The joy of competency

Strother Purdy, a CSW instructor and experienced cabinetmaker, skillfully applies some brute 
force to a student's table. And yes, I bought one of their way-cool sweatshirts.

     Sometimes I smile at how far short my imagination falls of any given reality. When my wife suggested we go to Spain, I was initially taken aback, wondering: "Why would anyone want to go to Spain? What's in Spain?" Before conjuring up ... wait for it ... bullfights and ... that's about it. 
     I had no idea that Atoni Gaudi's Sagrada Familia was waiting for us in Barcelona. 
     That is standard for me. Years before, when I contemplated the arrival of our first child, I thought I'd better go out and get a set of Dickens. Honestly, I looked for one in used book stores, the plan being to read it to the babe during what I imagined would be the immense yawning empty spaces of child-rearing. I did not consider being a dad would be a frenzy of constant activity broken up with too-short periods of exhausted collapse. I hardly had time to read the back of a sugar packet, never mind, "Little Dorrit."
    My younger son and I signed up for Introduction to Woodworking last fall. Whatever I expected the Chicago School of Woodworking might be, the reality was much better. Enormous. Unbelievably clean and orderly. A team of experienced, focused, energetic instructors. With room after room of unimaginably cool, enormous machines that made the stuff at Home Depot seem like so many penknives and potato peelers.   

     Now I was nine weeks into the second course, Methods of Mortise and Tenon Joinery. Ready for the last class. Which, we were told, would be spent gluing together the pieces of the end tables we'd just spent two months crafting.
     Conjure up what gluing together a table might involve. Tell me it isn't just me. Gluing together anything, I imagined, involves ... pots of glue, right? Dabbing the glue on the appropriate spots with a brush of some sort, maybe holding two pieces together while they dry. It seemed a sedate, easy, solitary process.
     Wrong.

     My son had to miss the last class, due to the demands of work. I told him if I succeed in completely gluing my table together with time to spare I would then glue his, too, to save him having to take the make-up class. 
     Ha. Double ha. Working fiendishly, with the help of all my classmates, I was lucky to finish my own table in the two and a half hours allotted.  

  

My table, made of maple and cherry.

   I did not realize that gluing a table is a mass, brute force undertaking where the entire class has to set upon each table, one at a time, glue brushes and spatulas flying, so as to finish before the thing dries out of kilter. I did not realize the number of big rubber mallets that would be necessary, with considerable pounding pieces into place. The table needs to be square, aligned. Thus various pieces have to be rammed home then braced using big Jorgensen Cabinet Master Parallel Jaw Bar Clamps, sometimes applied directly to force pieces into place. 

     I did not realize that everyone had to do it together, one table at a time, because glue dries quickly.

     I was horror struck when the entire class was invited to begin learning on my table, first thing. It was like showing up for what you thought was a picnic and finding instead you had to trust drop off a cliff. I divided my time between dabbing glue into mortises and grabbing squares of paper towel moistened with spit to prissily clean up glue others had slopped on my finely finished cherry and maple surfaces. When the thing was done, with eight orange Jorgensen clamps squeezing it together, my little table seemed like some kind of crazed wooden alien beast being restrained for transport to a moon prison.
     Here's the thing. I did the entire final class a second time, assembling another set of tables. I wasn't sure how many other students in the mortise and tenon unit would miss their various last classes — the school does seem to attract lawyers trying to keep a foot in the living world of tangible reality — so showing up bright and early Saturday for my kid's make-up session to lend a hand with his gluing ordeal seemed the kind of boss dad flex that I've mastered.
     There were four other students, and a teacher who pitched in, so it wasn't as if we were alone, père et fils. Still, I was very glad I'd come, not just to aid my son, nor the personality-effacing challenge of doing woodworking against the clock. But having just done this all the previous Monday, I actually was the one beside the teacher who knew what we were supposed to be doing. So I could point out where a piece was being put on backward, or advise someone to line up the grain with another piece, and in general proved more helpful than I normally would.  Not only did I get a table out of it, but a whiff of something far more precious: a sense of competency in an area where previously I was completely inept. The joy of knowing what you're doing. Gluing together the table a second time was really fun. Another aspect to the process I just did not expect.

     My son and I were too preoccupied to get ourselves into a weekend session of the third class, Techniques of Machining Wood, when it begins next week. These classes fill up fast. And frankly I think he could use a breather — I know I could. But are 100 percent committed to snagging a pair of spots in the session that begins in May. While I've decided not to take the buy-out — I think, having until Sunday at 5 p.m. to change my mind — I'm not 100 percent confident I won't be canned anyway. Woodworking will then come in handy, to both pass my greatly expanded free time and maybe pick up some pocket change.

Gibbs, the school dog, likes to hang out by the window, waiting for trains.