An excerpt from a work-in-progress, a short story from the collection, "The Tales of Five Boys" I guess there always was a part of me that felt cheated by my father because he never taught me things like how to change the oil in the car or how to fix a door that hung crooked or a pipe that leaked. It wasn’t because he didn’t know how to do these things him self, on the contrary, it was because he knew how to do all these things and do them so well that I never had to lift a finger when something broke. When the water ran cold or when the Ford got a flat, I got dad. Dad the fix-it man. Dad, the superhero whose utility belt was comprised of a hammer, a screwdriver, and a pack of Camels. I think he might have tried to show me a thing or two in the excitement of being a new father, but at the time, my hands felt more natural hanging on to a sippy cup than a monkey wrench. And then I think he just got used to being the handy man in the house. And now I’m pretty certain that he believes being Mr. Fix-it gives him purpose, makes him needed and that if another man were around to do the patching, he’d having nothing left to do but sit on the front porch and retire from the world. My not knowing these handy things might be understandable had I been born a girl, but as a son, I feel like I should have grown up learning and had the experiences of throbbing thumbs from a rogue hammer swing, rough hands from sanding tables, and a taste of oil on my tongue. I make the would-be memories sound sweet because I don’t know any better. And since you can’t reinvent the past in order to better speculate the future, I can but take a miserable gander that had I known those simple do-it-your-self things, we wouldn’t be where we are now. I grew up in a tall, narrow house on a two-by-four plot of land wedged between a tree and a shed. The shed is where my daddy lived, the house is where he slept and ate. The tree was planted the day the shovels hit the dirt to build the house back in ’34. Whatever dummy planted the twig didn’t consider growth room and so the tree grew right along side our house like an extension. I had something of a wooden fireman’s pole outside my bedroom window, never had to use the front door. I couldn’t even keep my window open during the spring or else I’d wake up to branches above my bed. Other than the tree the rest of our house was pretty ordinary. We didn’t have nice things but we had working things. Hand-me-down things and inherited things, but never garage sale things. My parents were economical, but they weren’t tightfisted. -Charlie Hampton