In the home of my youth there was no clear line between being a man and being able to repair the house you lived in and the car you drove. I was 9 when we bought our first house, and from that day till now, 75 years later, I have never stopped living under the fear of not being man enough to repair my own house or car. Though the weight of that fear is always silently pressing down, I notice it only when something goes wrong or I remember something going wrong that I couldn’t take care of myself. In such moments I try to explain away my fear or my failure by reminding myself of the good reasons the mechanic or handyman can do the job I am unable to do: because he has the right tools and experience. True enough, but such an answer does not lift the weight of fear or failure from my shoulders.
That first house my parents bought in 1949 was what real estate agents with forced cheer would today call a fixer-upper. To the second power. The phony, imitation-brick asphalt siding was antique and tired. The gutters were barely hanging on. The garage was on the verge of collapse. The middle of the dining room floor was two inches higher than the periphery. The basement, with a pillar in the middle forcing up that dining room floor, was only five feet deep. The kitchen was vintage 1920s with a visible porcelain post holding up one end of the porcelain sink. The plumbing and electric led lives of their own devising. And I mustn’t forget the coal-fired furnace my father fed with a shovel several times a day during our first three years in the house. We had an entire room in our basement into which coal men with blackened faces and terribly white eyes dumped bags of coal through an unsightly metal door on the side of the house.
But this fixer-upper had one immense advantage: It cost only $11,500.
Possibly it had a second, hidden advantage. Almost weekly it gave my father the opportunity to prove his manly mettle. For that is what he did every time something went wrong. Never once did Dad call in a tradesman to install or fix something. He would install it or fix it. My job was to hold the flashlight, which I seemed always to shine in the wrong place, causing him to rage at me in the same way he raged at nuts that wouldn’t loosen, screws that wouldn’t tighten, parts that didn’t fit. But the job always got done, and he was manly, and I learned to fear I would never measure up.
The fear began the summer we moved in. The first thing my mother and father and Uncle Tom and Aunt Mary did was remove layer after layer of tired, old wallpaper. They held the large, heavy rented steamers to every square foot of our living and dining room walls to strip away wallpapers likely dating back to the second decade of the century. The heat that weekend was so fierce that I can still see their faces shining with sweat and feel their fatigued arms and exhausted bodies holding up those steamers hour after hour. That weekend was the beginning of my knowing that life was going to be much harder than I had ever before imagined.
When I was 13, my knowledge was confirmed. That summer I was given the task of painting our entire two-story rear porch. That summer of work taught me in a way I can still feel in my hands and arms that the hard work of painting does not occur when a brush is in your hands; it happens in the thousands of monotonous jabs with a putty knife one makes to scrape loose paint from stairs, landings, railings, ceilings. Memory tells me my work lasted nearly the whole summer of 1953. And I never received any pay or even a thank-you.
There was no end of work around that house. In our first full summer there my father brought a large quantity of flagstone to the house and constructed a rock garden a foot higher than the rest of the yard. He tore out all the old grass, had a truckload of black dirt delivered, seeded it, then rented a roller he filled with water to make it very heavy and sweated his way back and forth rolling the ground level. The next year he tore down the dilapidated front stairs and put in new stringers, treads and risers. Watching this job, I feared I would never be able to do such a thing. And I never did.
The biggest job he undertook was to tear down the old garage and erect a new one. I don’t know how long that took, but I remember my father telling others that he and my Uncle Eddy did it in one weekend because the city inspectors did not work on weekends, and he wanted to be done before any inspector could put his hand out for a payoff.
These facts, of course, don’t jibe. How could two men tear down a garage and build another in a weekend? What would stop an inspector from putting out his hand afterwards? Why would an inspector even come around if a neighbor didn’t alert him? I don’t have answers, only the story as I remember it. And what I remember is that my father worked a miracle that weekend that I feared I would never be able to work.
In the summer of 1956, my father brought a 28-foot-long, Masonite-clad mobile home — we called them house trailers then — to a newly made section of a mobile home park that a farmer had created on the shore of Lake Marie, an hour’s drive from our house. I watched as my father laid pipe through that section of the village to bring water from a central source to our mobile home. I can still see him turning the large, pipe-like instrument to thread those pipes — another heroic task I feared I would never be able to do.
After my father died in 1993, I inherited all the plumbing tools he had used nearly 40 years earlier. Those giant Stillson pipe wrenches weighing nearly 10 pounds still sit where I set them down on a shelf under my workbench 31 years ago. Why did I bother to take them? Because I hoped one day I would overcome my fear and do something heroic with them.
