I SUFFER from a couple of forms of inherited mental illness that have been passed along on both sides of my family for generations. We get the idea that we can do things that a moment’s reflection ought to tell us we cannot, and we are easily sidetracked.
    To give you just one example: once, when I was about twelve, I got the idea that I could build a tape recorder. I had come into possession of a recorded tape, but I had no means of playing it and didn’t have enough money to buy a tape recorder, so I decided to build one.
    Not only did I suppose that I could build a tape recorder, but I expected to be able to build it out of common household junk. If that seems unlikely to you, then you have never come across a copy of Impractical Craftsman magazine. I think it is safe to say that this magazine has been responsible for more wasted hours of labor in the basement workshops of America than any other single cause.
    I walked to the drug store to get the latest issue. It had just arrived, but the stock boy hadn’t put it on the rack yet. Men with nothing better to do were lined up at the coffee counter, waiting, staring into their cups with the empty eyes of the desperately addicted. I took a stool at the end of the line. When the stock boy emerged from the stockroom with a bundle of magazines in his hands, the men rose and followed him. So did I.
    “All right, all right, stand back,” the boy said. He removed the last few dog-eared copies of last month’s issue and began, slowly, putting this month’s in its place.
    The cover offered to show one how to “Build a Photo Enlarger from War Surplus Bomb Sight!”
    I wasn’t going to be sidetracked by that. I had already tried to go into the photography business, and once was enough. From a company that advertised in Impractical Craftsman, I had ordered a Deluxe Developing Kit and E-Z Darkroom Instructions. To give myself something to do while I was enduring the pain of waiting for the kit to arrive, and to recover its cost, I advertised myself as an expert in photographic services. I had a Little Giant printing set from another enthusiasm, another ad. With it, I printed some flyers, and I distributed them throughout the neighborhood.
    When the kit and instructions arrived, I set up a basement darkroom (omitted here are details concerning additional costs for materials not supplied in the kit and the expenditure of considerable labor, the need for which was never mentioned or even implied in the advertisement, unless I somehow misunderstood the meaning of “E-Z”) and picked up a roll of film from my first customer, Mrs. Jerrold.
    I’m sure you have already guessed the outcome. I worked on her pictures for an afternoon, and then I gave up. I put the results, such as they were, into an envelope, walked to Mrs. Jerrold’s house, and knocked on her back door.
    “I have your pictures,” I said when she opened it.
    “Oh, good!” she said. “I can’t wait to see them. There should be some nice shots from our vacation.”
    “Yeah, there probably were,” I said.
    “‘Were’?”
    “Not all of them came out.”
    “Oh.”
    “A couple of them came out.”
    A couple?”
    “And some of them came out partway.”
    “Oh.”
    “There was a really good one of you in a bathing suit,” I said with genuine enthusiasm.
    “‘Was’?”
    “Yeah. I was trying to get it just perfect, but at first it was sort of too light, and then it was still too light, and then it was a little too dark, and then it was black.”
    “Oh,” she said. I could see her disappointment in the furrows that formed on her forehead and the way she pouted her lips. For a moment I thought she might cry.
    “It’s all my fault,” I said.
    “Don’t be silly,” she said, tousling my hair and trying to assume the air of a woman who considers the self-esteem of an adolescent boy who has a crush on her far more important than mementoes of the only family vacation she will take all year. “I’m a terrible photographer. Most of my pictures don’t come out. I’m sure you did the best you could, the best anybody could, and besides, everybody makes mistakes.”
    “Yeah,” I said.
    “How much do I owe you?”
    “Oh—no charge.”
    “I must owe you something.”
    “No, no. We only charge if the whole roll comes out. That’s our policy.”
    I closed up shop. From then on, I entrusted all my developing-and-printing work to Himmelfarb’s photography shop, in the heart of downtown Babbington.
    The equipment remained in the basement, but it began a shuffle toward the farthest corner. All the equipment abandoned in the cellar—the gear for my mother’s failed projects, my father’s failed projects, and my failed projects—shuffled miserably, humiliated, into the corners, where it accreted in heaps.
    There were no plans for a tape recorder in Impractical Craftsman or the other do-it-yourself magazines. For a moment I was tempted by the idea of building the enlarger, since I knew that we had a surplus bomb sight in the cellar left over from my father’s attempt to build a theodolite and make big money in surveying, but Cellar Scientist magazine had plans for a flying-saucer detector, and I decided to build that instead.