Week 50 – You Wouldn’t Believe It

 

Whether you believe what I’m going to tell you is irrelevant.  If you were telling me the same story, I’d probably find it pretty far-fetched.  No matter, it happened. Although I’m hesitant to share it with you because you may think I’m crazy, it’s the only story I’ve got that fits into this category. So, get out your Ouija board and hang on…

As a young girl, I always told my Grandmother Powers about dreams I’d had.  Not bad dreams, just dreams about random things and people.  She told me that she dreamt all night every night, and almost always remembered them.  The older I became, the more dreams I had.  Now it’s an every night occurrence and I almost always remember them.

Way back last century (I find that so funny to be able to say), in 1996, I moved back to Oklahoma City to care for my parents who were getting on up in years.  We purchased a duplex together where I lived on one side and moved my parents in on the other.  I could cook meals and walk out my back door across the lawn to their back door.  We had an intercom system so if they needed anything, day or night, I was readily available. It was the perfect set up. Sadly, my dad passed away in April of 1998.  It was then that I moved my mother in with me, as she needed full-time care. 

My dad was a tinker.  He could fix anything.  He saved every bit of wire, hardware, scrap of metal and wood, because one day, he would need it to put something back together. He re-used nails that were taken out of something he’d built. Even if they were a little crooked, he’d just straighten them, and they’d be just fine. There was nothing mechanical on a vehicle that could evade his masterful knowhow. When my mother totaled her 1968 Galaxie 500, my dad bought it from the insurance company for $100 and rebuilt it in the side yard at our house, using a 1969 LTD grill. I’ve watched him take non-working toasters, sewing machines, and major appliances apart, find the problem, rig up some of the odds and ends from his garage, and put it back together to last another generation.  I loved hanging out in his garage from the time I could walk.  He let me help him with just about everything except for that which might possibly cause me to lose a limb or end my life (that would have really made my mom mad).  His workbench was pox marked with holes from nails that I had driven into it with my own hammer and pried back out.  One of my favorite “jobs” as his assistant, was cleaning car parts with gasoline and my bare hands.  Gloves?  What are gloves?  Two of my favorite smells still today are gasoline and new tires.  The dirtier and greasier I was, the happier (and that DID really make my mom mad).  I’m pretty sure my dad developed his tinkering skills from his grandfather, David Williamson Patton. Great-grandpa Patton was a machinist for the railroad and had fashioned all sorts of parts related to his job. His son, William (my great-uncle Bill), also learned his skills in the same way. In 1921, he patented a Truss Fixture that he had designed. While I have absolutely no idea what its function was, it most certainly had the stamp of approval of his dad.

The duplex I shared with my parents was spacious and built on a large corner lot where one side faced south, the other faced west.  It had been built in 1974, with all the amenities of the time.  One feature was a built-in humidifier as part of the central HVAC system.  I religiously changed the filter in the unit and did the regular maintenance, but the humidifier didn’t work. My mother had a dry cough for most of her later years. After she moved in with me, I got the notion to see if I couldn’t bring the humidifier back to life to perhaps ease the tickle in her throat.

Being my father’s daughter, I detached the humidifier from the HVAC unit and spread all the parts on the garage floor.  I made notes of what was attached to what and took photos to ensure my notes made sense.  My dad wouldn’t have needed to do this.  By the second day I had even found an owner’s manual online that showed all the parts and how they fit together.  Using the troubleshooting guide, I checked for every single thing that was listed.  For the better part of the weekend, I went over each piece, looking for damage, or anything else that just didn’t look right that might be the cause of its inability to function.  Nothing worked.  I threw up my hands and put it back together as I had found it. Never in my life had I ever witnessed my dad giving up on anything. I may be my father’s daughter, but I was terribly frustrated.

I went on about my day-to-day life, but the humidifier kept lurking in the back of my mind.  On several occasions I went out to the garage to look at the unit.  Running through the troubleshooting guide, I kept hoping that the lightbulb would go off in my head and I could figure out what the malfunction was.  After several days, I finally decided to raise the white flag. I was apparently no match for this darn humidifier.

Several nights later, my dad came to visit me…

I had had dreams about my dad often since his death.  In them, he was always there, but I don’t recall ever having any communication with him.  He would be smiling, leaning back in his easy chair, driving down the highway, sitting in the yard watering the lawn with the garden hose.  Just about any random situation that he would have likely been in had he still been among the living.  This night was different.  In my dream, my garage door was open, and my dad had walked around the full yard from his side of the duplex to mine. It was quite a distance for someone suffering from C.O.P.D. but the first thing I noticed was that he wasn’t out of breath.  I was sitting on the garage floor with all the parts from the humidifier surrounding me.  He leaned in to take a look. There was no greeting, he just began asking if I’d tried this or that.  My response was always yes.  Finally, he picked up a part and handed it to me.  He said, “You need a new sensor relay. Now, fix it.” Whether he walked out the way he came, or just disappeared into a vapor, I cannot say, because I awoke, sitting bolt upright in bed.

I immediately went to the Owner’s Manual to see if the part my dad had shown me was actually there, or if it had just been a figment of my imagination.  It was!  I ordered the sensor relay, dismantled the humidifier once again and waited for the part to arrive.  A few days later, I replaced the sensor, put everything back together and guess what?!?  The humidifier may have won the initial battle, but with the help of my dad, it lost the war.  It worked!

I think most everyone has had some sort of episode where powers outside the realm of normalcy manage to infiltrate our lives in a bizarre or strange way.  In most cases, unlike me, they never mention it to keep from appearing to be nuts.  While it’s easy to think that I had given so much thought to the humidifier that I had figured out the issue in my subconscious, you’ll never convince me that my dad wasn’t the one who told me how to do it.  My dad has been gone twenty-five years already, and as the years go by, he appears in my dreams less and less.  I can almost guarantee, however, that if I were faced with a similar situation like that darned humidifier, he’d come back for a chat.