My father also did serious work on cars and boats. He often told me how when he was 14 his father bought the family’s first car. My grandfather never learned to drive, so my father became the family chauffeur and auto mechanic. The car had a faulty differential gear box that repeatedly needed to be fixed. The first time it broke down, Dad accompanied the car to the auto mechanic’s shop and watched how the mechanic repaired it. The mechanic, a family friend named Boniker, showed him what he was doing; he was especially careful to show Dad how delicately the gears had to mesh. He put a tissue between the gears and told my father that the gears must press in both sides of the tissue without tearing it. The next time the gear box broke down, my father, at age 14, fixed it entirely on his own.
In 1952 he bought a beat-up Chris-Craft inboard motorboat for $500, and that winter he completely overhauled the engine — new rings, valves, carburetor — and replaced the rotted planks in the bottom with kiln-dried — not air-dried — planks. That last distinguishing fact has stuck in my mind for more than 70 years because my father always emphasized it every time he told the story of remaking that boat.
Though I was never able to repair an engine, I did have a job on my father’s boats. It was the nastiest possible job on boats: sanding away all the slime, algae and barnacles that attach to the bottoms of boats throughout a summer’s use. Early every spring, when the weather was still bitterly cold, Dad and I went to the boathouse, and while he worked topside, I lay under the boat sanding away a summer of ugly, stringy stuff. The sand from the sandpaper and the algae often flew into my eyes, and the only thing I could do was blink, blink, blink and keep on sanding. And then I had to paint the bottom, with the copper-based paint dripping onto my face.
In all my life only one job was as grueling as painting the bottom of Dad’s boats. During the summer that Dad was piping water to our summer mobile house on Lake Marie, I was digging the sump pit outside our home where all our wastewater would go. The hole was slightly bigger than a 55-gallon drum, and the ground was almost pure clay. Digging in dirt is hard work; digging in clay is nothing less than torture.
So it was I served two very different apprenticeships: one in the admiration of the art and craft of fixing houses, cars and boats, and another in the actual doing of grueling but unskilled labor that no one in the world would want to do. They were very different apprenticeships, but both taught me a central, universal truth — that life is very difficult.
When I was 26 I got married, and three years later we bought our own house with money I had earned from working two full-time jobs at the same time for two years. A year after buying that wonderful house, the dishwasher went out. We bought a new one, and I decided to face my decades of fears: I would install it myself. Instead of taking the hour or so a professional would have spent, it took me an entire weekend of raging curses . . . because I didn’t have the right tools and I didn’t have the right experience. But I did learn a valuable lesson: to pay attention to my fears and hire a handyman if the job was something I did not know how to do. And so I began a half-century not as an apprentice but as a journeyman in the art of appreciating how others skillfully repair houses and cars.
2
I’ve lost track of all the handymen I’ve hired over the years. Some were real experts. Others skated by on bluff and a bit of experience. I began keeping a list of who did what work and at what fees and how good they were. That list, now more than 30 years in the making, runs to nine single-spaced, typewritten pages and has 31 categories (plumbers, electricians, painters, carpenters, roofers and so on). Altogether I have nearly 100 tradesmen on my list, and the most complicated section is handymen: the guys you bring in to solve problems that overlap or defy categories.
The first one I remember fondly was a gentleman named Bruce. I discovered him shortly after I moved into my third house, which I still live in 37 years later. Bruce was a quiet, courteous, kindly marvel of ingenuity I would have kept for life — and into the afterlife, too, if such people are needed there — because he did everything perfectly in a most gentlemanly way for a reasonable fee I was only too happy to pay. Bruce showed me that if you’re ingenious enough, you can turn a two-person job into a one-person job. And then one day, Bruce moved to another state, and I never saw him again. Thirty years later I still wonder how life has played out for this most kind and ingenious of gentlemen.
My next gem was Keith. He, too, did superb work, but he charged a great deal more than Bruce. His last job for me was a chair rail in my dining room. When I called him to repair a stockade fence gate that kept sagging, he quoted a price I thought much too high, so I found someone else — and he never again returned my phone calls.
Keith’s disappearance did have one quite wonderful result: I got to meet Pavel Babeti. I’ve forgotten the first jobs Pavel did for me, but I remember with amazing clarity the day I realized he was a miracle-worker. I had called in a licensed plumber to fix a bathtub faucet that refused to shut off. After an hour without success, the plumber handed me a bill for over $100 and told me the job could not be done without tearing out a bathroom wall, which meant retiling the room at an expense north of $3,000. In a funk because I dreaded such a mess, I called Pavel to take a look. A few seconds after he entered the room, he said he would solve the problem in minutes. And he did. And it is still solved two decades later.
