My parents were very, very, not-mechanically-inclined. Fixing things was not within their realm of experience, and neither of them looked at broken items with the kind of inquiring mind that would lead to a solution to the item’s problem. Either they would pay to have someone else fix it, or if they felt they couldn’t afford to fix the item, we would do without it and maybe get another one eventually.

When my brothers and I were growing up in Lynchburg, we were fortunate to have a neighbor who worked for the phone company and who understood how to fix almost anything. Many was the time Foster Dixon came over and fixed in short order some item over which my dad had been fussing. He even came over and installed the elaborate electric train set that my dad went crazy and bought my equally not-mechanically-inclined oldest brother one Christmas.

My mother did not sew and did not bake. She was an excellent cook otherwise, but the only time she could be persuaded to bake cookies was for the annual faculty Christmas party. She’d make cakes from mixes once in a while, but she wasn’t interested in anything much more complicated than that.

So what happened to me? I sew well enough to have once tackled making a man’s three-piece suit and a woman’s double-breasted camel-hair overcoat. I knit and crochet (no expert at either, but comfortable making intermediate level patterns). I bake, and I have canned and preserved and made jelly in the past.

I once built a computer monitor from a kit. I fix computers. I build them. I fix watches and make picture frames.

And today for the first time I fixed an iPod.

I like fixing things. If I didn’t see so much of my father’s genetic heritage in myself, I would wonder if I were a changeling child.

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