Tinkers

“When his wife touched his legs at night in bed, through his pajamas, she thought of oak or maple and had to make herself think of something else in order not to imagine going down to his workshop in the basement and getting sandpaper and stain and sanding his legs and staining them with a brush, as if they belonged to a piece of furniture.”

As George gets ill and old, his body visibly changes—in this case, his legs turn stiff. This reminds his wife of wood, and she associates George with furniture. Even in this grim association, there is a sense of tinkering, in which a character seeks to work on or perfect the objects around them.

“Poke your finger into the clock; fiddle the escape wheel (every part perfectly named—escape: the end of the machine, the place where the energy leaks out, breaks free, beats time).”

Clocks are frequently referenced in Tinkers as objects that bring order to chaos, record activity, and measure time perfectly. They are also frequently compared to people. This excerpt refers to both ideas: the efficiency of the machine, and the inevitability of energy running out and escaping just as a person’s life force is slowly drained as time progresses.

“Tinker, tinker. Tin, tin, tin. Tintinnabulation. There was the ring of pots and buckets. There was also the ring in Howard Crosby’s ears, a ring that began at a distance and came closer, until it sat in his ears, then burrowed into them. His head thrummed as if it were a clapper in a bell.”

The word tinker is an onomatopoeic word that comes from the sound associated with repairs. The sound of metal hitting metal is a common sound in Howard’s life, and the alliteration at the beginning of this excerpt replicates the sounds of his work and life.

“He talked about what it is like to be a grandparent for the first time and to think about what it is you will leave behind when you die.”

At the end of his life, George begins to increasingly think about his own mortality and the inescapable arrival of his death. Once, while he tries to make a recording of his family history, he speaks of legacy and what it means to die. He suggests that his legacy is the family he made and loves.

“They murmured about a place somewhere deep in the woods where a set of bones lay on a bed of moss, above which a troop of mournful flies had kept vigil the previous autumn until the frosts came and they, too, had succumbed.”

In this excerpt referencing Gilbert’s death, the flies that surrounded him constantly in life are depicted as his family; these flies keep vigil over his bones until they, too, succumb to the cold. There is a similarity in the imagery of the flies and the family that surrounds George, decades later, as he dies. His family watches over him and mourns for him as he dies, just like Gilbert’s flies; and like those flies, their ends, too, will approach with time.

“This is a book. It is a book I found in a box. I found the box in the attic. The box was in the attic, under the eaves. The attic was hot and still. The air was stale with dust. The dust was from old pictures and books. The dust in the air was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted the book before I read it.”

This book is a significant piece of family history, and its introduction relays its importance in George’s life. Its location and description of being “breathed” in and “tasted” before it is even seen or read give it a near-mythical status. The repetitious diction, too, conveys the narrative significance of the book’s discovery.

“It was like the opposite of death, or a bit of the same thing death was, but from a different direction: Instead of being emptied or extinguished to the point of unselfness, Howard was overfilled, overwhelmed to the same state.”

When Howard has seizures, he feels as though he opens up to the universe and sees the chaos of the cosmos. He describes it as dying in reverse. He heads toward the same destination of death, but the journey is one of being overloaded rather than emptied.

“George looked surprised at his reflection, as if after a lifetime of seeing himself in mirrors and windows and metal and water, now, at the end, suddenly a rude, impatient stranger had shown up in place of himself, someone anxious to get into the picture, although his proper cue was George’s exit.”

As he confronts his mortality, George is struck by the physical changes that come with aging and dying. When he looks in the mirror, he not only sees a person who is physically different, but one who has a different character from his own. His reflection is “rude, impatient,” signifying that he is fed up with waiting for the end of his life.

“[A]s if she had just slid the five o’clock hour to the nine o’clock one or took the four hours between them and banished them or tyrannized herself and her children into a type of abatement, leaving each of them and herself with a burden of four extra hours that each would have to juggle and mind for the rest of their lives.”

Kathleen is a strict mother and makes her children wait for Howard to come home before they can eat dinner. In this instance, as Howard is late returning home because he had a seizure, and George notices the cool way in which Kathleen addresses his absence. She acts as though nothing is wrong, and as though the hours that have elapsed never existed.

“They began with setting the home in order for the day, so that it might already be industrious when the sun climbed first the invisible horizon and then the branches of the dark trees.”

In George’s childhood home, Kathleen is a strict parent, and under her influence, the house operates in a way in which each member strives to be part of a collective industriousness. She instills resilience and hard work in her children, which includes running the house efficiently and starting each day prepared for the work ahead.

“He resented the ache because it was uninvited, seemed imposed, a sentence, and, despite the encouragement he gave himself each morning, it baffled him because it was there whether the day was good or bad, whether he witnessed major kindness or minor transgression, suffered sourceless grief or spontaneous joy.”

Howard resents the ache he feels every day that proves he is alive. Its unchanging nature irks him—it does not matter what happens during the day, the ache is always the same and always present. He struggles to accept that life itself is this ache.

“His father sat, snorting rapid breaths through his nose and looking first at the palms of his hands and then at their backs as he clenched an unclenched them the way a soldier might after a bomb had detonated in his trench and he was shocked to find himself still alive and possibly unharmed.”

