Part 1

People without a degree are just not smart enough, Nolan. That’s not me being cruel. That’s thirty years of grading papers.

My dad said that across the dinner table in May of my senior year with his fork still in his hand. He teaches economics at Iowa State. When I told him I’d turn down the engineering program and signed up to become an electrician instead, he set the fork down, wiped his mouth, and called me a disgrace.

Two hours later, my bags were sitting on the front porch.

My older brother had just finished his computer programming degree. My sister was halfway through hers. My little sister would pick the same thing two years later, mostly because Dad told her to.

I picked my bags up off that porch, and I never asked him for a dime.

That was seven years ago.

A couple of months ago, three job applications landed in my inbox on the same Monday morning. All three of them had my last name on them.

And that Thursday, my dad stood in the gravel lot outside my shop, looked me up and down in my work boots and my faded hoodie, and said, “Go get your boss.”

So I did.

I’m Nolan. I’m twenty-five.

Let me back up.

I grew up in Ames, Iowa, in a two-story house with a porch swing and a basement full of my dad’s old textbooks.

His name is Martin. He trims his beard every Sunday night over the bathroom sink and wears the same brown corduroy jacket from September to April.

He’s not a yeller. He never raised his voice at us. He just had a way of saying things calmly, like he was reading you a grade, and you walked away feeling about two feet tall.

My mom, Paula, works at the public library. She mostly went along with whatever Dad decided, and for a long time I held that against her.

I don’t anymore.

You’ll see why.

Then there were my siblings.

Justin was the oldest, four years ahead of me. Then Caitlin, a year ahead. Then me. Then Alexis, the baby, two years behind me.

In our house, there was one road, and Dad had paved it himself.

Good grades, Iowa State, a degree that pays for itself, and a career you could say out loud at a faculty Christmas party.

Justin was good with computers, so Dad steered him into programming. Caitlin followed him. Dad started calling them “my two software engineers” while Caitlin was still taking introductory classes.

I was supposed to be number three.

Here’s the problem.

I was never bad at school. I got good grades. I just cared more about how things worked.

At twelve, I rewired the lamp in my bedroom so it would turn on from the switch by the door.

Dad found out and told me I could have burned the house down.

Mom found out and asked me to do the one in the living room.

And then, when I was fifteen, Harvey Hagadorn showed up.

Our house was built in the 1940s, and the wiring was older than my grandparents. The insurance company finally told my parents to fix it or lose their coverage.

So Dad hired the cheapest bid, a shop out of Newton, about forty minutes east.

That shop was Harvey.

He showed up on a Monday in June in a white van with Hagadorn Electric painted on the side in peeling letters.

Fifty-nine years old, thin as a fence post, reading glasses on a cord around his neck.

He shook my dad’s hand, and then he shook mine, which nobody ever did when I was fifteen.

That whole week, I didn’t leave his side.

I held the flashlight. I fed wire. He talked to himself while he worked, and I just happened to be standing there.

Why you never trust a wire just because somebody told you it was dead. Why the old cloth wiring had to go.

At the end of the week, he finished the new panel in our basement.

Then he took a fine-tip marker out of his shirt pocket and labeled every breaker in tiny, neat block letters.

Kitchen counter, east wall. Upstairs bath. Furnace. Basement lights.

“Why so small?” I asked him.

“Because the next guy who opens this panel has to read it with a flashlight in his teeth,” he said. “Write it so he can.”

I’ve labeled every panel I’ve ever touched that way since.

On his last day, he packed up his van, and before he got in, he looked at me and said, “You ever want a job, kid? You know where Newton is.”

My dad was standing on the porch when he said it.

After the van pulled away, Dad shook his head.

“Nice enough man, but that’s the help, Nolan. You don’t want to be the help.”

I didn’t say anything.

But I kept Harvey’s business card in my wallet for three years.

By my senior year, Dad had my whole life mapped out.

I’d been accepted into the engineering program at Iowa State, and he’d already told his whole department.

I hadn’t said yes. I just hadn’t said no, and in our house, that counted as yes.

What I had actually done was drive to Newton on a Saturday in March.

Harvey was inside his metal shop building eating a sandwich at his desk. He looked up at me for maybe three seconds.

“The flashlight kid.”

He told me the apprenticeship was four years of hard work, night classes, and low pay.

Then he asked why I wanted it anyway.

“Because I want to know how everything works, and I want to be the guy people call when it doesn’t.”

He nodded, finished his sandwich, and said, “Start in June.”

I didn’t tell my parents for two months.

I knew how it would go. I just didn’t know how fast.

It was a Sunday in May, two weeks before graduation.

Mom made chicken and rice casserole. Caitlin was home from her dorm. Justin had just accepted a programming job at an insurance company in Des Moines, so Dad was in full proud-father mode.

And then he turned to me.

“Engineering orientation is the twentieth. I already put it on the calendar.”

“I’m not going, Dad.”

He smiled because he thought I was joking.

I told him all of it.

Harvey. The apprenticeship. Night classes. Starting in June.

He didn’t say anything for a long time.

Then he asked me, very calmly, if I understood that I was throwing away an engineering acceptance to go crawl around in attics.

“Yes.”

Then he said it.

“People without a degree are just not smart enough, Nolan. That’s not me being cruel. That’s thirty years of grading papers, and I refuse to believe I raised one of them.”