Finding Happiness in the Hand-Made World
After decades in the digital world, leaving behind something physical becomes paramount for me, my kid, and our nation
Married now for nearly twenty years, I’ve lost count of the times I responded to a request from Louise for some new piece of furniture with, “You know honey, if I had a table saw, I could build that.” My patient wife rolls her eyes and asks me to pass the potatoes. For reasons of finances or just available space, I wouldn’t get my table saw, and she wouldn’t get her shelf or table.
I have always enjoyed working with wood but never had a functional shop. I wanted to make things for as long as I could remember, but I never saw this as a career path because I had higher ambitions. The future, they told us, was the knowledge economy.
I had tools, of course, but mainly those necessary for home maintenance. I could always fix things. I had to. Growing up, we had little money for anything beyond food, mortgage, and utilities. When something broke, I fixed it.
Fast forward to 2018. A dear friend calls from Massachusetts to let me know that her parents put their house on the market after more than 40 years. Not only that, but “Dad is cleaning out the barn,” she said.
When she didn’t get the expected response from me, she tried again. “I’m not sure you heard me. I said he’s cleaning… out… the… barn.”
I got it. “The barn” was really a detached three-car garage that the old man used as his workshop, to which I now had a standing, albeit urgent invite to retrieve anything I wanted.
“I’ll be up there tomorrow.”
I trucked home quite a collection, enough to start making things in earnest, at the low cost of a couple of tanks of gasoline. As I often say, a beginning woodworker’s best friends are widows and divorcées. Across the land in garages and basements of aging Boomer guys sits troves of barely used, American-made tools not wanted or needed by their wives or children.
It starts with simple projects like smart-phone stands and bird houses. Then after watching scores of YouTube videos, confidence builds to tackle more complex projects such as Mission-style end tables, shelves, and an especially satisfying project for me, our family dining table.
Facebook has many groups and pages dedicated to woodworking, and many of their followers include enthusiasts like me — people who initially carved out careers in front of computer screens. Now, we want to leave something behind for our children and grandchildren, that they can use, and that actually casts a shadow.
I write this as my daughter considers her college options, where I find myself doubting a pursuit of a degree that ignores her inherent aptitudes. Like it or not, my kid is that creative type, and while my career didn’t make me rich, it did make me happy. Will she follow the money or her dreams? I have little choice but to let her figure it out for herself.
Mike Rowe and others have sounded the alarm about the dearth of talent available for the trades and how our economy suffers from it. Parents with college degrees want their kids to follow that path too. We have bought into the idea of its necessity. Meanwhile, according to Mike, our economy has millions of skilled jobs left unfilled because no one is trained or willing to do them.
A friend recently told me about the four-month wait he faced getting his central air conditioning system fixed in his summer house. The contractor flat out told him he couldn’t find people to do the work — this despite offering a starting salary of $100,000 per year!
My daughter’s desire to attend college feels more like a peer-pressured impulse than a career plan. In our little borough, it seems almost every kid walks lockstep down the college path and the school’s curriculum reflects that. They don’t offer wood shop or any class teaching practical skills. Even the art program in which my daughter does well limps along with low attendance and tired equipment.
Raising a child often feels like a futile attempt to talk to our younger selves. If I could go back and talk to my teenage self, I would desperately try to convince that dummy to reconsider going to a four-year university where he floundered for three years trying to figure it out. My kid does not have that option. My kid also suffers from the same thickness of skull as her father, so we’ll see.
We do need the knowledge economy. We need software engineers and fund managers and UX specialists (I think), but I fret over our detachment from the physical world. The New England I spent my youth is not just Fenway Park and quaint sea-side villages. My New England is mill towns and their factories, communities created by and prospering from physical production. Today, those same towns harvest tourist dollars from the charm and character left behind by their makers, preserved in museums or in the names of restaurants. I enjoy the walkabout, but I leave bittersweet. History fades after all.
Today, I have a fully outfitted shop. It’s tiny, but it works. I walk around my house and point proudly to many things I made with my own hands. These objects, unlike all my digital work, actually cast a shadow. I can hold them in my hand. They serve a functional purpose. They solved a problem. I can pass these objects on to my daughter. I can give them away as gifts. I can sell to others where they might become heirlooms.
Every time I turn on the lights in my shop, I shrug off a twinge of regret for starting this so late in life. I had an interesting career as a designer and sometime publisher, but the best representation of that career now sits collecting dust — sawdust, actually — in bankers boxes on a shelf in my shop. The websites I’ve built are forgotten hours after the client shuts them down.
Whether my daughter cares about any of that is a question I may never answer. I do imagine a day coming long after I’ve ripped my last board and Louise sells off my tools. I see my daughter sitting at that dining table sipping her tea. She looks down at the surface and with her fingers, she traces the grain, the seams in the panels, and remembers all the annoying noise and dust I made while building it. And then she smiles.
A father can dream.
Recommended Channels
If you’re interested in learning woodworking — or any other skill for that matter — YouTube is truly your friend. These are a few of my favorite woodworking channels.
Woodworking for Mere Mortals — There’s no better place to start. Steve Ramsey shows how to do some amazing things on a tight budget and with ordinary, affordable tools.
Stumpy Nubs — “Stumpy” is a Michigan-based woodsmith who dispenses some solid wisdom for anyone looking to move to a higher level of the craft. Every month or so, he reviews some “Cool Tools”, which will yank the credit card right out of your wallet if you’re not careful.
The Wood Whisperer takes you to some seriously next-level woodworking, but I’ve found many helpful tips while watching him build things that are way beyond my current capabilities.
3x3Custom — Most of the trades are dominated by men, but I find it refreshing to see a woman’s approach to the craft, and Tamar’s skills and attitude make her channel a pleasure to watch.
Are you making something? Tells us about it in the comments!
This hits home hard to me. As the son of a PhD father, and mother with a Master’s in library science, it was just expected that I would go to college. I wanted to join the Air Force after high school, but in 1973 as Vietnam was winding down, that wasn’t a popular choice. So I went to community college and got a degree in drafting and design, which I actually enjoyed. Then my father found a program for community college transfers to a program in mechanical technology. So I went, wasting three years of time and money. I finally decided, enough. I announced I was leaving college to become an over the road truck driver. 42 years of doing what I wanted was the best thing. I was never. rich, but always had a few dollars in my pocket. I provided for my wife and I. Not everyone needs to go to college. We do need the “ hands on” people to keep things going.
Randy... you might get along with Garen Daly - a cinema guy, especially science fiction, and probably no stranger to diners, but also a thrifty and thoughtful person.
https://frugalyankee.wordpress.com/