I started to think of our excursions, which usually lasted an entire day, as a practical subject—an extension of my schooling.
D and my mother had come to an agreement: I could be his assistant only after school and during vacations. And no matter what day it was, I had to be home by nine.
But deals never meant much to D, or to my mother, so most days we kept on past the school gate and headed for the highway.
After hearing so much talk about Kramp products, I started using them as a way to comprehend the workings of the world, and that was how, while my classmates wrote poems about trees and the summer sun, I wrote odes to door viewers, pliers, and saws.
I also invented instruments such as the “Adding Machine,” which was a rectangular piece of chipboard equipped with nails and nuts (it was a regular abacus, but I called it that, the “Adding Machine”).
I remember how, at school camp, when we were out looking at the stars, I used the Southern Cross as a reference point and explained to my classmates that the specks that shone so brightly in the distance weren’t stars but three-inch tacks that the Great Carpenter had used to hang the whole sky. Us included.
What I’m trying to say is that every person tries to explain the inner workings of things with whatever is at hand. I, at seven years of age, had reached out my hand, and had grasped a Kramp catalogue.