together. I don’t remember anyone ever explicitly telling me not to stare at a welding arc without eye protection. Somehow, you just knew that if Grandpa thought something required protective equipment, it must be serious business.

My mom and grandma would shoo me out of the house and tell me to go jump in the truck or tractor with Grandpa, and I’d happily follow him wherever he was going. Every once in a while, we’d head into town while he ran errands. Usually that meant tracking down some part he needed, stopping at the bank, going to an auction, or taking care of whatever business needed taking care of that day.

I remember one trip back to the farm when we stopped for a hamburger. Everywhere we went, people knew him. To me, walking around town with Grandpa felt a little like walking around with a celebrity. He knew everyone, everyone knew him, and he proudly introduced me as his grandson.

I can still remember that hamburger. I don’t think I’ve had a better one since. I’m reasonably sure the hamburger itself had very little to do with it.

I also knew pretty early that I wasn’t going to follow him into farming. Whatever possibility remained disappeared the day someone explained to me that I was expected to spend the day walking a field picking rocks out of the dirt.

That was a pretty immediate no for me.

But the older I get, the more I realize that following in someone’s footsteps doesn’t necessarily mean doing the same work they did.

Most of us didn’t become farmers. But when I look around our family, I can see pieces of Grandpa everywhere: his sense of humor, his stubbornness, his grit, his curiosity, and especially that instinct to look at a pile of parts and see what they might become.

For me, the parts were computers and networks.

I think I understand now what Grandpa must have seen when he looked around that garage. Where I saw shelves of strange parts, pieces of machinery, old tools, hoses, motors, and steel, he saw how things fit together. He could picture what he was going to build or how he was going to make something work before the rest of us had any idea what we were looking at.

My garage looks different, but maybe not as different as I once thought. I have enough computer equipment and spare parts lying around to build storage and compute for half the neighborhood. I’ve spent my career working on things like cloud computing, voice assistants, and AI, often early enough that it wasn’t obvious yet what they would become.

I don’t think that’s entirely an accident.

Whatever it was that allowed Grandpa to look at a garage full of parts and see the possibilities hiding inside them, I think I got a little bit of it too.

I’ll miss you, Grandpa.