Making sawdust

How do you unwind after a demanding day?

Pop and I looked at each other: sweaty, covered with sawdust, gnats in our eyes, pine needles dropping onto our workbench.

“Time?” I asked.

“Time,” he said. He went into the garage and re-emerged with two beers and two sand chairs.

Another afternoon of woodworking in the books.

I enjoy woodworking; there’s something comfortably mindless about sanding stuff, using finer and finer grades, going from a rough-hewn plank to a gleaming surface ready for its first coat of stain. I’ve got my retro boom box CD player playing and as I sand, I listen to Glenn Frey sing about a girl in a flatbed Ford.

Pop taught me. It’s not something you can really learn by reading or by watching YouTube. I needed his hand on mine, showing me how much pressure to apply. How to set a precise angle on a saw and how tight to make the wingnut. How to delicately countersink trim screws in unobtrusive spots. After an afternoon of futzing around, we’d have a few cold ones in our K-mart sand chairs under the towering seagrape tree and rehash that day’s lesson.

It’s a fun hobby, but an exacting one…for me, anyway. I’m a perfectionist and if a joint I’ve cut on my cheapy Craftsman table saw comes out 1/16” off and I need to cheat with wood putty…which stains lighter than wood…it bugs me. It may not even show, but just knowing it’s there rankles me somehow.

But I do the best with what I’ve got. The garage is for the cars, and all my woodworking stuff is in boxes on shelves or wedged in here and there. Taking it all out, then cleaning it afterwards and putting it back is a hassle.

A few months ago, I needed to make a difficult cut and a buddy who lives about a mile away told me to come over, he’d cut it for me. When he raised up his garage door, I was speechless.

Forget cars, his garage woodworking shop could be in a magazine. He had at least six or seven top-of-the-line shop tools, set up strategically, all connected to a central dust collection system. He even had a window air-conditioner; no beads of sweat dripping off his nose in August.

He turned on his 72” Delta table saw; it was easily a $4K piece of machinery and absolutely silent. He dialed in the required depths, not in crude 1/16ths of an inch, but hundredths of an inch. My piece of pine went through with the barest whisper. He held it up. “How’s that?” he asked. Yeah, that’ll do. Geez.

But—shop envy aside—I enjoy the challenge of making do with what I have because it keeps me connected to Pop. As I use a hand tool that we shared 20 years ago, the time drifts away and we’re again sitting in our sand chairs, BS’ing. I use his bureau to store stuff and when I open a drawer, the smell overwhelms me with memories.

Recently, I was building a printer cabinet and needed to make a tricky cut. I clamped everything, turned on my noisy saw and gingerly pushed it through. Amazingly, it was a perfect fit. I put it together a few times, pleased, then held it up towards the garage ceiling. “Whaddya think of that, Pop?” I asked.

What happened next was startling.

Instantly, I heard Pop’s voice. Attaboy, Dar! It was almost audible. I opened a bureau drawer and the familiar old smell pushed me over the edge. It was an otherworldly experience.

I believe the veil separating this world from the next thins sometimes to the point of being almost nonexistent. The Bible says we are being watched by a “great cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1) and I think God in his providence sometimes does things, allows things that we don’t fully understand. Because at that moment, Pop might as well have been standing next to me. Things blurred; Aww, Pop. I just stood there, lost in time for a moment, not wanting to break the spell.

Sue came out and instantly grasped the situation. She went to the little garage fridge, got out two beers, gave me one, then hugged me. “I know,” she said. “I miss him, too.”

And while he’s been gone more than a decade now, the incredible events that we remembered and celebrated just this past Easter weekend are fresh in my mind.

It makes me happy to think he’s in the presence of a better carpenter than he or I will ever be. 😎

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