Science Musings Blog

Dear denizens of the porch, Tom and I are exploring where to go next. We'll be back soon. Anne will surely join us. Hang on. Chet

Click to enlarge Anne's illumination of Dad's deathbed journals.

My father’s father was a handyman. So was Dad. I’m fairly handy myself, and I have a son who is handier than all of us. Nature or nurture? Who knows? Maybe a bit of both. But surely not any longer an exclusively male preserve. My oldest daughter recently remodeled her kitchen. She taught me how to use a sledge-activated nail gun to lay a hardwood floor. What is the difference between a craftsperson and a handyman? The craftsperson does it for a living. The handyman does it for a life.

I wouldn’t say that what my father was doing on his deathbed was a barrel of monkeys, but he was clearly enjoying what he was doing. His engineering-style drawings have a kind of whimsy about them, a spontaneous parody that would make Thomas Ewing French and Rube Goldberg smile. Surely, one of the infelicities of our age is that we take our machines too seriously. We let them squash our sense of fun, turn us into mere appurtenances of their own inscrutable workings. I couldn’t repress a smile when I saw my daughter wrestling that massive nail gun into position, whacking it with the hammer, grinning like a demented fool. Handygals have fun.

When I was about twelve years old, my father gave me a hand-held electric jigsaw for my birthday. It was a clever tool. You held it like a pistol. The blade was like the straight side of a stretched-out letter D. A little 110-volt electromagnet pulled the blade down and the springlike upper side of the D pulled it up. Bzzzzzzzz. My first power tool. I made a few little toys out of bits of balsa, but for all of its cleverness the jigsaw was not very useful. It labored through anything thicker than an eighth of an inch. The flimsy blades kept breaking. I’ll give this to Dad. He picked up pretty quick on the unsatisfactory nature of the tool. On my next birthday I was rewarded with a proper jigsaw, a real tabletop power tool, driven with a powerful one-quarter horsepower motor, the same motor that with a flip of a belt drove his drill press. Together, we had entered the age of the power shop.

In all of this he was a distant angel, keenly interested in my jigsaw projects, but unlikely to reveal much of what was going on in his own life. Not much happened to us kids that he didn’t proudly record on film, but a surprising number of his own professional accomplishments were unknown to me until I read his curriculum vitae after his death. He never stopped tooting our horns, but he was reluctant to toot his own.

My biggest jigsaw project was a chess set, thirty-two pieces enameled black and white, hollowed out and weighted with solder, the bottoms then covered with green felt. To display this grand production I made a coffee table with a tiled chessboard built into the top. It was the first thing I had made without hints or help from Dad, and I was inordinately proud. Too proud, in fact, for my Catholic guilt. I was then in the throes of a bout of religious fervor. We are called—so I believed—to keep our eye on the prize, and the prize is not in this world but the next. Kneeling in the darkened nave of Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church I resolved to chasten my pride by destroying one of the chess pieces, the white king. I laid the poor fellow on the cement basement floor. I raised the hammer. Then, in a change of heart, I substituted a more easily replaceable pawn for the king. Smash! As you can see, I was neither a very good sinner nor a very good penitent.

The pawn was quickly replaced, the Deadly Sin forgotten. The coffee table and chess set ended up gracing my first apartment as a married graduate student. It’s long gone now, I don’t know where, but it lasted longer than my Catholic scrupulosity. That cringe of guilt was not something I picked up at home. Dad took pride in my handyman projects, and hoped I would take pride in them too. Pride is an essential ingredient of the handyman’s craft. Somewhere among his many reels of 8 mm home movies there’s a sequence of me crouching by my chess-setted coffee table grinning with practiced self-satisfaction. Pride is the motive and the polish of the handyman.

He loved us. His love was vouched by his pride in our accomplishments. How did I show my love for him? By trying to live up to his expectations, by being as handy as he was and his father before him. Love is in the genes, of course, a biological imperative to cherish one’s offspring and revere one’s parents. Like the handyman talent, love is funded by nature and nurture. It was there in those backyard swings and seesaws my handyman grandfather made for his kids in Mount Pleasant, Tennessee, and in the Buster Brown suits and frilly dresses stitched up by my grandmother. Dad was nurturing love when he stood waiting with his Cine-Kodak at the bottom of Ninth Street hill as my soapbox racer with the unaerodynamic axles sped towards the finish line. I know now that the jigsaws were tokens of his love. A handyman takes pride in his work, and if the design of a soapbox racer or a repaired toaster can be a token of love so much the better.

