Category: Blog

The Showstring

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The truck died on the side of the road somewhere in Oklahoma City with a tank of weed killer in the back.

I was twenty-five, a month into a job spraying lawns, and I got on the radio and told my manager the truck wouldn’t run and asked if somebody could come out.

Nobody was coming out.

What I got instead was him walking me through it over the radio. Pop the hood. Look at this. Try that. I’m standing on the shoulder in the heat with a handset, describing engine parts to a man who wasn’t going to leave his chair.

The throttle linkage had come apart. And the fix — the actual fix, the one that got a company truck running again — was that I took the shoestring out of my own boot and tied it back together.

It worked. I drove the rest of the route.

He congratulated me.

Told me I’d done a great job out there. Sounded genuinely pleased about it, and I don’t think he was being sarcastic. A piece of his equipment had failed, one of his people had fixed it roadside with clothing, and as far as he was concerned the system had worked exactly as designed.

I remember standing there with one boot loose thinking: I am not going to be here long.

A couple of weeks later I told him I’d taken another job.

“All right,” he said. “This is your two weeks’ notice.”

“There’s no two weeks. I start Monday.”

He told me he had to have two weeks.

I said I didn’t care at all. The new place needs me Monday and I’m going Monday. If you want me to finish today’s shift I’ll finish today’s shift, and that’s what you get.

He tried to be angry about it and I watched him try. And there was a second in there — I’ll admit it — where the younger, more agreeable version of me almost apologized.

I didn’t. I have never once regretted it.

That job was a month out of the wilderness year, the stretch after the church work ended when I took whatever would have me. Art gallery, pizza place, lawns, and eventually an insurance office that turned into twenty years of something else entirely.

I’ve thought about that manager since, and what gets me isn’t that he was harsh. He wasn’t, particularly. He was cheap and he was checked out, and those are ordinary failures.

What gets me is the notice.

He wanted two weeks of formality from a man he wouldn’t send a mechanic to. He wanted the protocol observed — the professional courtesy, the proper interval, the way it’s supposed to be done — from a company that had let one of its guys fix a truck with his own shoelace.

I don’t think that ever occurred to him. I don’t think it occurs to most people who ask for it.

I’ve given proper notice at every job since. Two weeks, sometimes more, handoff documents, the whole thing.

Because it was earned, every time.

Lunch and Honesty

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

We had lunch today at a pizza place in the city. Shared a pepperoni on cauliflower crust between us, I had wings, and somewhere in there I started telling my wife about the rest of the year.

Not telling her the way I’ve been telling her all year — the running commentary, here’s what I’m working on, here’s what shipped. Actually asking. What do you think matters. What should I be doing right now.

I cannot tell you the last time we sat down and did that on purpose.

She had answers ready, which tells you she knows me and knows how I work. She’s a planner, and she had good questions before she had any advice.

Pivot to the Christmas book I’m revising. Finish the rewrite and get it out by the first of October so the promotion lands in the Christmas season instead of after it. That one’s been sitting half-finished for months and it’s the only thing I’ve got with a seasonal window, and she’s right that a window you miss isn’t a window.

Park the newest novel. Not forever — after. Her reasoning was that until the Christmas book is out, and the piece on intent is out, and the books I’ve already published are actually being promoted, working another novel is spinning the creative wheels while the operational work sits there.

As usual, she’s right on the money.

That’s not encouragement. That’s a plan, delivered over pizza.

Then she said the thing I’ve been turning over since.

When it gets hard, it’s easy to go back and keep creating instead of pushing through the hard part. She’s done it herself, which is how she knew.

That’s the whole diagnosis of my year in one sentence. Two books, an album, something written and posted every single day since January first — and almost nothing sold, because selling is the difficult part and making another thing is the part I’m good at. Creating has been my most productive way of not doing the promotion work.

I’ve circled that conclusion for months. Long conversations with myself, walks, notes, a mid-year review I dragged around on vacation and never opened.

She got there over a shared pizza.

What gets me isn’t that she was right. She’s usually right.

It’s that she knows me and has been paying attention the whole time. She’s seen the work I’ve put in this year, every stack of drafts, every project. She has the most trusted vantage point on me that exists, and I don’t pause often enough to ask for what she can see from it.

There’s no dark reason for that. I’m not protecting anything. We just get busy, and the days go, and the conversation that requires sitting down across from each other and being still for an hour keeps losing to the ones that can happen while somebody’s loading the dishwasher.

She told me she’s proud of me. That she’s watched me work harder this year than she’s seen before.

I needed that more than I’d have admitted before lunch.

I meant to have the intent piece finished a few days ago. I missed that deadline.

I’m not going to dress it up. What I’ve done since is put real accountability in place — people who will ask, out loud, on a date.

My wife is the first of them, and she’s had the best view all along.

I’ve had my head down for most of this year. The voice I trust most is right here at the door, and she’s glad to help.

The Table

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a crack down the middle of my kitchen table. You can’t see it anymore. You can feel it if you know where to run your hand — a faint seam under the finish, right where the two halves of the top were pulled back together.

