There is an old movie that I remember from Saturday morning re-runs where Fess Parker is teaching a young French immigrant to the American frontier his own special version of English.  The lesson focuses on conjugating the verb “fixing” as in I am fixing to and she is fixing to.  I was thinking about that film moment recently when dealing with a wimpy watch band.  I could have thrown this offending strap away, but a little black electrical tape and it was fixed.  This made me think about how things had changed and how they should probably change back.

When I was young my family’s means were on the modest side.  We certainly were not poor, but we were absolutely dollar conscious.  And we did not engage in the reflex buying so typical of today’s families.  If things were worn we patched and if they were broken they migrated to my father’s work bench where they were either fixed or cannibalized to add to the cultch pile for the fixing of other things.  Flashlights fouled by leaking batteries were cleaned and sanded until they worked again and not thrown away.  Our dress shoes were resoled and cardboard sometimes kept socks from scrapping the pavement when thinness transmuted into see-through.  I even remember working with my dad to fix a bad heating element on a dead toaster with a bent hair clip and I made a couple of emergency gasket replacements with paper bags.  We made do, as they said.

My point in all of this is that we had a different relationship with the stuff we owned.  We valued our stuff enough to take time to fix it and we made sure that we kept our own appliance junkyard to help us in the process.  Granted a lot of the solid state electronics we now own would stop us from this, but there is also a knowledge gap, because we were also products of a Heathkit, model building, sewing, gardening, and canning culture that valued knowing how things worked and being connected with the items in our lives.  Perhaps economic and environmental pressures will help us flip back to this fixing culture and away from our culture of trash.