Remember the model Spanish galleon my father built just before his marriage, the one my mother relegated to the basement? There was another sailing ship, a tiny one, that he made for my mother while they were courting. Its hull was a walnut half-shell, bowsprit and all, to which he had glued a cardboard deck. Above he fashioned three-masted rigging with billowing paper sails. For as long as I can remember, that little ship resided in a corner of the china cabinet in the dining room. In a funny way, it was as inspirational to me as the infinitely more accomplished Spanish galleon. One evening at dinner, when I was about eight or nine, for a reason I cannot recall, my father took the little walnut ship out of the china cabinet, pried off the cardboard deck with a dinner knife, and there written on the underside in his neat engineer’s hand was the message “I love you,” hidden all those years. The message struck me as terribly romantic, but I have a recollection of something unsettling in the air at table that evening, an ironic tilt to the atmosphere. I was too young to pick up on the subtler complexities of matrimony, but wise enough to have remembered the token of romance and forgotten the cause of those flickering sparks of discontent.

At the end, in his hospital journals, he seems a little baffled that she is still there, at his side in the hospital room, attending his whims, after thirty-eight years of sometimes uneasy marriage. He also seems a bit surprised by his own happiness when she is in the room. He writes: Mom (God bless her) got dressed and went after an ice cream for me! So glad she is going to stay with me tonight. It is not the afterlife that looms large in those last pages of his deathbed journals, but this life—this infinitely mysterious life with its ineluctable entanglements of love, parents, spouse, children, grandchildren, this life that was ebbing away. He wanted desperately to fix it, to repair whatever was broken, to mend all of the frayed bonds of love. He thought the journals contained something valuable, something that should be shared. And perhaps they did. What was it he always used to say, the mantra of the handyman? With a little ingenuity, anything is possible.

(THE END. Many thanks to Anne for her lovely illuminations. They are an affectionate record of Dad’s final days. And thanks to Tom for photographic illustrations. Without Tom this website would not exist. To all of you who stayed aboard for Mr. Fix-it, your presence of on the porch has been warmly welcomed and we are grateful for it. Stay tuned.)

Click to enlarge Anne's illumination of Dad's deathbed journals.

I have now lived fourteen years longer than my father, and well past the age when his own father died. A century ago, the average male lifetime in the United States was 45 years. Today it’s in the late-70s—and rising. Never before in history have so many of us had the expectation of a ripe old age. The average lifetime won’t rise forever, of course, at least not without some genetic jiggering. There are biological clocks ticking in every cell of our bodies. Our cells are fated one-by-one to die, each at its appointed time, until finally the entire colony expires.

For multicelled creatures like ourselves, death is not the opposite of life; death is part of life. Single-celled organisms are potentially immortal. With an appropriate environment and nutrients, bacteria can live forever. Genetically-programmed, inevitable death appeared rather late in the history of life, just 600 million years ago, at about the same time as sex and multicellularity. In recent decades scientists have begun to understand that if you want to have creatures with eyes and ears, brains and backbones, gonads and gods, then you must have death, too. Death is the driving engine of evolution.

An individual cell in a multicellular organism can do one of three things—divide, specialize, or commit suicide. It has been estimated that if division and specialization occurred without cell suicide, an 80-year-old person would have two tons of bone marrow and a gut ten miles long. The whole business of building and maintaining a multicelled organism is a genetically orchestrated dance of cell division and cell death. For example, as a human embryo develops, the extremities of the limbs first look like stumpy ping-pong paddles. Then cells start to selectively die in a way that turns the paddles into hands and feet with digits. We have fingers and toes because certain cells are programmed for suicide. The Grim Reaper has an alternate role as a Michelangelo who releases the statue’s form from within the block of marble.

