The Garage They Rebuilt Around Me

The way the shop ran

I never took a dime. Not once, not in twenty-six years, and I want to be plain about why, because people make it into more than it is.

It was never charity to me. I had my plant pension and the house was paid for and Ruth and I did not want for anything. A man with a working set of hands and a shelf of parts has no business charging a child to true a wheel.

So I set up a system, the way you do when you have run a line in a factory.

Saturday mornings, seven to noon, April to the first hard freeze. Door up meant open. Door down meant come back next week.

I ran the pegboard like a parts cabinet at the plant. Coffee cans across the top shelf, every one labeled in grease pencil in my own hand. Bearings. Brake pads. Cotter pins. Reflectors. Valve caps. A can just for the little springs out of coaster brakes that always went flying.

I bought tubes and cables and chain by the box out of a catalog, and in a good year the whole operation cost me maybe three hundred dollars, which is cheaper than a lot of men’s hobbies and better for the soul than most.

The rule was, the kid had to stay and hand me tools. I would not fix a bike while its owner ran off to play. You brought it, you learned a little something, that was the toll.

Half of them stopped being scared of a wrench by the end of a summer. A few of them never did stop coming by even after they were too big for the bikes, just to sit on the crate and talk.

There was a chalkboard inside the door, a little one, where I kept a running list of what I owed and what was owed to me, except it was never money. It said things like, Danny owes me one swept floor, and, I owe the Perkins boy a new reflector when the catalog comes. Ruth used to read that board and shake her head and say I ran the only business in the county that never once turned a dollar and never once went broke.

She was right. You cannot go broke giving away work you would have done for the joy of it anyhow. That is a secret they do not teach you at the plant, and it took me half my life to learn it, and it is the one thing I most wanted to pass to those kids along with how to true a wheel.