Wisdom of Touch

Captain Al Keuning, 1963

Captain Al Keuning, 1963, and yes, that’s a cigar in his mouth

[He] maintained a practical, sentimental affection for the specific trade skills that were transformed into the character traits of the men who cultivated them. The draftsman who inked a right angle on a plan, the bricklayer who spread a base of fresh mortar and smoothed it with the trowel before placing the brick on top of it … the master craftsman who verified with a plumb line the verticality of a wall … Now his hands were too delicate … never had acquired the wisdom of touch he’d observed as a boy in his father and the men who worked with him.

Antonio Muñoz Molina, In the Night of Time, Trans. by Edith Grossman

 

My father sanded a teak deck, ran his hand over it to feel if it were sufficient. It was not. He re-sanded, cleaned the surface thoroughly before laying down the first coat of varnish, then another. Don’t think you’ll walk that deck in anything but bare feet or rubber-soled shoes, even if you are the owner.

Mom came home from her hospital graveyard shift to organize the meal we’d have that evening and see us off to school. Only then did she eat something herself and clean up the kitchen before finally going to bed, because dishes had to be done immediately after every meal, just as beds had to be made as soon as you were out of them in the morning.

She lived in a one-bedroom apartment for a few years after my father died, and I’d come from Denver the evening before, when she’d insisted I take the bed, had made up the couch for herself before I arrived. The time change resulted in my sleeping in. I woke hearing her in the kitchen, knew she’d been up for hours, hurried in the bathroom. By the time I went back to get dressed, the bed was made. “I can’t stand an unmade bed,” she said crisply.

That’s the dark side, but also a bearing wall in the edifice of work with your hands, the physical labor my parents did all their lives. One school summer I waitressed at the same diner as my mother did. She never stopped. If there were no customers to serve, she was wiping tables or filling saltshakers, but she never stopped. I still seldom know when to take a break.

Dad was captain of private yachts, swank vessels with pianos in their living rooms. When Captain Al was docking, boat basin workers would stop what they were doing and come to watch. He managed it so the 75-foot yacht slid smoothly into its berth with no more than a kiss on the piling bumpers. Seamen shook their heads and grinned. It was a fine thing to see.

In those days men worked on their cars. Dad changed oil, spark plugs and filters, replaced or rebuilt carburetors. Our cars never went to a repair shop. His tools were neatly arranged on a pegboard in the garage. A shelf was lined with mayonnaise jars of nuts and bolts and screws and washers, sorted by kind and size. He came home from varnishing a deck, ate and went out to the garage to putter around. He didn’t watch sports, had no hobbies but making and fixing things.

It is no wonder I have a weakness for physical work done well, the exercise of those skills that become the character of the one who practices them. When I was a teenager waitressing at Howard Johnson’s on U.S. 1, there was a breakfast cook, lean and dark. He always had a cigarette in his mouth, the ash lengthening over the grill, and somehow knew the exact moment to flick it into the ashtray on the counter, never dropped ash into an omelet. He cracked two eggs in one hand, never broke one or dropped shell fragments and they always came out the way you’d ordered them: over easy, medium, hard. I was enchanted.

Or recently, the way the Mexican roofers didn’t blink over our steep roof others had declined to scale. Their toes lodged between rafters like mountaineers, they nonchalantly and rapidly pried loose layers of old tiles.

My father placed a palm on a tire, then moved it, appearing to listen like a doctor with a stethoscope, until he’d taken the temperature of several places on that tire. “It’s wearing unevenly,” he announced, and went about rebalancing it. Something in the feel of it on the road had led to that examination. How I admired that in my father. How I wanted to achieve in my own work and life that wisdom of touch.

 

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4 Responses to Wisdom of Touch

  1. Denise Gibson says:

    It hurts too much. I, who used to cut through media with an exact blade and not scratch the surface underneath took such pride in my sense of touch. These surgeons hands are, alas, a thing of the past. But I take wonder in the scalpel you apply to your writing!

  2. Sylvia Montero says:

    I just read Wisdom of Touch, Loved it.

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