Garage dad

My dad loved his garage. His garage was his holy space. In there he could restore old cars, build shadowboxes, and fix impossible-to-fix toys like tangled Slinkys or popped balloons.

He liked to be creative—he used old chrome tools and spare car parts to create lightsabers and laser guns for my brother and I. He fixed every appliance we ever had, dragged our toilet down for repair after my brother flushed his toys (again), and used it has his hangout space when neighbours or friends dropped by for a beer and a hello.

It was his quiet space. Many nights I sat beside his outstretched legs as he tinkered away under the car, bright light blaring underneath the chassis from a long yellow cord stuck to the roof. I was as useful as a heater in a heatwave, and we often didn’t speak. Most of the time, we just hung out and listened to jazz or classic rock tunes which drove my mom insane, occasionally passing a wrench between us.

Dads are like garages. They house things, they keep them safe. They’re practical and unadorned. Sometimes they’re wide open. Sometimes they’re closed shut. They’re the part of the home that is often least prioritized, yet most appreciated for fun things.

Ours was an attached, two-car garage. One time my dad painted the whole thing orange, floor to ceiling, I have no idea why. It contained all the usual things: tools, bicycles, basketballs, a chest freezer, an extra cupboard for off-season jackets and shoes. One time, it contained the door to my bedroom.

It’s hard to be a dad, I imagine, especially when you’re a quiet man with a loud daughter. I was a very loud and very dramatic teenager.

While I would still go down to the garage sometimes, I was more often found with my friends. We’d drive around in their cars, find fun places to shoot silly videos or drink a can of beer swiped from someone’s parents’ fridge.

One time, I’d been up in my room upset about something. Who knows what it was; maybe a restriction I perceived as unfair. Whatever it was, my dad and I got into a big argument. In my life there weren’t that many of those.

Garage Dad was hard to argue with—my anger would dissolve into the open air of the space, and find comfort in his reliability, just like his hammer would always know where to go thanks to its precise Sharpie outline on the tool wall.

This argument was different, though. As a teenage girl I was finding out what kind of person I was, and at that point I was exactly like my room—made up of mismatched furniture pieces, some which screamed for attention and others which sank into the background. Messy and chaotic and always so uncertain that everything needed to be rearranged regularly.

I screamed at my dad that day, then slammed my door as he walked away. He’d asked me many, many times not to slam my door, but I did it anyway.

As I sat on my bed, fuming, I heard his familiar tread return up the stairs. I prepared myself for him to knock and apologize, but instead he came in with a small crowbar and hammer, and in a few quick moves removed my door from the hinges and brought it downstairs.

I earned privacy, he said, from being respectful both of him and the house.

He stored my door, of course, in the garage next to the chest freezer.

Enraged, I waited until he left before going downstairs and attempting to retrieve it. I shouldered the massive wooden slab (huge against my five-foot-frame) and dragged it back up the stairs. As soon as I got to my room, however, I realized I had a problem: this was a two-person job. Someone needed to hold the door in place, off the ground, so I could reinstall the hinges.

My brother, wisely, opted out of a mission so clearly against some form of discipline, and my mom also decided not to work against my dad. I was a lone soldier.

That meant I had to get creative; I tried balancing it on stools, pillows, books and towels, but the awkward size and instability made it impossible. My family took turns coming by, and with each visit peered in and found an increasing amount of door grease on my hands, face and walls.

By the end, my mother, brother and I were in tears with laughter at how horrible a job I’d done—door half hinged and black grease everywhere. Even my dad came upstairs to see what the commotion was about. I looked at him, angry and sheepish, and he bit back a smile and shook his head.

The door stayed that way for a few days before my dad helped me reinstall it properly. The grease marks, however, stayed on for years as a funny reminder of the lesson.

Years later, my parents would sell our house and move far away to a place without a garage. I always wondered how hard that would be for my dad, without his space, without his quiet.

But sometimes spaces leave a mark on you, just as you can leave a mark on them. My grease-splotched walls have long been cleaned and painted—who knows, maybe that door has been replaced altogether. But, the call for quiet and patience in anger sits with me, just as the call for tranquility and collectedness sits with my dad, no matter which room he’s in.