A New Chapter: The Man Who Fixed Everything
The Man Who Fixed Everything
My father was a lead mechanic for Western Airlines . He could fix anything — engines, carburetors, the kind of problems that made other men shrug. He was the guy people called when something wouldn’t run. At home, same thing. A broken hinge, a leaky pipe, a noise in the wall — he’d have it quiet by dinner. He even designed and built our family’s summer home on Mason Lake with his own hands.
He died when I was fifteen. Skin cancer took him. No goodbye, just gone.
I don’t have a lot of words for what that does to a kid. You find out fast that the world doesn’t slow down to let you grieve. School keeps going. Bills don’t pause. And your mother — who just lost her husband — still has to get up in the morning.
Mine did more than get up. She owned two hair salons and ran them with the kind of quiet toughness that I didn’t fully appreciate until I was older. She took the wheel and never missed a step. Three kids, two businesses, one income. She never made it feel like a crisis. She made it feel like Tuesday.
My sister went on to retire as a regional manager for a large corporation. My brother built a career as an actor in Hollywood. I played a short stint in the NFL before a career-ending injury redirected me — and then I built a large real estate and mortgage company from scratch, followed by a successful bootcamp and CrossFit-style gym.
We all found our way.
I think about my father sometimes when things get hard. He was the kind of man who didn’t talk much about what things meant — he just fixed them. He showed up. He put his hands on the problem and worked until it was solved.
I’ve tried to live that way. Some days I do it better than others. But I know where I got it from.
There’s a version of grief that hollows a person out. And then there’s the kind that leaves something behind — a standard, a posture, a way of moving through the world that was handed to you before you were old enough to know you were receiving it.
I got lucky that way. My father left early, but he left something.
I’m still carrying it.
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