One of my first memories of my father showing an emotional vulnerability, also coincides with one of the first memories I have of using my now engineering skill sets. My father was often puttering around the shed/yard/house, and I would always be there either beside him or behind him.

He was an aircraft maintenance engineer and always took great care of his tools, despite the apparent mess that the garage may have become due to an unwillingness to discard any old treasures.

I remember one time stripping a nut and spanner using an imperial tool rather than a metric one. When my father saw it he was shocked at my laziness to get the right tool and said matter of factly if you were working for me right now you would be fired.

But with this said I always wanted to help out, so he would give me a hammer and two planks of wood, and he asked me to hammer in a bunch of nails and to keep going until I could do it consistently in one hit. Once I was done I would pull out the nails and go again until perfection.

Of course, to go along with my new hammer and nails I needed a tool box, so my father lent me a small wooded tool box that he had inherited from his father that I never got to meet. The tool box wasn’t well crafted in the traditional sense, I don’t think many carpenters would respect its wood work, but it had a lot of character. It was essentially several pieces of old scrap wood held intricately together by nails with two hinges.

I was told the significance of this tool box, I was told to respect it and cherish it, but over time, as I grew to know it more, I felt more confident that I could pull it apart and rebuild it. And if I couldn’t my Father certainly could.

Eventually one day I pulled it apart, my father found me in the process and was devastated, he couldn’t believe what I had done. I couldn’t put it back together, it was too intricate of a puzzle for me, and the wood released of its binds had most likely swollen.

That is my first failure I remember.