As Howard has a seizure, George witnesses it for the first time and comes to see its severity and pain. Howard’s reaction to his seizure is compared to that of a soldier who narrowly escapes death, showing that Howard frequently undergoes shocking and traumatic events. Though he survives each time, it leaves him shocked and mentally scarred.

“George, give me the spoon. George looked at his mother, George, the spoon, she said, not angry or loud or bitter, as usual, but almost gently. He dropped his fork and yanked the spoon out of the potatoes.”

Kathleen is usually strict with her children and does not show them emotional comfort or support. Because of this, when Howard has a seizure and Kathleen addresses George with kindness, he is taken aback. In this moment, witnessing a seizure for the first time, George is introduced to versions of his parents he was not aware of before.

“These feelings frighten her so much that she has buried them under layer upon layer of domestic strictness. She has managed, in the dozen years since becoming a wife and mother, to half-convince herself that this nearly martial ordering of her household is, in fact, the love that she is so terrified that she does not have.”

Kathleen frequently worries that she does not love her children. She does not think she was prepared to become a mother and as a result, she runs her household with a firm grip and withholds comfort and affection from her children. She convinces herself, despite her anxieties, that this approach is for their own good, and that it will make them strong and tough. She convinces herself that her severity is an expression of her love.

“[L]istening to his mother uselessly chopping at stone out beyond the window fitted with panes of black ice, when what he most needed was to be curled up in her warm lap, with her warm hands on his face and her soft, quiet voice cooing to him that everything was all right.”

In the aftermath of the seizure, during which Howard bites George, George finds himself yearning for his mother’s comfort. After witnessing a new, kinder side to his mother during the seizure, he can almost bring himself to expect affection from Kathleen, but he also recognizes that her decision to do chores rather than be with him signifies her preference.

“When he came to the turnoff for Ezra Morrell’s farm, he saw the wagon tracks turn with it. There was a moment, of sorrow, disappointment, and deep love for his son, whom he at that second wished had had a chance of real escape.”

Howard recognizes the unfortunate situation George is in: stuck between a cold mother and an unpredictable, unreliable father. George must not only contend with his parents but also care for his younger siblings, making him more of an adult than he should be at the age of 12. When Howard finds George after he runs away, he wishes his son made it farther, wanting George to have a better life away from his family.

“My father’s voice droned on about the importance of every little creature in the field, enumerating practically every crawling, swimming, flying beast he could and reiterating that it, too, was as important as any other of God’s creations.”

Howard’s father, the preacher, asserts that every living being is important. This belief is instilled in Howard from a young age and influences him throughout his life. He struggles with this idea when Kathleen considers committing him to a state facility because he realizes that she would forsake him rather than help him, diminishing the value of his life and place in the family.

“Throughout his illness (that is the word that now, for the first time, came to my mind, and it shocked me and suddenly made me frightened), he had remained kind and remote toward me, as he had always been, but I had lately noticed him looking at me with a sort of wistfulness, as if he were not looking at me, but at a drawing or photograph of me, as if he were remembering me.”

As Howard’s father deteriorates, he begins to forget Howard and look through him. The mental and physical deterioration leads Howard to believe that he is losing his father well before his eventual disappearance. His father forgets the people around him and loses the ability to do everyday tasks. This scares Howard, as his father becomes a completely different person.

“The men helped my father into the coach first and then my mother, a reversal of their usual and ritually observed manners, which seemed to me final and devastating.”

Howard guesses that his father might be disappearing for good because he notices that his parents have reversed roles. Usually, his father is the strong presence in the family, often comforting widows from the parish; usually, his father helps Howard’s mother into carriages. However, when Howard’s mother must help his father dress and board a carriage, the finality of his father’s condition truly hits Howard.

“I’m not gone just yet, he would tell me in a humorous tone that I should have recognized as belonging to a dream, since he had never used it in life, although I had often wished for it.”

Much like George, Howard struggles with his relationship with his parents based on what they give him versus what he needs from them. In this case, Howard dreams of his father having a sense of humor, though he recognizes that he should he is dreaming because at no point in the waking world does his father ever speak to him in such a way. 

“I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am a century wide. I think that I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you.”

George believes that his grandson, Charlie, says these words, despite not recognizing him in the final hours before his death. This statement, however, shows the impact the book has on Charlie, who seemingly reads words from generations before him, from a place the family no longer resides in. His introduction to such Family History and Generational Legacy grants him a better connection to George and to those who came before them.

“This cooperation, and each of these hundreds of thousands of seconds, may be heard at our leisure as the calming, reassuring tick-tocks of a winter’s night from the bracket clock on the mantel above the glowing fire.”

This excerpt from The Reasonable Horologist supports the notion of clocks’ dependability to make order out of chaos. The “tick-tocks” measure a set amount of time and are described as “calming” and “reassuring” as they are predictable and expected. They do not variate, granting their listeners a peaceful and unexciting background.

“He worked seven days a week and wrote poems extolling his company over the competition (The floor’s a mess and I feel a dope, I scrubbed it down with Red Lantern soap).”

When Howard arrives in Philadelphia and begins his new life, he finds a new joy he did not previously have. Not only is his new wife kind and caring (and very different from Kathleen), but his new job also provides him with a positive experience. While he liked being out in nature and tinkering, the stress and judgment of his sales job weighed on him. However, at the grocery store, he finds joy in his work and expresses it in creative ways, through these poems and his painstakingly arranged produce displays.