Somewhere in those long-ago days Pavel and I became friends. I am at a loss to say quite why except that in addition to being a man who thought for himself and so was always interesting, he was also very genial. And I think he saw the same qualities in me.
Soon Pavel worked his second miracle. My expensive, upright sump pump, which had worked extremely well for 65 years, stopped working. Frantic, I made a dozen phone calls only to learn there were no parts for it anywhere. Pavel came over and said, “Let me see what I can do.” He disassembled the pump’s switch, used an emery cloth to reshape a small, shiny brass part and put the switch back together. A decade later it was still working with the quiet precision of a sewing machine.
Not long after that came Pavel’s third miracle. Actually, it wasn’t a miracle; it was a saintly deed. During a storm in August 2007, while my wife, Kathy, and I were at our summer cottage on Walloon Lake, the electricity back home went out. My backup power supply for my sump pump finally gave out after a day or so, and my son told me over the phone that our basement was about to flood. I called Pavel and explained the situation. At 1 a.m. he borrowed a generator — all stores in the area were sold out — went over to my house, started the generator, powered the pump and charged the batteries till 7 a.m., when the electricity came on again. My house would have flooded if he hadn’t given up a night of sleep and found a generator.
Now I come to Pavel’s most astonishing miracle. Our second car wouldn’t start after sitting for over three weeks while we were up at Walloon. Jumping it didn’t work, so we had it towed to a repair facility I had used for years and very much trusted. A few hours after the car arrived at the shop, the owner called and told me the engine had seized up, and the best thing would be to junk the car since a replacement engine would cost what the car was worth. That evening I mentioned this to Pavel while we were having a beer on my patio. He looked at me a long time, then hissed, “Impossible!”
So, in the dead of night, we went over to the lot behind the auto-repair shop and opened the hood. After a half hour trying one thing and another with the aid of a flashlight, Pavel discovered the source of the seizure: the air-conditioning unit had frozen and was locking up the engine because of a shared belt. We went home, got a kitchen knife, came back, cut the belt and drove the car home. The price of a new car: saved. Even better was the look on the face of the garage owner the next morning when I asked to see the car, and he took me out to the empty place where the car had been. While he was staring in disbelief at the empty parking space, I explained Pavel’s miracle. The look on that master mechanic’s face was beyond priceless, and I never brought a car back to him again.
In 2016, I called Pavel for a small repair to my kitchen counter. When he arrived, he seemed tired and not at all the Pavel I had known for years. The heating tool he used to seal the laminate to the counter burned a hole in it, and all he could do was crudely patch it up. It was the only time I ever saw Pavel botch a job. The next time I called him, his phone was no longer in service. I tried other numbers, I tried writing him, I tried emailing him. All lines of communication were gone, and my dear friend and miracle-worker had disappeared.
3
Years passed, and I thought of my friend often but could figure no way to find him. Then, while I was preparing Christmas cards in December 2023, I thought I would try one more time to get in touch with his now ex-wife. I had tried her email years earlier but received no response. This time she did respond. She had returned to her and Pavel’s native country, Romania. She gave me the contact information of a cousin she said he had gone to visit in Sun City, Arizona.
I was beyond astonished at this news because this tiny place that takes up only 14 square miles of our continent and is home to fewer than 40,000 residents was where I had made my winter home for the previous six years. The chance of us both winding up there was small to the point of invisibility. I was overjoyed: I would see my friend again after an eight-year absence.
When I called Ana Drogomir, fearing she might think me a bill collector, I spent more than five minutes laying out my more than 20-year history with Pavel. When I finished, she told me he had come into great trouble in his life — health and financial woes — and had abandoned his home in Illinois to come to Sun City. Then she said, “It’s too bad you didn’t call three or four years ago. You could have talked to Pavel then, but he died.”
At the word “died,” I was overcome — because I would never see my miracle-worker friend again; because I could have helped him if I had only known he was in trouble; because against the longest odds imaginable we had been given the incredible gift of living within blocks of each other for the last years of his life, and neither of us knew this gift was in our hands.
In the months since I received that devastating news, I have thought of Pavel often. Among other memories I have been pondering is a story he shared with me many years ago. One day while he was watching his son play in a soccer match in one of the North Shore’s affluent suburbs, he fell into conversation with one of the soccer moms. He said she appeared to be much enjoying his company, and at the end of the match she asked what he did for a living. “I’m a handyman,” he replied.
