Strength
His granduncle’s bicycle was too big for him. It had large balloon tires soft enough to cushion any bump on the asphalt, any piece of rock on the gravel side shoulders of the narrow municipal road. The soft tires were a blessing since he could not sit all the time on the leather bicycle seat with its two chrome springs connecting from the stiff saddle frame. When he sat there, his feet could not reach the pedals for a full cycle. And so he sat mostly on the steel frame which pressed into his private parts and hurt him when he wasn’t careful.
His own father too had a bicycle, a thin steel racer that was perennially on the way to being almost finished. And so it sat on its rack at the silong of the old house where they lived. It sat there like a decorative artistic device reserved only for the eyes. And it was a beautiful thing though it might have been his father’s hedge against having to ride a bike. In a place where bicycles were the chief means of transportation, he had never once seen his father on any one of them.
And he remembers no credible reason why the bike should have remained unfinished that way. His father was an excellent mechanic and like all good mechanics, here he was a genius at finding something to take the place of any proper replacement part to fix any machine that broke down.
Not a decade had gone by since the end of the last world war. The world had not yet quite reestablished itself. And so there were machines everywhere that could not be fixed unless one made do with what was available or unless one improvised. It was not unusual to put Toyota parts into a Ford. It was not unusual to pick spare parts from junk cars to be used on ones still running. It was simply how things were done. And my father was good at doing it. And so too, his granduncle and most everyone else here.
But the professional of this field was Titong who sat always in his small dusty wooden shop near the galingan, the local mill, where people brought their corn to be milled into grain. Titong fixed everything from watches to electrical appliances. Before any contraption could be declared junk, they were always brought to Titong’s shop for a final certification that they were beyond fixing. But even if they were thus declared, they were never thrown away. They became instead, like his father’s bicycle, decoration. They became art.
Titong’s qualifications as a fixer of anything was never questioned. Neither was his father’s or granduncle’s. Everyone worked on the basis of reputations they set and these were always bolstered by the tools they owned. His granduncle had his bicycle, his father, jacks and wrenches for fixing car engines and the diesel motor. This ran the corn mill even as it was also adapted when not used that way to turn the compressor for making the town’s ice. His father assembled this contraption himself. And because of that, it could not run without him. He was steward, wizard, and father to the machine.
On a good day, it was never quite certain if it would work as well as it did yesterday. A breakdown was always to be expected. But that only reinforced the value of a good mechanic who understood why it was necessary to heat the engine’s cylinder heads with glowing charcoal before starting it. And the starter batteries were always uncharged in the early mornings. Those who needed their corn milled for the day would have to help turn the engine by pulling on the rope wound around its flywheel. And when the diesel engine finally coughed and sputtered to life in an explosion of thick black smoke, a loud cheer would ensue signaling the beginning of another wonderful country day.
A crowd will have gathered at Titong’s shop to watch him solder electrical connections into each other. The crowd would be entranced by the magic of his new soldering gun. Soon, his granduncle might come around. And then he will borrow his bike for a fast ride up and down these municipal streets. He is going nowhere. He is just enjoying the ride.
Or more exactly, he is only enjoying the magic of the machine. He marvels at the far distance he covers with even the most effortless push. And it tells him the the world is far bigger that he can ever imagine. And if ever it has an edge, it would have to be far far away, farther even than his granduncle’s bike can take him. But there would be other machines, other magical contraptions to fill his life with their quaint beautiful structure, with mysteries that must be solved, the same way they filled those who ever came before him. They are gone now. But every machine reminds him they lived a good life as he will also.
