Free Why I'm Like This by Cynthia Kaplan Page A

nights and, who knows, maybe also start a grassroots organization that in five years’ time will make me both financially independent for life and a good person.

jack has a thermos
    N OBODY loves a gadget like my father. Right up there with things that taste good are things that do things—unscrew tops, uncork bottles, inflate rafts, deflate rafts, juice oranges, blend milk shakes, vacuum spills, water lawns, keep tennis balls fresh. Like some kind of one-man Consumer Reports, he has tested the usefulness of several decades’ worth of power tools, barbeques, and exercise equipment, the last in a never-ending quest to get in shape. I remember in the late seventies there was a rope thing that you attached to a doorknob and you put your foot in one end of the rope and your hand in the other and when you pulled with your arm your leg rose up and vice versa. It was simple, really. You just laid there on the floor, watching TV, using your own body parts for resistance. Unfortunately, the doors in our house had warped smaller from the air-conditioning and when you pulled on the rope you also pulled the door open.
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    Most people think of gadgets only as novelty items, clever contrivances that are possibly of more interest than of actual use and which make good jokey gifts at Christmas and Hanukkah. But as far as my father is concerned, any device, large or small, that promises to accomplish a task better than whatever device came before it qualifies as a gadget. Call him a technophile, call him a prophet, call him a sucker. I call him the Gadgeteer.
    Over the years the Gadgeteer has bought untold numbers of flashlights and telephones and popcorn poppers. Inevitably, our family had multiple generations of things—five juicers in ten years representing biannual improvements in juicer technology. We had a camera for every occasion, a small sampling of which included a classic thirty-five-millimeter Nikon, the very first model of the Polaroid camera, purchased on a trip to Florida while they were still unavailable in New York, and a spy-sized Minox. On vacations my mother referred to herself as “Sandy Hold This” because my father would invariably insist that she carry his cameras and binoculars in her purse or slung over her shoulders, an upper-middle-class sherpa.
    Surprisingly, our kitchen and workshop did not boast a full array of Ronco products. That is because you had to mailaway for those. Nothing is worse for my father than waiting for something he has suddenly decided he has to have. Part of the pleasure he gets from making these purchases is the immediate gratification of bringing them home as soon as he has discovered them. The rest of the pleasure is derived from the gadget itself, which is also, by its nature, a source of immediate gratification. You do this and then this happens. If it takes more then ten minutes to accomplish a task, it is not a gadget. Also, if it is not fun to use, it is not a gadget. The washing machine and the dishwasher and the iron are not gadgets. The vacuum cleaner is not a gadget. Or rather, the conventional vacuum cleaner is not a gadget. The nifty, outdoor, suck-up-water-nails-and-industrial-waste vacuum cleaner is a gadget.
    My father gets enormous satisfaction from the knowledge that he is taking care of his family by bringing home a better mousetrap. Many was the Saturday afternoon he returned from an excursion to the hardware store or the electronics store or a store in Westport called Silver’s where pretty much everything they sold with the exception of luggage was a gadget, and presented us with his latest discovery.
    â€œYou’ve got to see this. It works like a dream. It’s much better than that old thing we had. Wait a minute, let me just, wait, I think there are instructions somewhere, okay, this fits in here and this fits like this, there we go. Okay, now try it.”
    Sometimes the latest generation of a gadget had becomemore complicated,