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Dinty By My Own Hands |
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Chiefly the mould of a man’s
fortune is in his own hands. —Francis Bacon Frustration
is a powerful tool. In my
new backyard, a lilac bush was crumbling the back wall of my garage, the
roots swelling large, shouldering emphatically into the old red brick. The
rear wall, partially below ground, had begun to crack, was bowing in at the
center, threatening to fall, and if that wall shattered, so would the side
walls, dropping the rafters, collapsing the roof. It would be a poor
homeowner indeed who stood by for such calamity. The
lilac was easily six feet tall, four feet across at its widest point. One
neighbor offered a chainsaw, but the problem was roots, not branches. Another
neighbor suggested I rent a stump grinder, a menacing machine on wheels that
grates wood into pulp. There are six tree removal companies listed in my
local phone book and I called the three nearest to me for estimates. None
returned my call; help is hard to come by in these years of high employment. In the
first month that I owned this house, I would check the wall compulsively. The
convex bow seemed to expand by the day, the roots and soil eager to burst
forth. Imagination played a part here—roots don’t grow that fast—but the
cracks were wide, the angle jeopardous, the need for action immediate. My
tool chest is meager, and, to be honest, my even having a tool chest is only
a recent development. Unlike many of my neighbors, I don’t tinker on weekends
for relaxation. I’m not anxious to build on. I feel no zeal for home
improvement. A broken faucet, a leaking roof, a squeaking
board, don’t motivate me. They make me feel powerless, stupid, inadequate. It gets worse. If you can divide homeowners
into two camps, I’m in that camp where everyone spends weekends on the phone,
anxiously trying to find an honest handyman. One
August Sunday morning, fitted out with nothing more than a dull, rusty
hatchet, I went at the lilac with all my captive feelings of inadequacy. For
three hours, I hacked in anger, chopped through gray soil, sliced across
small tendrils of root, searched for the rootball,
the plant’s anchor. Sweat ran thick, my shirt grew sodden, and I threw it
aside. I rubbed my eyes with soil-covered hands until my face darkened. The back
of my neck burned from the sun. My daughter walked by with a friend, backed
off quickly. Thirty
minutes into the job my arm ached, and I would have stopped, but my hands
urged me on. My hands loved this work, loved the feel of the wooden handle,
the blunt impact each time the hatchet found root. They loved the reassuring
repetition, the clear sense of purpose. I had
no real plan, but by then my hands had taken over my thinking—grip the
hatchet, swing away. Go until something happens. * No man is born into the world whose
work Is not born with him.
There is always work, And tools to work withal,
for those who will; And blessed are the horny
hands of toil. —James Russell Lowell My father had particularly large hands. Oil,
often, was pounded into his palms, his fingers, filling every crease and fold.
Buddy, as he was called, would scrub with Lava soap, but the oil wouldn’t
give. His hands were covered with scars, healing cuts, freshly blackened
nails. The cuts—gashes really—were of the sort and size that would send me,
and most likely you as well, to the emergency room for stitches; for Buddy,
they were commonplace. His hands were strong by necessity. His
handshake could be brutal. My father worked with his hands. Once upon a
time, we all did. Buddy
introduced me to manual labor at age seven. He handed me a screwdriver, a
simple Phillips head with a translucent yellow plastic handle, and said, “Here,
hold this.” By then, he lived in a trailer park at the top of a hill and
drove a mustard-colored Datsun two-door, as
inexpensive a car as he could find, always musty with the smell of unfiltered
My
father had been a car mechanic most of his life, a pit mechanic at the local
Chevrolet dealer, but he didn’t particularly like cars. Automobiles were
simply a way to get places, a tool for travel. Something
was rattling on his old Datsun—I don’t remember
what it was, maybe the door—but the repair involved my using the screwdriver
to hold one part tight while he tightened a second part with a wrench. It is
not just my poor memory that keeps me from being more specific. My father
never bothered to explain. Just an abrupt, “Hold this, and don’t let it move.” Of
course, the screwdriver slipped out of its socket the minute Buddy started
wrenching the adjoining metal part. I have no doubt that this was to a large
extent my fault. I was bored, looking at the neighbor’s trailer, trying for a
glimpse of the neighbor’s teenage daughter. “Jesus,”
my father said in response. “Gimme that.” He
took the tool in his left hand, bent his long, strong back awkwardly,
stretched his arms to cover the distance between the screwdriver and his
wrench, and completed the job. * What is a sense of one’s self? To a large extent, it
has to do with touch, with how we feel. —Diane Ackerman Lately,
I’ve made it a practice to look at people’s hands. Try this if you are at a
lecture, or a presentation, and you are bored. Look deliberately at the
speaker’s hands. Or next time you are in a restaurant, a cafeteria, stare
across the sea of tables. Hands
are vigorous. Animated. Unpredictable. Most
of us sit all the day, or stand stiffly. We expend great energy here in the
year 2000 holding the majority of our limbs rigidly in place. We have
constructed modern lives that demand firm postures in front of screens,
behind desks, and in queue. Our necks ache, our shoulders tense, we brace
ourselves. It is expected of us. Watch
those men and women condemned to wear business suits, and it is easy to
imagine that the smooth gray fabric is woven with steel. We will notice
someone with an animated face almost immediately now, because animated faces
are becoming more rare. Keeping an even expression is valued in business, in
most leadership positions. We stand stiffly in our suits, mask our feelings,
and climb to the top. Examine the men and women in our executive ranks,
corporate or political. Who do you see? Al Gore and Madeleine Albright? Or
Carol Burnett and Zero Mostel? But
our hands still talk. Watch
