Over My head

Considering that my life is extremely boring right now, and since it's still too early for a Halloween blog I decided to post a blog from last semesters English class. We had to write a paper on a person who inspired us so I wrote one on my Grampa Jensen. I had to interview him and then write a memoir. This is just a tiny bit of my paper, a section close to the end, but I wanted to post it. Grampa's birthday is at the end of the month so I thought this would be a fitting tribute! Happy Birthday Grampa!!

I looked over the towering wall of bookcases. The old books, at first glance, all seemed to be the same. They had thick dark blue or black covers with gold lettering, but on further inspection they were different. "I kept all of my old school books. I have read them thousands of times." I picked one of the books up, "Fundamentals of Chemistry" and thumbed through the yellowing pages. The equations and reactions in the book were too advanced for my understanding, much like the past hour of conversing with my grandfather had been.
He reached out to pull another book from the shelf. "I loved my science classes in high school. Our teacher, Mr. Sherman, told us we would go through stage one throughout the school year, but I took the book and read all three stages in about a week. I couldn't get enough." He put the book back on the shelf, "It got to the point that if he was busy and the other kids needed help he would say, 'Go see Lowell, he'll sort it out for you.'"
He laughed a little as we slowly made our way back to the couch. I held onto his arm to keep him from tripping over any unseen obstacles. His slight frame was not hard to keep upright. It was strange to see him like this, frail and thin. I still thought of him as the strong unbreakable man from my childhood. Once seated he began again. "Mr. Sherman gave me a key to the laboratory so I could go in on weekends and experiment. I had found a diagram of an x-ray machine in the back of the science book and I decided I was going to make one. After it was finished I showed it to the teacher and he couldn't believe it. It wasn't until I showed him the film I had exposed with the machine that he actually believed I had done it. I liked doing things like that though. When I was growing up during the depression my mother had a book, 'How to Make Things Out of Old Things.'"
He chuckled as he remembered, "But that is what we had to do. No one could afford to buy new things, so we made things out of old things." I laughed with him as I thought of all the "things" he had made from other things. The tractor sitting outside in the driveway made from an old car and left over scrap metal from World War II, the bicycle sitting on the patio rigged up to a small lightweight motor from who knows what. The gyro-copter in the workshop made with an old lawn chair and extra bits of aluminum pipes.
I marveled at what this man had done with his high school education. Even after six years of college I was no where close to understanding the world like he did. "When I was growing up in Payette, Idaho there was an old brickyard down the street, where they had once made bricks by hand. One day as I was exploring I found a little tunnel half buried under the big mixing pit. I shoveled out the dirt and found a huge room underneath. In the corner was a stove and a lot of metal tubing. It was a whiskey still. So I went to the library and I read about whiskey stills. I found out that the tubes used in whiskey stills are made of pure tin. Pure tin is hard to come by, even now it's pretty valuable, about half the price of silver. There was a man that owned the junkyard in Payette who also dealt with metal. His name was Seegal, but everyone in town called him Pop-Seegal." He started to laugh and then looked at me to make sure I understood, "You know like Popsicle?"
I laughed as I rolled my eyes and he continued. "So I melted the tin down into six bars and took one to Pop-Seegal. His eyes got real big when he saw what I had. He handed me a box and said, 'Go ahead and fill that up with stuff out of the junkyard and I'll let you know when you've gotten enough for a fair trade.' Well I filled up the box and he never did tell me to stop so that tin bar must have been pretty valuable. As I left he said, 'Hey Lowell if you have anymore of these, go ahead and come by next time you need something out of the junkyard.' I went to that junkyard a lot that summer!"
He was laughing again. Only my grandpa would think that hanging out at a junkyard for most of the summer would be a worth while past time. "I had enough projects to last me a lifetime after that. On one of my trips to the junkyard I found an old welder that had been burnt in a fire. I took it home, but it wouldn't work. That was the year I learned about transformers. I went to the library again and researched transformers. I took the transformer on the welder apart and laid the wire out all over our barn. Then I cleaned it and wrapped it in tiny pieces of sheets I had gotten from mother." He held up his hand to indicate the sheets had been torn into pieces about an inch wide. Then I found some linseed oil in my mothers art supplies and went to the library to learn how to make paint (I'm relatively positive I drove the gal at the library nuts when I was a kid). I made the paint and thinned it with gasoline, but you shouldn't do that Jenni because it's dangerous." He winked at me and I laughed with him again. "Then I put the whole thing back together and taught myself to weld with it."
He talked as if it was something that anyone could do, but I was totally lost. I didn't even know what a transformer was. I mean I was pretty sure he wasn't talking about the Transformers from the robots in disguise fame. I didn't have much time to contemplate as he started another story, "I built a little shack out by our house out of wood pallets. I would build little rockets there and I joined the U.S. Rocket Society of America. I still have the card! It's still running today, but it has a different name." He looked at me questioningly and I asked him what it was called. He leaned back with a satisfied smile, "They call it NASA now."