I don’t understand

The prompt for today is transmission. I groaned.

Even though I grew up in a science-y medical family, where my first thought should have been disease transmission or something like that, I thought of a car.

I don’t understand cars, specifically car engines.

When I was in high school, I found out I could miss classes one afternoon by taking the ASVAB (Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery) test. It was for kids who were looking to go into the military. I wasn’t looking to go into the military, but I was looking to miss a few classes.

I’ve always been a good test-taker – very logical brain and all that. I was good in English, had taken a year of French, and was taking Latin. I had always been placed in advanced math classes. However, the ASVAB had questions that were so puzzling to me that I was flat-out guessing on.

The question I remember best is “What is the function of a carburetor?” I had no idea.

After the test, I asked one of the boys in my class about carburetors. He immediately answered — because he knew — but I was no better informed on carburetors than I was before the question or the test for that matter.

Over the years, I’ve told that story and asked many people what a carburetor does.

I know the answer, but I really don’t. The answer that I could now correctly choose in a multiple guess situation on a test is that the carburetor mixes air with fuel. The fuel needs air to burn.

To be clear, those are just words that I’m saying. I don’t know what they mean.

When I coached swimming, I would get in the water before giving the swimmers a new drill to do so that I knew what the drill felt. I knew from my own experience what their arm should feel like or how their legs should be kicking.

Carburetors? I don’t know.

Transmissions? I don’t know.

I asked a friend what a car transmission does. He said it changes the gears, or changes the car from park to drive, something like that.

“So it’s like the stick-shift when I had a standard?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “that’s a gear box.”

Clear as mud.

I’m a deep-diver. I want to understand. Something in my brain has to click so it’s more than words I’m saying. I want it to be something I really know.

This is why I watch the god-awful videos of the shootings.

Sometimes the words people say don’t line up with what I’m seeing.

So I watch another video.

And another.

I listen to the explanations from one side.

And then from the other.

I may never understand carburetors or transmissions, but I feel very confident in saying that the victims in Minneapolis are not the Border Patrol agents (as Gregory Bovino says), but are the people who are trying to help their neighbors and are ending up dead.

I really don’t understand how we came to this place as a country. That’s even more of a mystery to me than a carburetor.