sometime. Our hands play hopscotch on the tabletop, caress the podium, slice the air, as if they have a life, a rhythm of their
own. Dance
used to be the part of every culture, every life, but that has obviously gone
by the wayside. Our hands, though, remember. I am
deliberately watching people’s hands now because I suspect they are sending
us a signal: We are still out here. Don’t
forget. * At
just about the hour when my father died, soon after dawn one February morning when ice
coated the windows like cataracts, I banged my thumb with a
hammer. —Scott Russell Sanders In his exquisitely-tooled and
often-anthologized essay “The Inheritance of Tools,” Scott Russell Sanders
tells of the hammer he inherited from his father, one his father had
inherited as well. Sanders describes the pleasure
taken in a straight-driven nail, the virtue of a right angle, the “unspoken
morality in seeking the level and the plumb.” He traces the family’s tools,
the work, the rules, and shows how careful craftsmanship and love for a job
well done hold his identity. Sanders, it seems, lives a dovetailed life. I love
that essay, though I can’t relate in any way. I buy
cheap tools, break them. My
father owned countless tools, kept them locked in a red Craftsman tool chest,
four feet tall, sixteen drawers, on black wheels. At lunch, he had to lock
his chest, and again after his shift, or the men with whom he worked would
borrow his tools, and his chisel would never come
back. When
his car mechanic days ended, Buddy landed his final job, at Erie Forge and
Steel, a block-long factory building as bleak and utilitarian as the name
suggests. Mammoth slabs of tempered metal would come to the forge on rail
cars, and it was my father’s job to plane them, to work from blueprints, to
sculpt them in such a way that they would become parts themselves, parts of
larger tools, of industrial hammers shipped by sea and assembled for use in He took me to his workplace just once, the
summer after high school, showed me around with little enthusiasm. But I
could tell he valued the amount of calculating he had to do on this job, how
much math was involved, the fact that, over all the other men, those with
many more years’ seniority, he had been given the biggest hunks of metal to
work on, the most precise jobs. Buddy took me to the worst part of that
factory, the dirtiest and loudest, and he pointed. “See this,” he said. “This
is why I’m sending you off to college.” When
my father died, he left behind his big red tool chest. My brother-in-law took
the tools, and I think the chest as well. I dug into the top drawer, rescued
a tie tack my father had been given by a salesman from Snap-On Tools. I wore
the tie tack to my first job, a journalism position in * When sometimes I am
reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not
only all forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs,
so many of them,—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk
upon,—I think that they deserve some credit for not having
all committed suicide long ago. —Henry David Thoreau The
poet Robert Bly traces “the decline of men” to the
disappearance of physical work. Thoreau might very well agree. My
hands would agree too, fairly quickly. They were never happier with
themselves than when I had the hatchet in my grip, swinging away at the lilac.
They knew what to do, what they were, what was expected of them, and we all
three liked it. Work
has changed, obviously, inevitably, and so have our tools. The current
Craftsman catalog offers a 1,197-piece professional tool set—included are 311
wrenches, 72 screwdrivers, 415 sockets, 36 pliers—for roughly $5,000. Sanders’
grandfather built a house with little more than a hammer and a saw, and I’m
guessing his entire budget was well under that figure. And
this massive modern tool set offered by Craftsman is just hand tools. Power
tools in the same catalog include drills, drill presses, edge banders, fasteners, finishers, sander/grinders,
sander/polishers, buffers, power hammers, jigsaws, biscuit joiners, lathes,
planers, routers, band saws, circular saws, miter saws, chop saws, radial
saws, reciprocal saws, scroll saws, table saws, and precision laser levels to
replace the plumb line on a string. Such
is progress. We are an affluent people, and our smorgasbord of specialized
tools reflects that. More and more we no longer even hold our tools—we push
the wood through them, or attach the wood to clamps, and just stand back. Bly mourns the
decline of physical labor. Thoreau
grieves over the atrophy of our legs. I am
worried about our hands. Most of us, it seems, don’t really use them
anymore, not for anything solid. Not for our life, our living. Not really. If
I had the correct software installed, even this essay could have been
dictated to my PC. Tomorrow’s tools are digital, invisible, hands-free. But is that all our hands are really for? To
hold things? I think not. It is principally through the
act of touch, Ackerman says, that we know we are really here. Hands,
according to Bacon, hold the “mould” of our fortune. This is why true believers hold their hands
above their heads, palms aimed to the stage, when a good revival preacher
comes to town. There is some direct connection, perhaps just nerve endings,
perhaps more, between our hands and our heart. We
still use our hands to speak, thank goodness, but I’m worried they, like
Thoreau’s brand of walking, like physical labor, are the next to go. Perhaps
years from now, people will be rewarded for the stillness of their hands. It
will be demanded of us. One more corner of our soul will shut itself down. My father used to work with his hands. One August morning, I did too. I grabbed a
simple tool, attacked my problem. Eventually, to my own genuine surprise, I
managed to excavate a three-foot rim around the lilac, to find the thick ball
where the roots began. A stump grinder might have done better in ten minutes.
But I managed to hack away at the solid tangle of buried wood, until the
lilac bush gave up, and the root ball popped out as easily as a long-loose
tooth. |
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Arts & Letters is supported by |
Arts & Letters Journal of Contemporary Culture Campus Box 89 Georgia College & State University Milledgeville, GA
31061 Phone: (478) 445-1289 E-mail: al@gcsu.edu
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GC&SU is a member of |
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