Now, there's good stuff!

Joyce's father was a plumber and heating contractor, and her earliest memory of Christmas was that her father built her a little stool that he would take along on jobs for her to sit on while he worked,--so she could learn. She was very good with tools.
After he died, they tried for three years to clean out his basement, and finally gave up. Brother Jim just adopted the stuff.

Along these lines, there were two striking differences between Paris and the US when we first came here 20 years ago.

First, here people could repair very little, and in fact, to do so was---a bit revealing, in a negative way. I could not believe that people would call a specialist to fix a stuck window. In Ohio, such skills were then almost universal. I think it was more a Paris thing than a French thing.

Second, we saw right away much knowledge about how to live comfortably and well- within an economy of scarcity.
Such knowledge existed in the US too- but was washed away by the consumer culture. Before my eyes.

I hate to own things I can't fix.

"There is mysterious music in democracy, when people decide to believe in themselves." ---Bill Greider, The Nation.