My grandfather could fix almost anything.
Toasters, bicycles, a radio that had gone silent: all of them ended up on his workbench, and most of them left it working again.
To him, throwing something away because it had stopped working was not merely wasteful but faintly embarrassing, an admission that you had given up without a fight.
Somewhere along the way, most of us lost that instinct, and it is not hard to see why.
Many modern devices are glued rather than screwed together, spare parts can be hard to come by, and a new appliance often costs less than having the old one repaired.
Faced with a broken coffee maker, we tend to take the path of least resistance, which leads straight to the store.
Yet there are signs that the tide may be turning.
In 2009, a former journalist named Martine Postma organized an event in Amsterdam where people could bring broken belongings and fix them with the help of volunteers.
The idea of the repair café caught on fast; there are now thousands of them around the world, from community centers in Ohio to libraries in Australia.
Many of the items brought in leave in working order, often after a repair that takes only minutes: a loose wire, a worn belt, a blown fuse.
What strikes me about these gatherings is that they mend more than objects.
Strangers sit side by side, swapping tips and stories, and visitors who arrive convinced they are all thumbs leave having opened a machine for the first time in their lives.
Perhaps that is the real value of repair: it reminds us that the things around us were made by people, and can be understood by people too.