Editing with a Toolbelt

October 23, 2007

My grandmother’s house had a basement. For me, an LA kid, brought up in a little stucco ranch on a slab, this was a place of mystery. I could spend a good while talking about that house, the only place that was always the same in my young life, as TWA transferred our family from coast to coast and points in between. It was a sort of Mecca for me, sometimes east, sometimes west—but dependable as twilight. Even the furniture never changed position—or the hidden treasures in the drawers pf the hutch.

There was a ping-pong table down there, tucked into a dark corner. On the one wall, there was a deer head (about which there was a story) and under that, a rack of pipes – wonderful, odd pipes, many of them hand carved, all smelling of sweet pipe smoke. And there was a firebrick heater in the little fireplace, guarded by a cast iron Boston terrier. And a pair of very long skis, longer unused, that had belonged to my father (skis in Kansas City?), and an ancient upright piano that I know my grandmother never played.

Of course, there’s more to this—smells, textures, old books, arrowheads and fossils—but my point in all this is that, in one very rarely seen corner, tucked in behind the wash room, was my grandfather’s workbench.

I didn’t like it in there. I can’t tell you why. Maybe because the tools seemed so alive, when he had died long before I was born. They made him seem young and present, not a ghost, but somebody I always just seemed to miss seeing when I visited. Rich, worn wooden handles. All in order, hanging as he had left them.

My father tells me that when he was first married, he didn’t really know how to build things. He was an engineer, following in his father’s and grandfather’s footsteps. But planning terminals and runways is a far cry from mounting a doorway, adding on a room, building shelves and sheds and things—and if I understood him correctly, this was stuff he did not know how to do. I am puzzled by this, considering his father’s tools—but young men, out there with their tennis rackets and frat houses are likely not to take much interest in screw drivers and hammers.

Once domesticated, it seems that he—with that rich legacy of tools in his upbringing—became very self sufficient. By the time I was old enough to recognize anything, I knew what Craftsman tools were, and had been taught how to make a tiny screw driver out of a handy nail. There wasn’t a house we lived in that my dad hadn’t tweaked—added a room on the back, or a new door or bathroom—put up shelves, screened in a porch. When I think of my dad, I think of project drawings, all labeled in that angular, clear architectural print—strong illustrations of beams and joists and studs.

I find that there are two things that make a home to me: the piano and the projects.

Guy’s father was not much of a handyman. Our good friend down the street (the Bishop) is said not to know one end of a hammer from another (I doubt this very much), so I guess there are some real men who are not tool-savvy. But Guy came with that same fools-rush-in mentality that set my father learning these things, and a father-in-law who liked to spend his visits with us building things with his s-i-l, and now, Guy is just like my dad, except not as in love with neatly hung tools (read: please do not let my father near our garage – especially this year). I am guessing that my father, indifferent as he might have been to his father’s industrious ways, was as deeply impressed with those rows of hanging tools, all neatly ordered by size and function, as I was by Dad’s peg-board ordered walls. No. Dad wins—he was the more impressed—because, where he made a workshop ordered like the insides of a Swiss watch, I have never successfully imposed that kind of shining, musical order in any area of my life.

Anyway, this is all about building onto the studio—something my husband was brave enough to do because my father taught him how to do these things, and because Guy is brave enough (or fool enough) to wade into a thing like this.

The sweetest moments this summer have been the times that Cam came over to help, and that Murphy had time, in the middle of school and work, to help. And John Kane, too. Kind of like the culmination of a lifetime’s work: children who can help, and do.

And Cam is of Dad’s and Guy’s ilk: stumbling confidently into a project, conceived by necessity crossed with imagination, and wrought by sheer plod and chutzpah.

So these are my pictures of June: the ground breaking on Murphy’s birthday – Murphy, running the little back hoe beautifully, with the exception of the fact that he mangled the water main. But that was a mere trifle. I say June – but I mean, the entire summer and autumn.

We will finish it. We have to.

They’re already charging us more property tax because it’s there.