That was two days ago. Since then, it wouldn't start, not even when I tried the trick with the choke and the throttle. A push-start was out of the question without a second person, so it just sat there in the parking lot of the barracks. Then it occurred to me to call Willenbring to come help me out. He was a smart guy, very mechanical, and good at figuring stuff out. He could probably fix the car permanently. Even patch up the hole in the floorboard. I called the CQ desk. Kelner was probably working the phone.
"Echo company 45th Quartermasters, this is Sergeant Kelner."
"Kelner, you fuckin' retard. It's me."I couldn't resist. Kelner was in fact, a douche of the highest order - I mean, like a fucking five star general. In the background, I heard a small clicking noise, then someone yelling "OH SHIT!". They must've been playing darts.
"Holy shit, when in the god damn are you coming back to duty soldier?" he asked, half distracted.
"I'm still sick. Gastroenteritis man, I'm taking these horse pills the size of your mom's cock."
"Shut the fuck up. What do you want?"His reaction made me grin into the phone.
"Listen, I need you to gimme' Sergeant Willenbring's phone number."
"Willenbring? Why? What, are you two fuckin' eachother?"
"Just gimme' the fuckin' number. He was supposed to help me fix up my car."
"You have a car?"Did I not mention that Kelner was entirely made of grade-A dog shit?
"You are a fucking troglodyte. Do you even know what that is Kelner? Is Maggio with you? Just hand the phone over to him."This is how it went for another two minutes. Until Maggio snatched the phone, asked me what I wanted, and gave me the phone number. When I called Willenbring, he picked up on the first ring. I explained my situation, and he agreed to help.
"What time would be good for you?" he asked.
"Is uh... three o'clock this sunday ok for you?"
Willenbring arrived fifteen minutes early, and as was his usual, remained seated in his car until the agreed-upon meeting time. He walked up to my door holding a black leather doc bag, dressed in navy blue shorts and a white short sleeve button down shirt with grease stains on the front pockets. We shook hands and walked down the stairwell out to the parking lot, where I pointed out the car. He walked over briskly, gradually accelerating toward the car. I took a stutter step to keep up with him.
Willenbring: "Ok, open 'er up. Let's take a look."I popped open the hood, and stepped away to give him plenty of room. He fished out a small pocket flashlight from the doc bag he carried, and swept it back and forth along the various innards. I didn't know what the hell any of it was, but suddenly, he switched off the light, bent down, and asked me --
"When was the last time you changed your spark plugs?"
"I've never changed them - man, I just got this thing!"
"These spark plugs are very dirty. We'll need to clean them."
Then this happened...
He bent down, reached into the doc bag again, this time pulling out a long once-white rag streaked with grease and motor oil. He carefully unfurled it, then laid it out on the asphalt next to the front driver's side wheel. He stood up, bent over into the engine compartment, removed one spark plug, crouched down by his rag, and placed it on top. He repeated this in one-by-one fashion in the slow precise movements of a metronome. On the third go-round, he started talking. He mentioned some crap about an uncle. Uncle Eugene, apparently some kinda' wizard at fixing stuff. Turns out uncle Eugene developed a number of patents with respect to grommets. Fucking grommets. That's how it all started. I'm sure of it now.But how are grommets related to spark plugs?
"I'm glad you asked."He explained how they were related. And how Uncle Eugene was fascinated by electrical devices as a child, and that later as a grown man, had a small mechanical insight which led to a subtle improvement in a well known problem involving the life expectancy of spark plugs. And that this helped him secure his first patent. Just when I thought he was done, he gave an overview of the history of grommets - you know, to bring me up to speed on what might have led Eugene to the insight in the first place.
But wait...
