By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
On the 1970s Catholic school lawns and the 1980s rooftops of my Ogden, Utah hometown, I proved beyond a reasonable doubt that I was meant to be a lawyer and not a mechanic.
My mother was proud that I attended and graduated from the University of Utah College of Law. Yet, she sometimes told me, jokingly but with just a slight hint of truth in her voice, “What I really need in this family is not a lawyer, it’s a good mechanic.”
I am not naturally inclined towards building or fixing things. I did not grow up in traditional boy world, where apparently one is taught to use hand tools, operate landscaping equipment, and fix those enigmatic devices known as cars. As a result, I never really developed any skills or interest in such activities.
My family jokes that there are two kinds of people in the world, those who fix things and those who break them. They always firmly, but affectionately, put me in the second of those two categories. This reputation developed at an early age.
In the mid-1970s, Sister Patricia Ann Thompson—our St. Joseph Catholic high school principal and a Holy Cross sister—hired me over the summer to care for the school lawns. It was a generous but foolish attempt to help our family financially. I was horrible at it. Over just a few days, I blew the gasket (not even sure what it is but I broke it) on one mower, caused damage to the blade of a riding mower, and took out a half dozen or so sprinkler heads in the process.
It would have been difficult to cause more damage intentionally. Sister Patricia Ann called me into her office and started to explain the problem in gentle terms. I already understood, and asked her to use my unpaid wages to cover the costs of the landscape mayhem. She happily accepted the offer. This was my first negotiated settlement agreement, and I think I probably got the better end of the deal.
With mixed emotions I heard the news, in the spring of 1982 while still an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame, that my mother had abandoned the practice of renting an apartment, where someone fixes everything for you, and had bought a small mobile home, where nobody fixes anything. The new domicile sat on lot number 10 in a quaint little trailer park located at 4th Street and Grant Avenue in the northern part of Ogden, Utah.
By the time I got home from my college pre-law and theology studies that summer, Mom had drawn up a list of DIY projects and asked me to help. I was assigned first to build a small prefabricated shed from a kit.
This metal shed construction project went relatively smoothly. The kit seemed rather straightforward, and I consulted the instructions (written in jargon rather than plain English) on an as needed basis only. Two parts of the project stumped me—the roof and sliding door—and the instructions did not help, despite my swearing and threats of imminent litigation.
I am not certain why the project bogged down at those two particular junctures, but it may well be that the relevant shed physics bore no resemblance whatsoever to the metaphysics I was studying at Notre Dame. Drawing on my emerging legal advocacy skills, I objected to any further enclosure, argued the merits of “open air” storage, and told Mom she’d have a fine and fully functional shed without a roof or door.
My mother overruled my objections and asked my brother Pete to finish the shed project. He managed to attach the door and roof without resorting to the courts. It had been clear from an early age that Pete was the superior mechanic. When we built model cars together, his final product looked remarkably like the lovely image on the outside of the box. Mine usually was smashed or abandoned in frustration.
Due to his well-established skills (he once built a motorcycle from scratch), my mother also gave Pete a more complicated fix it up project—repainting the whole mobile home white (and black trim) with a sprayer. I got the less glamorous, but arguably more straightforward job of metal roof repair.
My roof repair work required four essential items: (1) a tool to scrape away old roof, (2) black meshed fabric and tar to patch holes; (3) silver sealing goop (I’m using the technical term here) to apply to the whole roof after the black patchwork was done; and (4) a ladder to get me up on the roof and back down.
The scraping/patching work was tedious but relatively easy. I made it needlessly more complex and messy, however, by sleeping in and starting the work sometime after lunch every day, in the middle of July, in one hundred degree weather. If he had been lurking around the small Ogden mobile home park that month, looking for inspiration, Tennessee Williams might have written about something other than a cat on a hot tin roof.
The silver goop phase of the work proved trickier and more comical. The goop bucket was large and heavy. Toting it up and down a ladder was not a skill taught in any of my Notre Dame pre-law or theology classes. I strained muscles I never knew I had, and even slipped or fell off the ladder more than once.
One other unfortunate, but perhaps foreseeable, consequence of my clumsy ladder work was an overturned bucket of silver goop. After the spill, I tried to salvage some of the goop with my hands, only to transform myself—from the elbows down—into the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.
Mom was kind the entire time, not once breaking into a chorus of “If he only had a brain…” She did not accept my impassioned contentions, however, that a silver-ized section of grass added a nice unique touch to her otherwise impeccably green postage stamp green back yard.
Remarkably, I completed the roof project successfully and on schedule, and it did not leak. We also were only slightly over budget, due to the unplanned and unforeseen expenses of one extra bucket of silver goop and a small piece of replacement sod. Given this successful outcome, I never had to articulate my carefully prepared arguments to Mom about how she could enjoy a fine and fully functional mobile home with just a partially fixed roof.
In the years that followed, I earned my J.D. but only rarely again helped Mom on other mobile home projects. Most often, on the cusp of a DIU—domestic improvement undertaking—the help she wanted was my knowledge of the yellow pages: “Who should I hire to do this job?”
I was never insulted by the question, but instead always felt a bit relieved by her polite implicit rejection of my meagre mechanical skills. And I am proud to say that although she did not need a lawyer often, when she did she always called me.
*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.
