I am thankful my father took the time to teach me rudimentary skills: basic plumbing, car maintainence, hunting, fishing, cooking, carpentry and the like. If necessary, we can get by, not easily, but we can if we so chose.
Over the past 3 or 4 decades there seems to be a move away from teaching these skills. Today’s parents seem to be completely disconnected from their kid’s development except where it involves asserting their belief their kid’s have a right(!) to everything because they are alive. The notions of self sacrafice and responsibility are not taught or even shown by example. I don’t blame the kids btw, as my mom used to say, you get em as your raised em.
Very true. I've been surprised many times at what young parents don't know. We've lived in prosperity and peace for many years, and it has been a long time since some families have found it necessary to do basic chores for themselves or to do them without technology. Our community has been full of homes with high-end remodeled kitchens with granite counter tops in which nobody cooks anything from scratch. I meet mothers who can't sew on buttons or scout patches. My son came home from school the other day to tell me that he was the only student in his Latin class who knew what home canning was for and roughly how it was done. (They were discussing "hermetic"). Our sons are the only ones that I know locally who are expected to help mow the lawn.
I remember talking to my mother about this once, and she related that things had taken a similar turn in pre-war central Europe. When she was a child, basic skills had become somewhat atrophied. When the war and rationing hit, people quickly became resourceful. Old people taught the young, who at that point willingly learned. Everyone suddenly became more clever, innovative and willing to do manual work. Food was cooked from scratch using a variety of substitutes for unavailable ingredients; ersatz coffee was made from beans; wine, honey and cough syrup were made from dandelions; people gardened and raised chickens and rabbits; and mechanical goods were repaired however was possible. Barter and sharing held communities together. People adapt when they must.
My dad (who was one of that generation) was a completely self-reliant man when it came to many things, and I was in awe of him.
When he retired from the Navy, he began renovating the 75 year old house he had grown up in and purchased from his father.
He did everything. What he didn’t know how to do, he learned from a book, and did it well. His shop was full of do-it-yourself books.
He had a pool built, and decided to build a 5 foot wide concrete walkway all around it with a large rectangular concrete patio connected that was 30’x15’. My dad had never laid concrete, but he went out, bought a book, purchased an old “one-lunger” rust encrusted cement mixer, and did it. We live in Massachusetts, and he built that thing in 1975. There is one crack in one rectangle, after all these winters.
He was representative of those men of his generation. Hard drinking, hard working family man, in a time before hard drinking became socially verboten, hard working before that became the exception, and a family man before it became a PC crime to be a man with a family.
Man, I sure do miss him.