It occurred to him that Eugene’s exquisite craftsmanship might have been the direct result of his having been a direct descendant of Franz Joseph Willenbring, who immigrated to America from Steinfeld, Germany in the very early eighteen hundreds. Ok, he'd have to set aside the historical survey of grommets momentarily to briefly fill me in on Franz’s back story.Franz the cooper
Franz Willenbring was a moderately successful member of the cooper guild in the Netherlands, and was well regarded by many of the tradesmen in the boating industry. But just in case you don't know what a cooper is... a cooper is a specialized carpenter who not only builds barrels for dry goods being transported by boat, he also fixes and rebuilds new barrels as they get damaged in transit from one port to another. A skilled cooper can repair a busted barrel filled with rice, aboard a rocking ship without losing a single grain - which was important to the investors! To really hammer the point home, he reminded me (and you) of the difficulties of transatlantic voyages in the eighteenth century, and that the whole enterprise was very financially risky, not like today at all, with the steel shipping containers made in China. Many many poor sailors drowned at sea transporting God knows what from God knows where.America
Franz used his profession as a cooper to hitch a ride aboard a boat that took him all the way from Holland to Baltimore. And once there, he made the journey to Iowa, where he established himself as a carpenter for a man named Isaac Heying.Back in Steinfeld, Germany
While under the employ of Heying, Franz wrote a letter to his wife back in Steinfeld, indicating his desire for her to pack up their three children and join him in America. Being a dutiful wife, that’s exactly what she did, and was scheduled to arrive in the summer of 1844.Franz => Frank
Poor Franz died one week before his family arrived, but was survived by his wife and three children. His youngest son, Franz Arnold Willenbring junior, proved to be capable with a hammer, and was hired by the very same Mr. Heying. He even changed his name to Frank at the urging of his mother, who sensed that her boys would need to have good American names in order to make something of themselves. It is documented, both in church papers and family letters that Frank worked for Mr. Heying for several years before relocating to the Sauk Rapids in 1855 with sixty four other German immigrants. It was a muddy mosquito-infested river town about twenty miles west of Minneapolis. Once there, Frank would eventually marry, and have a son named Herman, who in turn would have a son named Eugene, who would one day grow up to become an inventor of grommets.Prelude to growing ennui
My father realized that this information - much like Craftsman Tools’ no questions asked return policy - needed time to sink in, so he worked in silence for what seemed to be several minutes. During this time, I began noticing less and less. For instance, I didn't even flinch when I referred to Willenbring as my father just now. But let's move on.He poked and prodded the car in silence for a few minutes longer, cleaned all the spark plugs, replaced them, then offered a terse synopsis of his next step: the alternator. After another shorter silence, he resumed his brief history of grommets. Not being totally clueless to my growing ennui, he graciously gave the executive summary. But his thoughts were on Europe, which of course, wound up opening the door to a long discussion of maritime exploration on the part of the Dutch, English, Spanish and Portuguese empires. Naturally, he assumed these topics were of great interest to me. Which... they were. That was unexpected too.
A vast causal chain of events
"There is a vast causal chain..." he began.That takes us from the French revolution all the way back to Marco Polo... and to the European spice trade with the far east, then more exploration, which led to colonialism, which induced advances in shipbuilding and longer voyages, which necessitated the need for coopers. But hold on just a second man!
The middle ages were a strange time
He felt the overwhelming need to remind me of the little known fact that incestuous marriages of Europe’s nobility led to an aberrantly high probability of hemophilia in their offspring. Which explains how all those kings and queens kept making babies who died unexplainably before even reaching puberty. The talk about hemophilia and incest then brought him (and me, and you) right to the doorstep of the Aleutian Island Rats. You heard correctly.The World behind the World
When he stopped speaking, a few seconds went by. Then a sharp slap -- high up on my back, in between my shoulder blades. And a small tugging behind my eyes above the nasal passages. This gave way to itching, and a feeling like a grain of rice worming its way through my head. Whatever that thing was, I could feel it moving, and becoming active. And it was a familiar feeling - like a muscle I've had my entire life that maybe tensed up once or twice by mistake, similar to accidentally wiggling your ears while wearing sunglasses. The grain of rice was behind my eyes.Just for a moment, I held a dual image of the world -- one in which none of the things in my father’s story ever happened, and one where all of them did. And a small part of me was certain that just a moment earlier, Woodrow Wilson was not the twenty-eighth president of the United States, that there was never a Portuguese empire, and that my father and I were not supposed to be related. And then, that certainty was gone.
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