Image by Geishaboy. Licensed through Creative Commons.
About once a month between 1989 and 2008 I wrote and recorded short essays for National Public Radio–initially Performance Today, then Morning Edition, and finally, for a decade and a half, for Sunday Weekend Edition. To honor that tradition, I’ve decided to publish a short essay every Sunday morning online here, on this very website. Most of them will be original; and if I can swing it, some will even come accompanied with audio clips, so once again people can recognize my voice and ask, “Aren’t you that British guy from public radio?”
Memory is like that: when I first started on the Endangered Alphabets Project I laid the saw on the edge of the maple board, knuckled my left index finger to steady the blade, drew it back carefully to notch the beginning of the cut, and at once I was back forty years in woodwork class, the only subject at high school in which I ever got a C.
It was the fact that I was working with hardwood that did it, I think. I’ve thrown together all sorts of things out of pine over the years, and never felt that particular tunnel opening back through time; but as soon as I wanted to do something well, to make something out of wood that was supposed to look beautiful and to last, I was in charcoal-gray school shorts again, back at the Worcester Royal Grammar School under the scathing eye of Mr Allen, the carpentry master.
He was a fat, brusque man with a wandering eye that gave him his nickname: Wonk. He had huge hands and beefy shoulders: he sawed a board as easily as drawing his forefinger across it, and couldn’t understand why in our hands the same weapon bowed and twanged.
He taught us literally old-school woodwork. None of your shop class here: we learned real hand-tool carpentry with tenon saws, planes, chisels, sandpaper–none of your routers or table saws or drill presses. No miter boxes, either: all measuring and calculations by pencil and ruler.
The pencil, in fact, was Wonk’s principal tool. He taught us to make waste side and waste edge marks, to shade areas to be sanded, and how to hold the pencil so as to enable us to draw a line parallel to the edge of a piece of wood and up to one inch in.
I was, frankly, no good at woodwork. “Let the saw do the work,” he growled, but my saw stuck, or cut at a slant, just as my plane took off too much or too little and my chisel invariably dug too deep and snapped off a critical chunk of wood, destroying the joint I was trying to make. “Start again,” Wonk said, unsympathetically: he hated the waste of wood worse than anything.
He also doubled as the bridge master, and when I was sixteen and had long given up woodwork, four of us students met in his workshop a couple of lunchtimes a week. We pulled up hand-made chairs, kicking aside the wood shavings, and dealt onto the rough surface of the work tables. He was not a great bridge player but a thoughtful man who, like my grandfather, showed that there is pleasure and calmness to be found in staring long at the ceiling and placing every card played during the hand. We won an important trophy, which in my mind will always smell of wood shavings.
It was only years later that I realized how demanding it is to cut accurate mortise and tenon joints in soft wood: he was preparing us for cabinet-making, not the entry-level do-it-yourself projects that most of us would later do. He was not only teaching us about tools and wood—he was trying to teach us not just how to do something, but how to want to do it well.
In time I designed and built a set of apartment-perfect bookshelves that slotted together and came apart when I needed to move, and could be reconfigured for any shape of room: they survived seven moves, and parts of them are still in use twenty years later. And now, with the Endangered Alphabets, I was starting to work in hardwood, which felt as precious to me as china.
Throughout the project, which took more than eighteen months, he was looking over my shoulder, and I’m forced to admit that nothing I’ve made would ever have pleased him. This face should have been better sanded, this edge should have been planed, the whole thing could do with another coat of polyurethane.
But if he were the type who ever congratulated himself, he might acknowledge that he had taught me the desire to treat a good piece of wood well, and the belief that, in time, anyone can work up to a B.
You can check out the Endangered Alphabets Project by clicking here, and you can read about my latest book, Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment, here.
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