My father had a saying that he used frequently: “Good enough”.  This he applied to everything from a concrete repair to a homemade hockey stick.  The medium my father worked in best was a type of duct tape.  It wasn’t silver like the traditional kind, but rather olive drab, like the 100-mile-an-hour tape used during World War II to patch bullet holes in B-17 bombers.  You could find my father’s handiwork all over the yard, from the arms on the aluminum lawn chairs to holes in the aluminum siding.  He even taped up some of my cracked concrete-filled plastic weights.  No defect was immune from his sticky green remedy.

“Shoemaker”

His nephew was a talented machinist who valued precision.  He took great pride in everything that he made.  You could pick out his work just by looking at it.  He had a nickname for my father: “Shoemaker”.  This apparently was meant as a dig to his half-assed attempts at repair and construction, as in “what shoemaker poured this patio?”, or “don’t hire a shoemaker to do a carpenter’s job”.  My father, unmoved, would respond with his favorite phrase: “Good enough.”

Memories of the shoemaker

Fast forward about 30 years.  I have a daily reminder of my father’s good deeds, every time that I use my eclectic collection of weights.  You see, I still have some of the concrete-filled plastic weights from my teenage years.  Some of them bear the mark of the shoemaker: a piece of the green adhesive tape that holds them together.  Why do I still keep them?  Certainly not as a memento of the past.  I have plenty of things that were left to me by my father.  The weights still weigh the same, and I still have to lift them.  So they still have utility.  They still have a practical value, ugly as they are.

Good enough is cheaper than perfect

When I think back to my father’s shoddy repairs, I can see that he was just being frugal.  To him, perfect was the enemy of good enough.  He was satisfied with good enough; he didn’t expect things to be perfect.  Good enough is also cheaper in the long run than perfect.  A taped-up lawn chair did the same job as a brand-spanking new one.  Who cares if it looks like hell?  He didn’t give a crap what people thought.  If they didn’t like the way it looked, that was their problem.  He never tried to keep up with the Joneses.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree…

This past week, I broke the plastic arm on the vacuum attachment for my swimming pool.  It was early in the morning, and Leslie’s wasn’t open.  The pool needed a cleaning, so I had to think outside the box.  Then it occurred to me: DUCT TAPE! My father’s ancient remedy for all things broken.  I broke out the green sticky stuff, and wrapped enough around the broken pieces to facilitate vacuuming.  I can report that my shoddy, shoemaker-inspired repair has held up for three days now.  It didn’t cost me a dime.  Frugality in practice.

Maybe the old man had it right all along.

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