Thingamajig

When I drop a quarter on the floor, I can’t just bend down and pick it up; my blunt, gnarled fingertips have had their nails whittled down by nervous chomping (a habit I can’t seem to shake), making it nearly impossible to grip the thin, ridged coin as it rests flatly on the ground. Usually, I resort to sliding a piece of paper underneath the coin, or, if there is no paper available, I’ll stubbornly press down on George Washington’s nose, trying to create enough leverage to lift the coin’s other side enough to peel it away from the floor. It’s not just coins of the floor though; counters, tables, dressers, any level surface inevitably leads to a vicious struggle between my half-eaten fingertips and the gravitational forces rooting the quarter.

I don’t remember exactly when, but sometime around the end of middle school my father presented me with a small, rectangular box, about twice as long as it was wide, with a bowed strip of linoleum somehow affixed to the inside of the wooden frame. To my adolescent mind it looked like a somewhat flattened half-pipe, the kind I saw Tony Hawk and Bob Burnquist skateboarding on every August during the X Games, only instead of the bland plywood of a skate ramp, flecks of gold sparkled in the faded cream band of flooring.

“What is it for?” I asked my dad, turning the thing over in my hands and examining its green felt-covered base. “You put your spare change in it. That way it’s easier to pick up,” he sagely replied. I rolled the box back over, setting it down on my dresser soundlessly, eyeing it once again, this time with its purpose in mind. It dawned on me as my dad reached into his pocket and drew out a couple of coins, placing them at the nadir of the linoleum half-pipe. “See,” he said, sliding the coins up the smooth sides to the edge, where they leapt into the waiting palm of his other hand. “Cool,” I drawled out, not unimpressed by the demonstration. “Yeah, your great-grandpa Sayers made it. He kept it on his dresser his whole life,” my dad said, loosing himself in a reverie while I gathered up the loose change scattered around my room in bottles and jars and oddly shaped banks (I’ve never owned a piggy bank; the closest thing to it is the miniature Red Cross ambulance with a coin slot in its roof that my grandfather gave me when I was little). As I began to load up the thingamajig with change, I couldn’t help but slide a few coins up the side, over the edge, and into my soft, child’s palm.

My great-grandfather Sayers (my grandmother’s father) was a farmer, with hard, coarse fingers that put in countless days in the humid Illinois summers plowing cornfields and sowing soybean crops. His family lived in a big two-story house, shaded to the north by the thick forest of oak and walnut trees that seems to sprout from the Rock River, a thick and luscious island of timber in a sea of rolling farmland. During the Great Depression, great-grandpa Sayers was able to whether the tough economic times by maintaining a vast acreage at minimal costs, generating maximum profit. My dad likes to say that my great-grandfather never bought any equipment new: his tractor was well beyond its prime, his plow was used, and he supposedly built a combine out of nothing more than a pile of spare parts and a diagram. Earl Sayers was above all things ingenious and innovative, able to repair the seemingly irreparable with junkyard parts and the boxes upon boxes of spare nuts and bolts he’d salvaged or saved from the discard pile at the steel mill across the river. Farming was a family affair, my great uncle Bud putting in long days in the fields, my dad and uncle spending their childhood fishing for hoses or rebar in the remains of what was once a dump not far from the property. My great-grandfather died in 1985, three years before I was born, victim of the cholesterol-ridden bacon, egg, and pancake breakfasts that fueled his day’s work, the pot-roast and mashed potato dinners, the thick, smelly cigars that were his favorite luxury. While he took to his grave his own love of economy and ingenuity, great-grandpa Sayers left the legacy of these values in his progeny. And in that thingamajig.

I’d be lying if I said that every time I slide a couple of nickels up the gold-flecked linoleum ramp I think about its maker. The simple genius of this small, convenient object I often taken for granted, its virtues no longer celebrated, but instead simply expected. Yet when I stop and think about it, I can’t help but picture a devilish smile, a cunning wink, a rightfully-exhibited pride on my great-grandfather’s face as he presents and demonstrates his invention. The sheer cleverness and quality of craftsmanship evident in this amalgamation of scrap is worthy of praise, as is the man who identified a problem and saw the potential for solving it in these diverse components.

Where have these men gone? It seems as though there is something ready-made for every situation, that innovation is relegated to gray-walled, low-ceilinged R & D departments at Sony, or Apple, or Brookstone. There are no “thingamajigs,” only “coin keepers,” pre-fabbed in particle board, or, for the high-end customer, plated with brushed nickel, available for $24.95 in the “crap-you-don’t-really-need-and-shouldn’t-really-be-spending-your-money-on-anyway” section of your local department store. Most of us would rather choose to live without something that makes gathering up our spare change easier than shell out for a little convenience (besides, who even carries coins around anymore?). But that’s not what really matters about great-grandpa Sayers’ linoleum coin ramp; what’s important about this family heirloom is not its usefulness, or even its role as an heirloom. In the end, the spirit of ingenuity, the desire and, above all, the ability to create solutions with the sweat of one’s brow, the skill of one’s touch, and the strength of one’s muscles, is what really counts. Disassociating oneself from the world by walling off problems with newfangled gadgets and excuses can never fulfill one quite like grabbing hold of a situation and contending with it. It’s not easy; hell, it’ll probably never be easy, but “easy” and “right” are often to very different things.