The Last of Those Who Know How?

We all go through life differently. That much I know from being around this long. I have known people who could hardly use a screwdriver. I have also known some who could do almost anything with nothing. Human society is trending towards those who might not even recognize a screwdriver unless their smartphone can show them a picture.
Last summer finally convinced me that most people would rather have food out of a grocery store than a garden. That comes after many years of giving away produce from our garden. Giving away produce is not just picking it from the garden and handing it over to someone.
Often you have to clean it up, sort it, wash it multiple times and sometimes even prepare for the table. You have to make it look like it came from the produce aisle. There are not many people I could tell, “Just go cut whatever head of lettuce you want.”
There are even fewer people you hand over a plot of land and have them successfully plant a garden and harvest food from it. In a little over a hundred years, most of the people in the country have gone from living close to the land to living in the city or the suburbs and divorced from everything but their yard.
Of course it is not just gardening. There are plenty of things that people used to do for themselves that they cannot or choose not to for themselves. There are a lot of professionals out there who make a living filling in the gaps.
At a certain age there are things that you are better off not doing. Just before I turned seventy, I quit using the push mower to mow my yard. It was a two-mile walk and a couple of hours of hard work in the coastal heat. We hired someone to do it but I continued to do some of the fussy mowing. I would probably still be doing that if we had not moved.
I am one of those people who went back to land after college. I did not become a back to the land hippie, I became a farmer or actually a cattleman with two hundred head of Angus. During the decade after college I learned everything from doing copper sweat joints, making cabinets, welding and wiring a house to building barns and growing all the food we needed. We had a milk cow, chickens, and even pigs once. I know where and how meat gets from the pasture to the table. In 1972, two of us killed a steer and hung it in our root cellar with the salt pork from our pig while we cut the steer up by hand meatsaw. It was a lot of work. We went with the butcher the next time.
I have managed to build a few things over the last years including the desk in my office. I know there are still people out there who build things with their hands but I also know their number is shrinking. When we moved in 2012, I had to pay someone to take my radial arm saw.
A lot of the things you learn long the way lose their significance. Very few people probably even remember what a distributor did much less how to make sure it is set to specifications. Points/distributors are no longer in cars. A car today is much more likely to have a computer problem than something feeding electricity to the spark plugs.
Even with computers, a lot of what I have learned is worthless today even though it was critical knowledge at the time. I still remember how to make an Apple III work. That has to be high on the list of useless things to know.
There are thousands of people who know how do things who had different life paths than me. Each one of those people picked up unique skills that may or may not be relevant today. There are a lot of stories there worth telling- maybe a new Foxfire series. I would read it.
As people recede further and further into their cocoons insulated from the real world by today’s service economy, those of us that remember how to do all those things can often no longer do them ourselves so it is good the service economy is there. Maybe I will hang on long enough to remind some of the more able people what they could do if they would.