A Mechanic’s Dictionary: A Case for Forgetting
Forgetting reveals what matters most
This piece comes with its own soundtrack A Mechanic’s Soundtrack. Not because it needs one, but because I like the idea of you reading this to music, like some kind of literary karaoke.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
This dictionary began in a garage floating above Tanjungpinang harbor, where each day’s tide lifted us closer to the sky before setting us back down. Between engines and tools, a father and son pieced together the meaning of forgetting. The entries that follow are not arranged by alphabet but by time, as they had to be lived before they could be understood.
Battery-Powered Radio (n.)
/băt′ə-rē-pou-ərd rā′dē-ō/
Device for transmitting sound and storing joy.
Usage:
The radio crackles to life: “One Way Chicken!” my father bellows from beneath a boat engine, the words dancing off decades-old tools that line our walls. It’s the only English phrase he knows, borrowed from the Eruption song.
His eyes twinkle with mischief as he emerges, wielding a wrench like a microphone. He believes it’s about a chicken, and I believe him. Because when you’re seven, your father’s world makes perfect sense. Even disco songs about poultry.
We flap our arms to the beat of the battery-powered radio, two chickens dancing between fishing boat engines, our laughter drowning out the harbor. His grease-stained hands ruffle my hair as we spin under the flickering fluorescent light, turning our garage into a disco suspended between sea and sky.
Wrench Set (n.)
/rench set/
Collection of calibrated tools that remember their purposes.
Usage:
Chrome vanadium steel, memory-worn. The wrench set moves through father’s hands like a tide through our harbor, each turn as natural as the water below.
From my usual perch on the workbench, legs swinging, I watch him work on the harbor master’s impossible engine, his hands moving like waves: steady, unrelenting, each gesture softening the engine’s resistance.
Other mechanics come with their manuals, pages dogeared and oil-smudged, specifications written down to the millimeter, but father listens to the engine’s whispers: the scrape of misaligned metal, the hiss of escaping air.
“Thia seng”—listen first, he says, and I do. The wrenches groan softly as he loosens, adjusts, and tightens the bolts, each movement guided by the engine’s voice. Finally, it sings to life.
When I ask how he knows, he just smiles. “Books tell you what should happen. Engines tell you what is happening.”
Walkway (n.)
/wawk-wā/
Wooden path connecting garage to shore; passage where tools rattle
Usage:
The walkway shudders beneath us: my new friends’ first glimpse of father—wrench-microphone raised high, hips swaying to “One Way Chicken,” with fishing boat engines roaring as his backup dancers.
The familiar rhythm catches in my feet, but my friends’ snickers freeze me mid-step. I slam our garage door, my face burning hotter than engine oil as their stifled laughter follows me across the planks, tools rattling on their hooks behind us.
Hours later, crossing back alone, I hear the radio still playing, barely audible now. Through the window: his silhouette, dancing alone between engines, his movements smaller, more contained. He’s turned down the volume for my sake.
The boards groan under my weight, their creaks as familiar as my breath.
Phantom Rattle (n.)
/fan-təm rat-əl/
Engine noise that disappears under inspection. Synonyms: Pavlov’s Bell.
Usage:
I’m half out the hatch when I hear it first—a faint, tinny clink that wasn’t there a moment ago. At first, it seems innocent enough. Boats make noise, sure. But after ten rounds of listening and finding nothing, I start to suspect the boat has other plans. It’s training me, Pavlov-style, to doubt my own sanity. I can practically see it twirling an invisible mustache, whispering, Let’s make him question everything he thinks he knows.
I call over my father, but of course, Mr. Pavlov goes silent. “There,” I insist, waving frantically in the general direction of the engine as my father looks at me with the expression of someone who just discovered their child might be unwell.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” he says, leaving me alone with the canine behaviorist. Mr. Pavlov is, of course, just biding his time. He waits until my father’s gone, then strikes again with his training tool of choice: a clink, perfectly calibrated to unravel me.
And so begins my descent. For weeks, I obsess. I log every occurrence: time of day, air temperature, moon phases, even my mood—just in case the clink is petty enough to respond to my emotional state. I check bolts, tighten screws, loosen them again just to feel useful, and still the phantom rattle eludes me.
Then one day I notice my father, head tilted toward his own phantom rattle coming from the harvester engine. A metallic ping, faint but persistent. He doesn’t tighten or loosen anything. He just hums along, the noise folded neatly into the rhythm of his day, like it belongs there.
Pressure Gauge (n.)
/presh-er gāj/
Instrument on the compressor for measuring contained force, both mechanical and emotional. The red zone means danger.
Usage:
He pulls a stack of college and travel brochures from the workbench drawer, his hands trembling just enough to notice. A little shake, like the pages themselves are alive. Colleges in Singapore, bustling streets in Bangkok, temples in Kyoto—all glossy and impossibly clean, like they’d been printed in a world without fingerprints. He spreads them out between us, the tremor making one of the pages flutters slightly. Besides us, the needle on the pressure gauge ticks upward with each dream he lays bare.
