Tales from the woodshop

 

     Monday night was woodworking class. Nearly halfway through making my end table. Maple shelves with cherry legs and rails. A minor crisis — I took some wood home last time, thinking it was scrap, and it turned out to be something I needed yesterday. But the teachers are nothing if not accommodating, used to dealing with the full spectrum of blundering, and I was guided through creating replacement pieces and got my work done before class ended. 

     Mistakes happen, and usually can be corrected. That's part of the joy of workworking, one of its central lessons. If you recall last time we popped in, I was regarding with boggled horror my terrible dovetail joint. I considered how rarely do adults get to do things they're really bad at. They learn to avoid them, so don't dance, don't speak in public, don't express their emotions. 
     Me, I try to power on through. To be good, you have to be willing to be bad. I signed up for the second class at the Chicago School of Woodworking, "Mortise and Tenon Joinery." Though I deserve no credit for persistence. I took the second class for the same reason I signed up for the first ; my younger son asked me, a development I've taken to referring to as "The Pulitzer Prize of Parenting." Though this time I couldn't help spilling the beans. "I know I'm not supposed to say this part," I said. "But I'd sign up to spend two and a half hours a week tossing playing cards into a hat with you." 
     The kind of squirmy, over-sharing thing a dad would say — well, that I would say. My dad was a nuclear physicist for whom sentiment was an irrational number of no practical value. So I veer the other way, though worrying it's too much. "Dad was always saying 'I love you,'" the boys will grumble to each other, bitterly, in 2055. "I hated him for that."
     A mortise, by the way, is a recess designed to accept a projection, called a tenon. I could pretend that above razor sharp joints reflect a huge increase in my skill. What they represent is the value of machinery. I'm sure a skilled carpenter can make some wonderfully precise cuts with a wooden mallet and chisel. But I am not a skilled carpenter. We learned the basics with Japanese hand saws and brass marking wheels. Now we've moved on to the most extraordinary power tools — massive Felder professional machines that make the stuff sold at Home Depot look like potato peelers.
    Yes, you have to be careful that you don't feed your fingers into the blades. But there are safety guards, and with Mad Eye Moody's epithet ringing in my ears — "Constant vigilance!" — I keep focused and perform my tasks, under their constant watchful eye, with intently but without so much terror. I've kept my fingers on my hands, so far, and the teachers stress the value of keeping that desire foremost in mind.
    I went back and looked at that first dovetail joint, which I kept, as a token of humility. Actually, it wasn't as bad as I recalled, that second to the bottom mortise, which got kinda chewed up — I could get the yips with the chisel — but did not look that terrible, from a distance. 
     A reminder: we progress for many reasons. Being able to look back and detect improvement is a good one. Everything is a process. Those who passionately wished that the years 2017 to 2021 would be a nadir in the decline of the United States were, sadly, mistaken. Our rock bottom is still out there, waiting for us.  The sooner we get there, the sooner we will begin improving. A joy, it will be, someday, perhaps, to remember even this.