Once Was Open

At the foot of our mountain sits an abandoned auto repair garage. I pass it twice daily on my commute.

Gary owned and ran the place. He was a lean, friendly fellow with an open face and direct manner. Shortly after we bought our place years ago, I had need of a mechanic and decided to give Gary’s place a try. It was a good decision. He was honest right down to the ground, a master mechanic, and remarkably fair. He once kept my old pickup truck an entire day, ran it up and down the mountain roads, crawled all over and under it, in an attempt to locate the source of some smoke I’d seen one morning. When I went to pick up my truck, he didn’t charge me a dime. “Didn’t find anything, didn’t fix anything. You don’t owe me a thing.” He once stopped what he was doing (I think it was a transmission situation) to plug a leak in one of my tires when I swung into his parking lot on a busy morning. Several times he installed parts for me that I bought somewhere else, and his labor rates were fairer than fair.

Then the cancer came back.

Gary had suffered pancreatic cancer some years before I met him, and the treatment apparently drove the disease into remission. But one day a few years ago when I stopped to get my wife’s car inspected, Gary wasn’t there to greet me. One of the other mechanics said, in his taciturn mountain manner, “He ain’t feelin’ too good these days.” Later that day, my nearest neighbor, a good source of local knowledge and gossip, told me that Gary’s cancer had returned and that he was in rapid decline. Not long after that, I saw the news of Gary’s death in the newspaper.

He had started the garage as a young man and had built it into a thriving local business. His reputation for honesty and skill was common knowledge in the area. His wife worked with him as bookkeeper and receptionist, and she was every bit as pleasant as Gary was.

A few months after Gary’s death, some local guy bought the garage and started it up under a new name. I toyed with the idea of giving him some business, but every time I drove past the garage, I was put off by the sloppy appearance of the place and of the staff — Gary had always dressed in a tidy set of khakis — and by the meth-head-looking hangers-out who always seemed to be in the parking lot. That enterprise lasted less than a year, and was shuttered.

And now when I drive past Gary’s old garage twice a day, I see a silent shell of what was once a living part of the little community. He put his entire life into the garage, and it served him and the town well. And now he’s gone, and frankly, it’s as if he never existed. Ozymandias with grease under his nails. The kudzu and the snakes and the spiders are taking over the structure where Gary once brought broken vehicles back to life. His labors continued right up to the end, even as his own body’s  check engine light was starting to glow. All of that work, all of those years, and where are they?

No, I don’t look on this man and his work and his empty garage with despair. I look on it with the certainty that I will come to the same end. I have never accomplished anything on the scale of this humble mechanic, so I know my own presence will be overgrown and forgotten much more rapidly than Gary’s. But this is good and natural. Last year’s lush flowers are now deep down in the earth, and this is not a sad thing. They served their purpose, and are still serving their purpose.

The morning air is sweet, and the sky above is as pretty as a watercolor by a master. There is peace to be found in seeing these things, watching them patiently, listening to what they say to me. My reflections are hardly original, certainly not of lasting importance. But they are mine, and they matter to me during this hour that I am here, here beneath the sun’s relentless path.

~ S.K. Orr