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Unlike some of my neighbors, who on occasion might be found beneath shade trees in their yards repairing their temporarily disabled automobiles, I'm not much of a car repairman.

Though I inherited many of my father's tools when he died, I did not acquire his mastery over the mysteries of the internal combustion engine. Thus I've always been compelled to obtain what knowledge I could from friends and from the pages of car repair manuals. My dependency on the latter is and always will be a personal disappointment that I'm sure will haunt me all the way to my own hopefully distant grave.

My inadequacy in this area is certainly not for lack of opportunity. Indeed, for as long as he lived my father kept a progression of used cars and rusted old power mowers in operating condition through little more than elbow grease, heroic resolve and resourcefulness. He never owned a new car in his life.

My memories of childhood are filled with images of my father working outside, rain or shine, leaning over the engine of whatever family car he owned at the time. Unfortunately, notably absent in these memories is me. For whatever reason -- my own developing inclination toward laziness, my father's preference for working alone (one quality I did inherit) -- I rarely assisted him in his efforts to keep the family car on the road.

My father and I also missed out on the bonding that often occurs between a father and son when the latter acquires his first car. Other than a motorcycle I briefly rode my senior year of high school, I didn't buy my first motor vehicle -- a used '56 Ford pickup truck -- until I returned to college after four years of military service. And even then, my father and I lived several states apart.

What little time we did share working together on cars was toward the end of his life, after he and my mother moved to Virginia. Often when the vehicle I was driving at the time was giving me trouble, I drove to their home in Christiansburg to seek my father's advice, which he willingly dispensed as we stood in his driveway listening to whatever automotive wheeze, clank or cough concerned me at the time.

As my father's health began to deteriorate near the end of his life, I helped him maintain his car any way I could. Keeping it in drivable condition was important to him until the very end. Indeed, my father was driving this car when he realized he needed to go to the hospital only days before he died, although, because of his weakened condition, he was unable to drive himself. It took my mother several hours to coax him out of the car to go there in an ambulance.

I think my father felt that the mobility provided by his car compensated in some small way for the increasing lack of mobility he was experiencing in his own body.

He died the next day. And to this day I wish I could have parked his car where he might have seen it from his hospital bed.

I think about my father often. I even miss our arguments about politics. (We were on opposite sides of the political spectrum.) I miss him most, though, when I'm standing in the yard working on my pickup truck with one of his wrenches in my hand. I wish he was there to help me. It wouldn't even matter much if we fixed anything. Not really.

Now I have only the car repair manuals to guide me, and the work seems a lot more intimidating than it used to.

Simply leaning over the engine, working with Dad again, would be enough.

Steve Kark teaches writing in the English department at Virginia Tech.