The garage will always be a special place of memory. It doesn’t matter whether it is my current garage, or some future garage should we move. I carry my garage life with me wherever we might go.
I made the sign in the 1980s. It invokes the memory of working in the garage with our child. The sign went with us to Indiana, and returned to Big Grove Township. It resonates with master carpenter Norm Abram’s Public Broadcasting Service program The New Yankee Workshop, and with Bob Vila’s This Old House. I’m reasonably sure, that during those years, there were many people like us working in the garage, learning about how household things worked, were built, and could be designed. For my generation, and for many millennials as well, this was a core memory.
The other garage memory dating from the 1980s was listening to programs on Iowa Public Radio. The organization had actual money to afford a wide variety of nationally syndicated programs. Mountain Stage was a live music program produced by West Virginia Public Radio in Charleston beginning in 1983. It was hosted by Larry Groce, its artistic director. It still exists with a new host, yet the cache was listening to it live on the radio in the garage. Those days are gone.
There was also A Prairie Home Companion which was just that for so many years. I remember recording the “last show” on June 13, 1987 while our child and I took a walk around the neighborhood. When we returned, the program had run overtime and my cassette tape ran out before recording it all. Luckily I found a rebroadcast the following day and was able to capture the rest. I was a faithful listener right down to Keillor’s actual end in July 2016. Not every weekend like a cult member, but when it was convenient while working in the garage or kitchen. Nothing quite framed my life as that time with the radio turned on.
Last week, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced they were closing the operation down after the president clawed back its funding. Better to shutter than to leave an opportunity for the president to use it for his own purposes, they thought. While local stations in Iowa persist in the wake of funding cuts, many stations in other parts of the country don’t appear to be making it in post-Trump world. That’s unfortunate.
It is curious I remember the radio but not the hundreds of projects on which I worked in our garage. The workbench I made in Indiana was a good one that I still use. I recently posted about the work table I made from wood scraps. Since finishing that project, it has been in constant use. I also made a wall of storage which is also in constant use. I guess that’s the difference. When you use something you made every day, it is just there in the present and not in memories.
These days I tune the radio to a country station in Cedar Rapids in the garage, or to BBC news simulcasts on public radio. It’s not the same as I remember from coming up as a family, using the garage to make and fix things. I can carry the memories with me. They help me know who I am.
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