The Struggle to Be Known

When I was a teenager, my dad always had a project waiting for me. These weren’t just chores, at least not in his mind — they were proving grounds, small tests meant to harden me into the kind of man he thought I ought to be. The problem was, I could never ascertain exactly who that man was.

Dad talked a lot about the Marines, more about boot camp than anything else. His stories were part warning, part insult. “You’ll never make it,” he’d tell me, shaking his head with a deep frown. To me, they were horror stories, but to him they were gospel. I’d mumble under my breath that I had no intention of ever stepping foot in boot camp, but still, talk of a military draft kept echoing from the television news each night, enough to make me uneasy.

I understand now what I couldn’t then. My father wanted me to be strong, self-reliant, someone who could wrestle with the world instead of shrinking from it. His training meant tossing me out into the open air, slapping tools in my hands, and waking me at dawn with a barked list of tasks.

One of those mornings began with my sheets ripped clean away in a single jerk, with dad looming like a drill sergeant over my bed. That day’s mission: remove the oil pan from the tractor, clean it, have it ready to fill with fresh oil before he returned from work.

Now, this tractor was no ordinary piece of machinery. It was a relic even then — others would eventually call it antique. Years after dad was gone, strangers came knocking at our door hoping to buy it, collectors from an agricultural museum who could name its make and year from a hundred yards away. Back then, though, it was just the beast that cultivated our sprawling summer vegetable garden.

So I marched out to the shed and got to work. I’d been changing the oil in our cars for years — another of Dad’s lessons in manhood. According to him, no real man would ever pay someone else to do an oil change!

I crawled under the tractor, squinting at the dark metal underside, running my fingers around the bottom of metal undercarriage and found what I assumed was the oil pan. A wide belly of steel, bolted tight all around. I went to work. It took every ounce of my 97-pound teenage strength to loosen those bolts. Sweat soaked through my T-shirt as I wrestled each one free, but eventually, I lowered the pan to the ground. For just a moment, pride bloomed in me. Against the odds, I had done it.

When Dad came home, I stood ready for his inspection. “Here’s the pan,” I said, pointing like a soldier presenting the spoils of war. “It’s ready to go back on.”

He studied the thoroughly cleaned pan on the ground. Then he bent over and peered under the tractor. A long silence stretched out, broken only by his deep sigh.

“That’s the transmission pan,” he said shaking his head. He slowly pulling a paper towel from his pocket and wiped his face. “We’ll never get that thing back on without it leaking. You’ve ruined that gasket. It’s gonna leak from now on.”

And with that, he walked back toward the house to eat supper. He never mentioned it again and neither did I.

The next morning, I reattached the pan as carefully as I could, bolt by stubborn bolt, holding that fragile gasket in place all the while, and praying I hadn’t ruined it. And here’s the twist. Dad used that tractor for another decade without a single transmission leak. It never failed, not once.

Not all of my assigned tasks ended so well. Some left me with bruises on my pride and deeper doubts about myself. For a boy already struggling with an inferiority complex, those failures weighed heavy. Yet, somewhere in the struggle, self-reliance began to take root. Even now, when a faucet drips or a light flickers, I don’t call a repairman. I reach for the toolbox.

Looking back, I see my father more clearly. He was a man shaped by his era, a world where boys marched off to war, and survival meant being self-reliant and having the curiosity to jump into the middle of a problem and find a solution. He wasn’t perfect. Neither am I. But in his own way, he was trying to pass on the only inheritance he knew … resilience.

And isn’t it funny? These days, hardly anyone changes their own oil. But I could, if I wanted. And if a transmission ever needs pulling apart — I could probably do that too.