WHEN I FOUND MYSELF BORED, when I didn’t know what to do with myself, when I was a little on edge and needed to find or devise a way to relax, or even when I was just looking for a way to pass the time, I sought inspiration in junk.
    Most of the time, I found it there. The ready availability of intriguing materials is, I think, a spur to creation more often than the arrogance of artists allows us to admit. Fortunately for me, I lived in a family where there was plenty of intriguing stuff around. They regarded any supposedly useless thing with the attitude that its true, deep, hidden, or overlooked utility would be revealed—eventually. This attitude was summed up in the words they muttered when they tossed the thing into a corner of the cellar instead of tossing it into a trash can: “Never can tell—might come in handy someday.” For me, these things already had their uses, since they were fodder for my browsing.
    I have said it before: so much depends on chance. There I was, down in the cellar, poking around in the junk, when I came upon something intriguing: the remains of an old windup record player. Thank goodness, it had no amplifying horn, no pickup arm, no needles. If it had, I would never have seen it as raw material; I would have seen it as a record player, and I would have been blinded by that perception of it. I might have tried to fix it, and I might have filled the afternoon with the effort, but I would probably have failed and emerged from the experience frustrated, diminished by failure, possibly scarred for life. Instead, thanks to the providence that had dictated the evisceration and amputation of certain record-playing essentials, I saw only an engine, just something that would make something else rotate. Its life as a record player was over, but there was a vital spark in the old gadget yet. All I had to do was discover its true, deep, hidden, or overlooked utility.
    The thing as I found it was, essentially, this: a motor driven by a spring that the operator wound with a large crank (see Figure 1). The motor was mounted vertically inside an oak box, with the shaft emerging from the top of the box. Mounted on the end of the shaft, outside the box, was a platter, covered with green felt. The record was supposed to spin on this platter, of course. Mounted farther down the shaft, inside the box, was an intriguing trio of metal balls. The adjustable orbiting balls acted as a governor, a limiting device. Their original purpose had been to allow the operator to keep the platter spinning at the 78 rpm of old shellac records, so the range of adjustment was kept short, just a narrow band at the center of the machine’s possible range of speeds. The original purpose didn’t interest me, though. I wanted to see the machine spin at its extremes, so I began dismantling the governor.

    By removing the adjusting screw entirely, I could make the platter spin much faster than it was ever intended to spin, and by doing away with the trio of balls I could make it spin faster still, quickly enough to catapult small objects from its rim. I tried this for a while, shooting things across the cellar and marking record distances on the floor, but I quickly reached the catapult’s practical limits, and the record player vibrated so violently that it seemed likely to shake itself to death, so I gave that up.
    More intriguing was the opposite extreme. With longer screws I could slow the machine down. When I’d inserted the longest screw that would fit, driving the top collar down against the bottom one, I thought for a moment that I’d slowed it as much as could be done, but a little thinking showed me the next step: longer arms, bigger balls. It was the work of a happy hour to attach three dowels to the platter, each with a rubber ball at its far end. . The whole arrangement reminded me of the electrified model of the solar system kept in a glass case in the hallway of the oldest of the elementary schools in town. At the center, symbolizing the sun, was a naked light bulb. That, I saw, was what my gadget needed—a light.
    I thought of trying a small table lamp, but my mother spotted me sneaking it out of the living room, so I had to settle for a flashlight. I taped the flashlight to the platter, wound the motor, and released the brake. Watching the spot of light moving around the walls of the darkened cellar, I realized that I had here the essentials of a lighthouse. I had wanted a lighthouse of my own for years. Now I was halfway there. I had the mechanism. All I needed was the shell, the housing, the lighthouse equivalent of the record player’s cabinet. That couldn’t be hard to come up with. Next to what I had already accomplished, it ought to be a snap. I didn’t see any reason why, with some help, I couldn’t build a lighthouse in the back yard in a couple of days. Of course, I would need my father’s permission. . . .
    It would be best, I reasoned, not to announce my intention to build a lighthouse, o claim that I had something else in mind, something more modest. I asked permission to build a shack.
    “A shack?” said my father.
    From something in his voice, I realized that I had chosen the wrong word.
    “Well,” I said, “not a shack, a hut.”
    “A hut?”
    “A fort,” I tried.
    “A fort? What kind of fort?”
    “More like a clubhouse,” I said.
    “Oh!” he said. “A clubhouse. Sure. Why not?” . . .
    I suspect that my father expected me to build, no matter what I called it, an eyesore, because he allowed me to build it only if I built it where it would be hidden by a grove of bamboo.