There was a Canadian comedy show in the nineties called Red Green that my wife and I used to watch together, and one of its running lines was that “if she can’t find you handsome, she might as well find you handy”.
I was not handy. Not even slightly.
She was. Around 2001 or 2002, a couple of years into our marriage, she had a chopsaw and she knew how to use it. I’m fairly sure the first thing I helped with was shelves.
I was hesitant, and I want to be accurate about why, because the obvious answer is wrong.
It wasn’t the tool. I wasn’t nervous about a spinning blade. What I didn’t want to do was get the measurements wrong and make the thing badly — turn good lumber into firewood while somebody watched.
What I did not understand at twenty-three is that you have to make a fair amount of it wrong before you get to making it right. That isn’t a stage you skip by being careful. It’s the price of admission, and everybody pays it, including the people who look like they never did.
She learned from her dad, who is one of the best carpenters I’ve ever been around. Genuinely gifted with his hands. I’ve since learned plenty from watching him too — but she’s the one who put a saw in front of me first.
Twenty-some years on, I build most of what needs building around here.
A seating bench in our dining room. Cabinets. An oak cover for the vent hood over the stove, which I’m still pleased about. A long list of smaller things nobody notices unless they’re gone.
It keeps getting easier. Not because the work gets simpler — because I’ve stopped being surprised that I can do it.
I do have a hard line. I don’t touch plumbing or electrical inside the walls. Anything outside the walls is fair game and I’ll take a run at it. That’s not fear, it’s just knowing where my competence ends and where a licensed man’s begins.
Here’s the part I noticed only recently.
I can’t name one thing I’ve taught her back.
What happened instead is that I got good enough that she hands it to me. She doesn’t run the saw anymore. She tells me what she wants built and I go build it, and that arrangement suits both of us fine.
She trained her replacement. On purpose, as far as I can tell, and without ever mentioning it.
The thing I say most often about all of this is that it isn’t as hard as I thought it would be.
I say it about projects at work. I say it about writing. I said it about a chopsaw in 2002.
I have a chronic habit of building things up in my head to be considerably harder than they turn out to be, and I’ve never fully broken it. The difference is that since about 2002 I’ve had proof that I do it, handed to me by a woman with a saw and a pile of shelf lumber.
David Willis 