“First university,” he says, tapping a picture of some overachieving campus fountain. “Then we go see world together.” His hands are cracked, his nails dark with years of other people’s engines. His left arm—broken in an accident—looks like it belongs to someone else entirely. The forearm doesn’t taper where it should, and every evening, it hangs just a little lower than the right. It’s the kind of thing you won’t notice if you haven’t spent years watching the man.
The needle climbs. Higher. “I want to stay here,” I say. “Work with you in the garage.” He doesn’t look up. Instead, he shuffles the brochures into something that vaguely resembles order. The needle edges toward yellow as he speaks, voice sharp but not loud, “I fix engines so you can fix bigger things. You think I work like this to watch you do the same?”
I storm out before the pressure can break us both, slamming the door behind me. What I want to say—to yell, even—is that I want to stay because watching him break his body for other people’s boats is destroying me. But I can’t. Because if there’s one thing he’d hate more than me staying, it’s knowing that his sacrifice has turned into my burden.
Compressor (n.)
/kəm-pres-ər/
High-pressure vessel that demands attention..
Usage:
They said the compressor’s blast radius just missed his heart. In the hospital, machines beeping replaced radio songs, and tubes snaked where tools should be. The doctor keeps saying how lucky he is to be alive. My mind keeps circling back to the pressure gauge I was supposed to keep an eye on when I stormed out, blind to the needle moving past yellow, my anger drowning out the warning sign.
Through morphine haze, no mention of my mistake. Not a word about how I left the garage, left him to notice the climbing pressure too late. Instead, he says: “Always check the gauge. No matter who worked on it last.” Just that. A lesson written in bandages and beeping monitors, offered like a gift I don’t deserve.
“You think I don’t know?” he whispers. “All these years watching me work, worrying. But this—” he gestures at the tubes, the monitors, himself, “this is why you must go. I break my body so you won’t have to break yours.”
Diagnostic (n.)
/dī-əg-nos-tik/
Systematic examination of mechanical failure.
Usage:
The midnight diagnostic begins: Years of engineering school behind me now, and I find him exactly where I left him—in our garage, tools arranged with mechanic’s precision on his workbench. But something has changed. He holds up a wrench, studies it like a letter from an old friend. “This one,” he says in Hokkien, then in Indonesian, searching for a name that keeps slipping away.
I start to reach for the word, then stop. Watch his fingers trace the wrench’s shape, testing its weight. When the harbor master’s boat sputters in at midnight, father’s hands move through the engine’s maze without hesitation, finding what’s broken, restoring what’s lost.
His fingers remember what his mind forgets—each tool’s purpose written in bone and muscle, like the path to the second drawer where he keeps his dreams.
Travel Brochures (n.)
/trav-əl brō-shurz/
Printed guides to faraway places that slip just out of reach.
Usage:
The workbench drawer hasn’t changed—second from the top, between the metric wrenches and torque charts. Inside, under years of grease and progress: Bangkok streets bright with promise, Kyoto temples rising from glossy pages. First education, father always said, then we’d trace these paths together.
Now when he opens the drawer, his hands pass over the travel brochures like strangers. Sometimes I catch him pausing, touching their worn edges before reaching for his tools. The pages stay sealed with sea air, their ink fading. But from this same workbench, he’s already built me a thousand paths out of the harbor.
Forget (v.)
/fər-get/
To remove from memory or consideration.
Usage:
Somewhere in me lives a version who never left the garage—who learned every tool’s weight and whisper, who knew engines would eventually speak to him like they spoke to his father. Sometimes, in the pre-dawn quiet of my desk, that version rises like tide beneath our stilts, asking what I chose to forget in transit from wrench to keyboard, from engine oil to ink.
I watch my fingers move across keys now, fixing different kinds of engines. Behind me: our garage floating above the water. Ahead: bugs in code, breaks in prose. Between them: the rhythm he gave me, carrying across years like harbor waves.
For my father—who taught me to listen first, and to always trust what remains.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This mechanic’s dictionary, like all well-built engines, owes its rhythm and motion to many hands.
To the Master Mechanics: Endless gratitude to
who stayed from start to finish, shaping every part of this piece with care and precision, ensuring it all fit together.To the Fine-Tuners: My deepest gratitude to
Jennifer Scott whose thoughtful feedback tightened bolts and aligned parts until the engine sang to life.To the Harbor Crew: And to
whose timely wrench nudges kept this project moving forward.To the Blueprint Makers: Thank you to
whose early ideas on sketches the draft of this engine.This dictionary runs because of all of you.
What a fantastically surprising essay, a very unique way and poetic way to impart meaning. I am blown away by this.
This was spectacular. And I did play the music which was a brilliant supplement to the mood of the piece. Thank you for sharing and writing about the mechanics of your bond with your father. Deeply touching, poignant, profound, and nourishing of the heart.