“Man, I got to make a real brass candleholder,” my brother said, plunging the little craft high into the air. “Isn’t it cool?”
It was tiny. If a mouse cared a lick about candlelight, he would be hard-pressed to put this puny holder to work.
“Wait, is that from the place where you pay $5 to turn a candlestick yourself?” I said. “You actually spent money on that? Hahahaha! We saw that and thought only suckers would go in there.”
We were in Michigan to see my younger sister in the Michigan Shakespeare festival. My daughter had traveled with me, and on this morning, we had been talked into going to visit nearby Greenfield Village, created by Henry Ford in the late 1920s as a re-created town to show off working technology from sawmills to living farms. It was my brother’s idea, and he had already sold my father on it.
Now he just needed two more suckers.
So we went. And it was pretty fantastic, I have to admit. An old steam train running around the edge of the 80-acre village. Craftsmen and women showing you how to blow glass and, apparently, turn candlesticks. Smooth-running Model Ts that tour you around the little town. Historic houses and buildings moved there to create an old timey main street, agricultural lots and other districts.
Pretty cool!
But my daughter’s and my idea of “pretty cool” diverges sharply from my brother’s, and head to opposite ends of the spectrum. We like to walk, stroll, take in sights and avoid anything with too many words. We walk up to park reenactors to ask important questions like, “So, what time does the popcorn machine strike up?”
My brother – a master tinkerer, hobbyist, professional ornamental blacksmith and connoisseur of all things expensive, technical and unimaginably boring – likes to charge up to the engineer on the train and ask obscure questions like, “So, are you using bituminous coal in the furnace?”
We didn’t spend a lot of time together at the village and quickly went our separate ways. My dad and brother explored the Craftworks village with its machine shops and sawmills, while we took a hard left, waved “see ya!” and headed in search of horses and pigs and cotton candy.
My brother stared in disbelief. “Where are you going?!? The good stuff with all the machines and detailed history is over here!”
“This was my life as a kid,” I told my daughter. Summer trips traipsing around the West with my dad and brother. Or ghost towns in California or mines in Colorado. My younger brother could spot an educational tourist trap like a vulture smells dead varmint. If it had rusting industrial machinery or old world craftsmanship, we had to go. I wandered along, ignoring his history lessons while admiring trees, mountains and hoping that a giant boulder might fall on my head.
Greenfield Village had transported me back in time – both to the 1920s … and to my 1980s childhood.
We bumped into my dad and brother as they emerged from the machine shop with the candlestick. My father said my brother – 44-years-young – actually did a Snoopy dance after creating it.
“Yep, that’s cool,” I said. “So … we’re going to go see the covered bridge that looks like it was in the movie, ‘Beetlejuice.’”
Teeth actually fell out of my brother’s mouth. “You’re … you’re going to see WHAT?!?” he said as a vein in his forehead started to bulge. I worried he might be having a stroke.
For him, this just didn’t compute. Here we were surrounded by history and innovation and pieces of mechanical genius, and the two of us wanted to walk across a bridge that wasn’t even IN a movie!
“I just don’t understand you,” he finally said.
And on that we certainly agreed. Then father and daughter trekked off in search of our “cool” bridge, and of course, the popcorn machine.