In that moment, Pavel said, the woman looked as if she had just witnessed an accident. She took her son by the elbow and said they must be going. This woman, who had been so friendly all game long, rushed her son away from the smashed wreck a handyman was in her eyes.
Pavel’s story saddened but did not surprise me. I remembered those six years after high school when I worked in a printing plant and always felt like a second-class citizen when I was with full-time college students or graduates. Pavel’s money problems came, at least in part, from the fact that his miracles weren’t valued — maybe weren’t even seen — by the people he worked for on the North Shore.
Remembering Pavel’s story recalls a video that came my way a few years ago. Ted Koppel was interviewing plumbers about their work. They told Koppel how interesting and challenging their jobs were but said there was a notable downside: People looked down on them for doing sometimes dirty work with their hands rather than working with clean hands in an office.
At the end of the video, Koppel interviewed Matthew Crawford, a man with a doctorate in philosophy now working as a motorcycle mechanic. Crawford told Koppel that people make the mistake of thinking that “because the work was dirty it must be stupid. If people never attempted skilled manual work,” he said, “they may not understand just how intellectually rich and engaging it can be.” Crawford had been the director of a think tank and quit that job to open a repair shop because in the think tank “we started with a set of conclusions, the ones that our donors wanted, and then worked backward to a set of premises that could get us to [those] conclusions, whereas if you’re trying to figure out why a bike doesn’t start and run right, you can’t weasel your way out of it not starting and running right.”
Crawford reminded Koppel that 43 million Americans were then carrying student-loan debt averaging more than $37,000. “What distinguishes the skilled trades,” he said, “is that you’re always using your own judgment . . . . You’re never simply following a set of instructions. You always have to get a handle on some novel situation and diagnose it.”
How well I knew the truth of this motorcycle mechanic’s words. I had watched in awe as Pavel Babeti performed his mechanical miracles. I remembered the magic that pressmen in printing plants performed routinely. I remembered my father tearing down a garage and building a new one in a weekend. And I knew that not one of them would ever have been invited to a cocktail party or dinner in a North Shore home.
Something else has come back to me in these months after learning of Pavel’s death: an interview with Victor Davis Hanson, an accomplished historian with important books and prestigious lectures to his name. Hanson said, “There’s nothing more impressive to me than a master cement person or electrician or plumber. And I try to do all my own plumbing. But when I get outfoxed by ancient pipes, and I call a guy in, it’s like watching a maestro at an orchestra. And he is rewarded far better than most of the professors I know. And what is wrong with what he’s doing? I know that in the ’30s and the ’20s and the ’40s we got the idea of [the] upward-mobility BA, but I think in the new, postmodern 21st century, it’s going to be, let’s forget the titles and the alphabet soup that follows your name and look at what you can actually do.”
What you can actually do. What Pavel and my father and the pressmen in printing plants actually did every day was solve problems that I, someone who taught at the college level for 36 years, couldn’t have solved. These handymen and mechanics weren’t free to take a C and scoot to the next course, as my students were. Every day these tradesmen had to fix fiendishly difficult problems: no scooting, no excuses, just figuring out and fixing, day after day after day.
What lives inside a person that makes him or her able to endure the havoc of such problems, overcome the fear that comes from not knowing exactly what’s wrong, and find the will to stay in place and figure out what’s wrong and how to fix it?
Whatever it is, courage and ingenuity play a large part in it.
Recently I have been forced several times to find a bit of that courage and ingenuity myself. Two years ago, the service door to my garage would not stay closed. The door had settled enough that the bolt no longer entered the opening in the strike plate. I called someone to fix the problem. He did, but I could see his fix was a lick and a promise, and, sure enough, a few months later the problem returned. After living with it for months — because I did not want to repeat that cycle — I decided to tackle the job myself. So, I selected a chisel I had inherited from my father and used it to dig out a new opening in the door frame, and when the opening I dug wasn’t quite right, I did it again, and then I had to do it a third time. It was extremely tricky work to get the opening exactly right — and it had to be exactly right — top to bottom and left to right, but finally I did. It was a terribly tedious job, but in the end the bolt clicked into place with the most beautiful sound. Many times during the last year I have gone through that door and stopped to listen to the click of that bolt and felt more than a hint of manly satisfaction.
Sometimes hearing that click, I have been reminded of my friend who worked miracles for me whom I will never see again, and sometimes I have been reminded of those days of my youth when my father fixed our house and our car and our boat entirely on his own. But most deeply of all, the clicking of that bolt reminds me that in the home of my youth there was no clear line between being a man and being able to repair the house you lived in and the car you drove.
Mel Livatino is a regular contributor to this magazine.