Sooner or later, however, in multicelled creatures such as ourselves, the reaping runs ahead of the shaping and we experience senescence, the physical decline of old age. Scientists are not sure how or why senescence evolved, but humans are the only creatures for which it makes much difference. For other animals and plants (and including humans until recently), death by accident or violence or disease was a more likely fate than doddering old age. If evolution never selected against senescence, it may be because it never had much opportunity to do so.

My father’s mind was sharp until the last few days of his life, when disease cut short his “three score years and ten,” the carefully orchestrated balance of cell division and death having gone wildly astray. His experience was typical of most humans throughout history; my two grandfathers died in their forties, one of a tragic accident, the other of pneumonia. We live today in a civilization that has invented antibiotics and childproof caps, vaccinations and seat belts, sterile parturition and the ABM Treaty. It is possible that I will collect my Social Security check for another 10 or 20 years. This is a huge new thing in the history of life: Not nature red in tooth and claw, but Centrum Silver and senior aerobics. For most of the history of our race, death came as a bolt from the blue—a snake bite, an impacted tooth, a bash on the head by the warrior next door, starvation. Now, with the benefit of medical science and the orderly assistance of civilized society, many of us live long enough to see that mortality is a necessary part of the plan, a corollary of life that is built into every cell of our bodies. Death is life’s necessary partner, the ultimate tinkerer, endlessly creative.

Of my father’s death I have five volumes of his handwritten notes. I know his every thought for ten terrible weeks, every blast of radiation, every pill. What is strangely absent is any recognition that death is inevitable. The slightest uptick from his well of pain is invariably recorded as a harbinger of recovery. Where are the Big Questions, the ones that are supposed to occupy a dying man? Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? What does it all mean? My father seems to have been more interested in the Little Questions. How many inches is my head from the top of the bed? How many minutes since the last Percodan pill? Will the next cobalt treatment correct the double vision in my right eye? These questions were not as trivial to him as they might seem to us. It was by the accumulation and analysis of apparently trivial data that engineers and scientists have answered other no-so-little Little Questions. How are atoms of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen forged in the cores of stars? How do enzymes in every cell of our bodies build proteins, carbohydrates and lipids? How does a hummingbird hover? How does one increase the average span of life from 40 years to 80 years? What my father was doing may seem trivial and fruitless in his dire circumstances, but he was celebrating at the end what he celebrated all his life—things that can be told and named. The army of rampaging cells that escaped from his prostate at age 64 and infiltrated his entire body were part of what is, just as the moving mechanical belt that grasped his father’s glove and ripped off his arm was part of what is. He fought the spreading cancerous cells in his body with the instruments of is. He was an engineer, a handyman, to the very end, but no match for the explosive power of life run sadly amok.

In the final days, his journals descend into a bit of chaos as his faculties become muddled. The doctors and priests come and go. Family and friends attend. And still the current of optimism flows through the pages, the handyman’s faith that with a little ingenuity anything can be fixed. The doses and times. The ups and downs of the energy cycle. Nausea. Morphine. Mylanta. Milk. Bleeding. Oxygen. IV. Antibiotics. A hodgepodge of hopeful notes, as if he were rooting around in the junk drawers of the big black cabinet in the basement, looking for just the right gizmo to set the mechanism aright. At last, other hands take over the journal, recording what he no longer has the strength or clarity of mind to record himself. His last words: 6:45 “Let the light come in.” 7:00 “Purple people eaters.” 7:10 “I hear a bell.” And then, a joke, as he is given an injection to control his spasms. 7:12 “Shot was hot. Hot shot!”

In the year he died, senior students at Notre Dame High School dedicated their yearbook to him. They reproduced his photograph from the yearbook of 1928, with the description that had accompanied the photo then: “The sterling qualities of honor and integrity are possessed in an unusual degree by Chester Raymo. His ability to plan and to execute has caused him to be chosen leader in almost every school activity which calls for a cool head and quick brain. Beneath his rather serious exterior there runs a thread of humor and fun which rises to the surface on frequent occasions.”

Click to enlarge Anne's illumination of Dad's deathbed journals.

