Mechanical Virtuosity

A poem about one of the best parts of parenting, a day late

A photo from our family group chat that I took when my husband and I traveled in the UK a couple of years ago. The color! I think there may be no better green.

We have a fondness for cars in our family- for our own cars, and for those we see and admire. Our family group chat is often full of pictures of cars we’ve seen in our travels and want to share. Just this week I texted a picture of a 1958 Austin Healey from the back page of the AAA magazine. The very next day my daughter sent a photo of almost the same car parked on her university campus.

My husband travels often for work, has done for years. The two questions the kids always asked him when he’d call to wish them goodnight were, “Have you seen any animals?” and “Have you seen any cool cars?”

While we all admire cars, my son is the only one of us who actually works on them, unless you count the time he had his sister install a fuse behind the dash of his 1999 Volvo project car. She has very tiny hands and was the only member of the family who could hope to reach in without battering her knuckles bloody.

Seeing your child develop a skill that is all theirs, something you never taught them, is to my mind one of the best parenting experiences there is. It is humbling and yet such a source of pride. The following poem comes from this year’s February Poetry Adventure. The prompt was “engine,” and this is what it prompted for me.

---

Mechanical Virtuosity

We thought we'd take your car, 
the one you tinker on
in your spare time

It has a certain cachet now
that it lacked when your father
and I had nearly the same model
before you were born
Then it was old, but now
it is vintage, or so you say

But on this day, when the sun
made a valiant but ultimately doomed
effort to shine, you turned 
the key to start the engine

And nothing happened

I mean nothing
Not a click
Not a growl
Not a gasp

And in the moment, I was struck 
by how long was the list in my mind
of potential problems 
from the battery (good guess)
to the alternator (also solid)
to every other part of a car
I've ever heard mentioned
(shocks, struts, muffler)
to some I just made up
(winkle hinge, Knopfler valve)
to sun spots

While for you, with all you know,
all you have learned and taught yourself,
and the way your mind works,
that mysterious combination of 
mechanics, intuition, and sorcery,
the list was so much shorter

You stood for a moment
and stroked your chin in that way you have
that seems both utterly yours but also
like it must have also belonged 
to a great grandfather or long lost uncle

Then you nodded your head a few times
and told me the issue was most likely 
one of two things, neither of which I can recall
at the moment, but that's really not the point

The point is how you have become
the most marvelous person,
a whole separate entity 
from the two of us who made you,
and you know things 
we'll never know
and can do things 
we never taught you to do
and how that seems like
the very best kind of magic

---

The Public Domain Poetry Project reached a milestone this week. We finished or first poem, “Travel” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. For the last twelve weeks we have use a line from the poem as a jumping off point for a new poem. The project will be on hiatus for a while as I take a break for start of gardening season here in Maine. But when the heavy lifting is over I plan to return with a new poem. If you’re interested at what we did for those twelve weeks, this is a good place to start.

Thanks for reading, everyone!