Lynn, of course, really saw this as a gift as he strewed warped pine boards, screws, drills, screwdrivers, and hammers over the lawn in front of the park offices. He held the items up one by one, asking if we knew what they were. I, unsurprisingly, did not know the name of an unwieldy-looking piece of equipment with a round blade and terrifying-looking curved teeth. “It’s a circular saw,” Tonya called out gleefully. Well, I couldn’t judge Tonya for knowing this. My idea of a good time used to be similarly nerdy, involving peering into a telescope for an embarrassingly long time. Lynn passed out screws to each of us so we could feel them, hold their weight in our hand, he said. “There’s not going to be a test, but I’d like you to familiarize yourself with the different sorts of screws.” The drywall ones were thin and had flat heads, larger than the others. There was a wood screw, a deck screw, and what he called a self-countersinking screw. Whatever that was, I probably needed it.
