As I grew older, Dad was to build all sorts of things for me as I explored a variety of interests: magic tricks, a toy circus, neighborhood shows and science projects.     From as early as I can remember to the time I left home for college, I continued to come to him with a design or an idea, and he would figure out how to build it.      In fifth grade, a schoolmate and I wrote a puppet   show that we wanted to perform for our class. I made the puppet heads myself, and I made the costumes and curtains with Mon---who was as expert designing and sewing with cloth as my father was designing and working with wood and metal. With Dad I made the puppet stage, in our own invented style between kid and adult with me saying something like, " It has to be this high, and it needs to come apart and fold up so it can fit in the backseat of the car, and it needs to set up fast, and it needs to have different color1ed lights on top with switches you can reach to control them and a curtain you can pull from under it, even if you still have a puppet on your hand." Dad figured out how to make it all work, making plans as we went along. Then with the tools in his shop he built it, and I helped.    Dad also spent a lot of time out in the garage or in the driveway working on the family car. I don't remember that he ever took it to a professional auto-repair shop. Maybe to save money, but also because he could usually figure out what needed fixing, just by taking it apart and looking. Though not trained as an auto mechanic, he could look under the engine cover and take parts and pieces out, spread them on a tarp   to catch the oil and figure out what was supposed to happen to the machine and then figure out what wasn't happening and then replace the worn-out part or whatever and then put everything back together again. Before the writer went to college, he always turned to his father for   _  .
designing a machine building his design or idea making a puppet show building a show stage