He taught me to use a drawknife, and a brace and bit. He taught me how to include a spring suspension in a soapbox racer, and how to take it out again. He taught me how to cut and splice celluloid film. He had a headful of handy skills and was happy to share them. He was, in fact, a born teacher, and found the time in the margins of his full-time employment as a quality control engineer to teach night courses at the local technical schools on everything from welding to blueprint reading, from metallurgy to foremanship. It was probably inevitable that when he retired from the American Lava Corporation at age sixty he would look for a teaching position. And he found it, at his old high school, Notre Dame Academy in Chattanooga, now moved to a bright new campus in a rather smarter part of town. He taught mathematics and physics, and served as plant manager and assistant principal. His favorite course was geometry, and he had in mind writing a high school geometry text. Even in the final weeks of his life, confined to his hospital bed, he wrote in his journal: “I should also use this time at a table of some sort and begin my long overdue geometry book.” He got no further than the first sentence: “Begin with a point.” His cancer had a point to make, and it was final.

As John Updike points out in a poem, death exists nowhere in nature except in our forebodings. As far as we know, no other creature, animal or plant, has an awareness of its own mortality. Only in human consciousness is death anticipated, as a dark foreboding or promise of release. And so much else is carried along in that baggage of anticipation. Courage. Fear. Virtue. Guilt. All of this comes out in my father’s journals—the ambivalent foreboding rising now and then to the surface through that carefully contrived overlay of data and analysis. “Begin with a point.” The imagined geometry book was another instrument for holding death at bay, not so much a practical project as a palliative, a placebo.

In the Roman Catholic theology of my youth only humans had immortal souls. In the heaven of our imaginations there were no animals or plants, no victory gardens or picket fences or starry nights. No dawns or dusks. No seasons. I suppose I pictured heaven as rather like the hospital my father died in, all stainless steel and white paint and pale green gowns and angels with pushcarts and mops going around swabbing up the invisible microbes that had managed to slip in on our resurrected feet, and some little device down the hall going ping-ping-ping counting off the seconds of eternity. Not a terribly attractive prospect, but I have never come up with anything more plausible. I search my father’s journals for his anticipation of the afterlife. His attention is on the present. In the noontime of his handyman days he had used to say, “With a little ingenuity, anything can be fixed.” Until the moment when he is no longer able to scrawl his notes he is searching for an escape clause, the triumph of conscious will over the out-of-whack cells that were rampaging his body. He records a dream of “waking up in a formless container—a cocoon!”

Occasionally in the journals I find a puzzled “Why me?” He has so much left to do, courses to teach, a geometry book to write. Where is the justice? But nature is arbitrary and violent, and cares not a whit for human conceptions of what is fair and not fair. Massive black holes at the centers of galaxies gobble up gas and stars. In the arms of galaxies suns explode with a force that shatters surrounding worlds. Comets and asteroids smash into the Earth causing mass extinctions. In the midst of such arbitrary violence, what is the importance of an individual human life? As Loren Eiseley wrote: “Instability lies at the heart of he world.” Order and disorder, life and death, cooperation and competition are the paired principles of nature’s creative force.

There is a line by the Irish poet Pat Boran: “The spirit loves the flesh, as the hand the glove.” That fit, of spirit to flesh, comes across in the journals, in all those drawings of his body splayed on the bed, the angles, the dimensions. The material world of nuts and bolts, ceramic widgets, flesh and bones was his bailiwick, his heaven on earth. The spirit is flesh, yes, but more than flesh. This I learned from my father, as long ago as those starry nights on the badminton court when he taught me the names of the constellations, or those hours in the garage with drawknife and plane: The spirit is flesh in interaction with a universe of infinite complexity. The windows of the flesh are thrown open to the world. The spirit is a wind of awareness, a pool stirred by angels. And, yes, some part of the spirit will linger when the flesh is gone, as memories in other flesh, as words and stories—a fleshless hand that retains the shape of the glove. He was not a philosopher or a saint. His very ordinariness was his crown. He was a handyman, a teacher. And this is what he taught: Let us love the world, this world, the world outside the windows of the flesh, for in truth there is no other world, no other world for us except the world we inhale like a deep, deep breath and seal into the soul.