The table is somewhere around a hundred and fifteen years old. Built, best we can tell, between 1910 and 1915, with fold-down sides so it could shrink against a wall when it wasn’t needed and open up when company came. It isn’t fancy. It’s a farm table, the kind that got built to be used rather than looked at, and it’s where we eat breakfast, where we eat lunch, and where most weekend mornings I set my iPad down with a cup of coffee and think about the day before the day starts.

We didn’t go looking for it. We go looking for old things in general — estate sales, garage sales, antique stores, the kind of Saturday where you drive around with no plan and a little cash and see what somebody’s ready to let go of. My wife and I have done that for a long time. Some people collect a thing. We collect the habit of looking.

A few years ago we pulled up to a garage sale and realized we knew the people.

The table was sitting out there with the rest of what they were selling, and it had a problem. The top was split right down the center and they didn’t know what to do about it. It had been in their family the whole time, as far as they knew — more than a century of it — and now it was cracked and they were moving things on.

We stood in that driveway a long while before any money came out. Where it had come from. How long they’d had it. What it had been to them. They told us and we listened, and then we paid them a fair price and put it in the truck.

My father-in-law is a carpenter and a very good one. He’s shown up here before.

We took him the table and he repaired the top, closed the split, made the two halves one piece again. I did the rest, which was mostly getting the fold-out sides to swing up and hold the way they were supposed to instead of sagging. Nothing about it was hard for him. It took me a couple of tries.

Now we sit at it every day.

I like to think about who else has. A hundred and some years is a lot of breakfasts.

Somebody sat at it at two in the morning with a cup of coffee going cold, trying to decide something. There were arguments at that table and there were the mornings after the arguments. And there were a hundred meals nobody remembers, because they were Tuesday.

I don’t know any of that for a fact. But I know tables, and I know families, and a piece of furniture doesn’t make it to a hundred and fifteen without sitting at the center of a great deal of ordinary life.

We’re careful with our things, so I expect it will outlast us.

But what I keep coming back to is that it had a family before it had us. It wasn’t ours to find. It was theirs to let go of, and they let it go to people who stood in a driveway and asked about it first.

That’s a handoff more than a purchase.

So we look after it. We’ve added a few years to the count.

This morning it held my coffee.

Second Place

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I was holding the trophy when he got to me.

Second place. I hate second place trophies. Nobody builds a shelf for them. I’d worked on that speech for weeks, rehearsed it in the truck, rehearsed it in the kitchen, ran it for people who’d tell me the truth, and I walked into that contest expecting to win. Then they read the names in the wrong order and handed me a piece of wood with a little plate on it, and I walked off the stage trying to figure out what had just happened.

I got maybe ten steps.

A man I’d never met stepped in front of me, put a hand out, and said, “Let’s talk about what you could’ve done better.”

Here’s the part I’ve had to be honest with myself about since. He wasn’t wrong to think I needed that conversation. I did. Walking off that stage, the only thing in my head was how did he beat me? I truly didn’t understand. The other speaker was good. I thought I was better. Call it pride or call it competitiveness, whichever fits. I wasn’t mad about losing so much as confused by it, and confusion is worse. Somebody was going to have to explain it to me.

It just wasn’t going to be him.

I’ve given more evaluations in Toastmasters than I can count, and taken more than I’d like to admit.

Feedback is the whole point of the place. Every speech gets one. There’s a person whose job that night is to stand up after you sit down and tell you, in front of everyone, what worked and what didn’t. That sounds brutal from the outside. It isn’t, and the reason it isn’t is the room.

You know the evaluator. You’ve watched them bomb a speech in March. They watched you lose your place in April. You’ve eaten bad cookies together during the break. By the time they stand up to talk about your delivery, you decided months ago whether they get to. The evaluation lands because everything around it was built first.

And when you want feedback from somebody outside the club, you go find them. You pick the person. You ask.

What almost never happens is a stranger walking up cold with a diagnosis.

So when that man opened with what I could’ve done better, I wasn’t hearing an evaluator. I was hearing somebody who’d watched a contest, formed some opinions, and decided my ten seconds off the stage was the right moment to deliver them.

He may have been dead on. I’ll never know.

I said something polite and kept walking, which is about the best I had in me.

I think about that when I’m the one in the audience.

I’ve sat through a lot of speeches from people I don’t know and I’ve had plenty of thoughts about them. What I say afterward, if I say anything, is this: I really enjoyed your speech — if you ever want to talk about it, I’d be glad to.

Then I let it sit.

Most of the time they smile and say thanks and that’s the end of it. Every so often somebody finds me a week later and asks what I saw. Those conversations are good, and they’re good because they asked.

The other contestant beat me.

It took me a while to be able to say that without the word “probably” in front of it. The explanation came eventually, from a couple of people who’d known me for years, who’d heard early versions of that speech and could tell me exactly where it had gone soft.

They were right. He was better that night, and the reasons weren’t mysterious at all once the right people said them out loud.

The trophy’s in a drawer.

Her Chopsaw

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

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.