After a good seven hours at the mechanic’s, it is hard to believe that you are anything else other than an adult – and a rather unfortunate one, at that.
For it was something so dull that only someone who had no other choice would do so. And adults can tell you all about “having no other choices”.
But of course, I had it easier. I had Pratchett, and for a good five hours I was having too much fun throwing chocolate eggs at grey-shaped figures with Death’s granddaughter Susan Sto Helit and confusing watchmen to open the doors to the crime scene with journalist William de Worde. I only return momentarily to the physical world of bolts and nuts and the faint smell of gasoline when my mechanic barge in to grab auto-ish stuff, and when my bladder threatened to pull an embarrassing episode.
But as adult as going to the mechanic’s on your own can be, it is also highly infantile – in a big, bad, baffling world of cars, you just wish there is someone you absolutely trust.
Uncle Fatt is that person for my family. He and my dad go way back, when my dad put his first air-conditioned car, a Proton Wira, into the hands of this jovial, pink-faced foreman more than 10 years ago. My dad is highly paranoid and impossibly fussy, but with Uncle Fatt he never looked back. Since then, every car in the family would have to be looked over by this man who has watched me and my sister grow up.
It was a Relationship, honoured by both Time and Men, and maintained by my dad’s insistence that this and that should be done, and Uncle Fatt’s firmness that this and that should not.
As ass-flattening as the seven-hour wait at Uncle Fatt’s workshop can be, I did enjoy watching the foremen bustled back and forth. There was something in the way they tug and fiddle at the mechanics, wearing their hearts on their sleeves and cussing without a care. There was something… comforting about the grime under their fingernails and soot on their tattered jeans.
These are the men earning an honest day’s pay with sweat and strength and a whole lot of skill. These are the men who may not be at home with the snazziest in-car entertainment or performance parts, but throw them a beat-up piece of junk and they can whip up a roaring machine again.
These guys are sawbones, not cosmetic surgeons.
They get the job done, which is more than what can be said for jobs these days.
2 comments:
I think you gave a very touching and accurate description of Uncle Ah Fatt lor.I think this is the BEST article by you that i have ever read. To me this is high quality stuff lor. Something about the way you wrote about him touched me lor. Eh but his face was black mah where got pink?
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