June 21, 2002

• Fixing Things and Things Fixing Themselves

  
  

  One of the recognized psychic
  “gifts” or talents is that of the “fixer”. I’d never heard of this
  until about eleven years ago when I was browsing through a stack of
  back issues of Woman of Power Magazine at the home of a friend. Prior to that, in the late ‘seventies, I’d seen an article in Psychology Today Magazine
  about unconscious technological adepts (UTAs) and maladepts (UTMs). I
  knew as soon as I read the psych article that I was a UTA, and when I
  encountered “fixers” on the list in the old Woman of Power, I recognized that they were the same as UTAs.

  My son Doug, this kid who takes care of me
  and probably takes as much of the physical strain off the old fart as
  he piles on mental stress to compensate for it, is a fixer, too. It’s a
  good thing for the household as a whole that there are two of us
  fixers, because Greyfox is a “breaker”, a UTM.

  The late physicist Niels Henrik David Bohr
  was perhaps the most famous of such maladepts. Physics experiments
  would go wrong if he just happened to be in the building at the time.
  His colleagues began scheduling their important experiments for times
  when they knew he would be away. One popular Bohr story tells of the
  time when he was traveling and a physics experiment planned for his
  absence didn’t come off properly. The men involved joked that perhaps
  he had returned early, but it was found not to have been the case. They
  attempted it again, and all went as planned. They later found out that
  at the time the first try failed, Bohr had been passing through the
  city on a train.

  The event that brought this to mind today
  was just one of a long series of “miraculous” mechanical resurrections
  I’ve witnessed. Months ago, the motorized turntable in our microwave
  oven stopped working. I think Greyfox was the last person it worked
  for. Doug and I had fiddled with it but had not taken the microwave
  apart. Yesterday, I was thawing some frozen strawberries, and it
  started turning again. Not only that, but it now works without the
  horrible grinding noise with which it used to start up every time.
  These events are occasions for laughter and comment when they occur,
  but none of us is surprised by them any more, and I for one never
  assume that there is any psychic or miraculous force behind them. I’ve
  been seeing things fix themselves all my life. To me it seems they just
  heal, as living things do, though I recognize the absurdity of that.

  We had been married no more than a year or
  two when Greyfox started asking me to drive his car for a while if it
  had started malfunctioning or making unidentified noises. When his
  watch stops or a flashlight won’t light, he hands it over to the kid or
  me, and more often than not, it works for us and continues to work for
  at least a little while longer after the old fart takes it back. If
  something is stubborn, and simply handling it and fiddling with its
  switches or whatever doesn’t fix it, I ask the kid to take it apart.
  But I insist that he put it back together again, also.

  I used to take things apart a lot when I
  was younger. It was mostly a matter of curiosity for me then, as it is
  now for Doug. He enjoys seeing the inside of things, tracing gear
  trains and such just as I did. When I was about three years old, my
  parents’ alarm clock quit working and I asked if I could take it apart.
  My father, a machinist by trade, shade tree mechanic and inventor by
  necessity (there’s a whole blog there for another time), had found and
  fabricated a set of small tools to fit my hands. He said I could take
  apart the clock only if I would put it back together. That became a
  standing rule in our house.

  He spread newspaper on the kitchen table
  and as I removed screws and parts he showed me how to line them up in
  order so that I could put them back together in reverse order. The
  clock was a large old-fashioned wind-up thing with two bells and a
  clapper on the top. As I disassembled it, my father explained that when
  this key turned that way, the spring tightened around its spindle, and
  when the spring unwound it caused the spindle to turn and made one gear
  turn that way while the one meshed with it turned the other way, and I
  got my first lesson in mechanics.

  We failed to find anything obvious that
  would account for the clock’s failure to tick. Since it was getting
  late, he guided me through the procedure of replacing each part and
  screwing them down tight. When it was done, I set the clock on the
  table and it started to tick. It worked perfectly for years after that.

  The talent has gotten me in trouble a few
  times, when some man’s ego would be stung as a mechanism he had given
  up on started working almost as soon as I laid hands on it. Women, as a
  rule, tend to be more appreciative of the gift.

  Now I haven’t the slightest idea if this
  next matter has any bearing on the fixer phenomenon or not. There is a
  clock hanging on our wall that was here when we moved in, a green
  plastic battery-powered kitchen-style clock. Sarah will know whether
  she left it here or if it was something Mark left behind. Whether this
  clock stops or goes doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the
  freshness of its batteries or anything else that I can perceive.

  I have observed the hands turning backwards
  at times. When it first stopped, I changed the batteries and it ran
  again. Another time, even though I didn’t think the batteries were so
  old as to be run down, Doug changed them and got it going again. But
  that time, with a new pair of Duracells®, it ran only a short while,
  then ran backwards a while (and yes, the batteries were in there the
  correct way ’round) before stopping.

  That time, when it started running again,
  it was as close to the correct time (as shown on our computer, the only
  reliable timepiece we have) as any other clock in the house was at the
  time. It has stopped and gone backward a few times since then, and the
  latest time it started up, it was showing standard time, though we are
  now on daylight savings. It may be coincidence (although I don’t really
  believe in coincidence) that the onset of all this backing and forthing
  and stopping and going of that clock coincided with Doug’s and my first
  discussions of a plot for a time-travel story we’ve tentatively titled The Rosetta Clock. It may be synchronicity. I don’t know.

  This latest starting of the clock came very
  close (though no one was watching to tell if it was synchronous) to the
  restored functioning of the microwave’s turntable. I sometimes wonder
  about this stuff, and wonder continues to enrich my life. Greyfox asked
  today, when we noticed the clock was going again, why I don’t get rid
  of it. “Is he kidding?” I wondered. That crazy clock is so very much
  more interesting than a clock that just goes on day after day in the
  same direction at the same clockwork pace. Don’t you agree?

  • 11:41 am
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