Tumbler gear (noun, Machinery)

A gear in a train of gears, mounted on a pivot arm so that it can be swung into and out of engagement with an adjacent gear.

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Tumbler gears are remarkable inventions, even though usually being hidden on the inside of things, they are seldom seen.  Picture the inside workings of a bank safe, with tumbler gears so precisely in tune that only when five or six are perfectly aligned, can the door can be opened. Or the tumbler gears inside of an automobile transmission, moving at intensely high speeds and interacting so smoothly with other gears that the driver scarcely notices a gear change. Open up an older wristwatch and you will see a miniature wonderland of gears, all working to keep the minute and hour hands correctly aligned.   Most mechanical tumblers gears are made of metal or plastic, and you can hold them in your hand; but there are other types of intangible tumblers at work in this world. And they live deeply in our consciousness, and are also seldom seen.

A few weeks ago I heard the faint click of the tumbler gears in my mind aligning… someone’s actual event started a gear in motion that engaged another mental tumbler gear, this one in my memory. It wasn’t a very loud click, or even a critical life changing event, but it clicked, nonetheless.

We are entirely flesh and blood physical beings and there are no gears in us a doctor could expose in an operating room; but in our consciousness, our senses, and our memories, an interlocking series of gears is working always. You may start out as infant with only one or two gears…. maybe one for hunger and one for comfort, but the gears get added quickly. Before long you get gears added for most of your needs: affection, recognition, security, ego, gratification, possession. Still later come the gears for social interaction: personal appearance, sexual attraction, standing within your crowd, and personal achievement. And your gears can engage other peoples’ gears. Meet someone and fall in love and some of both of your gears engage. Start a family and pass along some of your gears and a bunch of much older gears ranging back countless generations, soon to be installed in your offspring. Lose someone close to you and your gears go out of sync for awhile, slowly returning to normal as time works its magic on your grief.

Every decision you make and every happenstance that falls your way speeds up or slows down your gears, changing your viewpoint, your convictions, and shaping the person you have become and are still becoming. And all of these gears are turning, and at times aligning with another gear, and when that happens, the two tumbler gears mesh with a soft click. Something resonates within you.

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My oldest grandson recently sat for his high school entrance examination at St. Rita High School. It was the same building where some fifty four years earlier I also sat for an entrance exam, only then the school was brand new and known as Quigley South. I’d like to think he sat at the same desk as I did, but fifty four years is a long time for a school desk, so I’ll chalk that one up to whimsy.  I remember my exam day vividly, a cold January Saturday morning, for which I didn’t even mind having to be in a school. All my gears for excitement, nervousness, and adventure were engaged at once. I was moving on to something new and I’m guessing it was the much the same for Matthew.

I remember the priest in a long black cassock who proctored the exam. I remember thinking the exam was easy. I remember seeing the swimming pool and the enormous gym. I remember that they fed us hamburgers and fries after we were done. And the gears from his real life exam day and those from my remembered exam day briefly aligned and it resonated.

He is about to transition, and in so many ways. He will shortly leave elementary school, a world defined mostly by women. A transition from a world characterized by order, adherence to rules, kindness, compassion, and a feminine sense of fairness. He will soon enter a high school world of boys and men. It will be less orderly, less kind, less compassionate, and in many ways more demanding. It will certainly be a bit smellier. And he can’t wait to get there. Like me back then, like most of us, he is impatient to grow all the way up.

He is embarking on a four-year journey that will define the young man Matthew who waits for us in our shared futures.  It is a time of rapidly turning gears, fueled by desire for acceptance, hopes for the future, an overpowering need for independence, and hormones firing away. To be sure it will be a confusing time, a time of higher highs and lower lows, a time of passionate feelings, fierce anger, and sweet joys.

Here’s the best part: he gets to select the man he wishes to be. He will define himself in so many ways…. as a student, an athlete, a friend, a loner or part of a group, maybe a boyfriend to a girl we haven’t yet met.  He will start to think of what he wants to do in life. He will learn to drive a car. He will think about college.  And he won’t be alone in his questions or discoveries. He will have plenty of company from his classmates who will be struggling for life’s answers just as he will.

He will have strong guidance and have to answer to discipline, probably more than he wants. The guidance will come from his teachers, older boys, coaches, the occasional adult who gets through the fog of adolescence with the right question or observation that hits home for him. It will be amazing and maybe a little frustrating to watch this occur, just as I am sure it was for my parents. He will leave his boyhood behind him and grow into a young man and it will happen not fast enough for him and too fast for us.

The beauty of being a grandparent is that you don’t worry like you did as a parent, if for no other reason than you have come to realize how little control of someone else’s life you ever really had in the first place. You can create the home environment, lay down the rules, educate, encourage, cajole, sometimes punish, but there are a lot of gears turning, far too many for you to control.

So I am excited and happy for Matthew, as I will be for his brother and his cousins when they reach that junction in life’s road.  His parents laid down a solid foundation under him and he knows he’s loved, that he is expected to do well, and that this is an important step, but one he anticipates with eagerness.

The tumblers continue to spin. Life is good.