To be good at anything, you first have to be willing to be bad.
No one who ever tried anything new, who ever walked out onto a dance floor or an athletic field, would dispute that. Proficiency is hard won, and you have to step on a lot of toes and muff a lot of easy catches to get there. Want to bake well? First you have to bake poorly.
I know that. But knowing a truth, intellectually, and actually experiencing it are very different, just as writing “hitting your thumb with a hammer hurts” is not anywhere close to extending your digit and bringing down a claw hammer on it, hard.
The truth of just how badly being really bad at something hurts dawned on me while standing at my workbench at the Chicago School of Woodworking, 5680 N. Northwest Highway, a few weeks ago, contemplating my first attempt to make a dovetail joint.
How did I get here?
Paternal love makes a person do many strange and expensive things. It caused me to quit a city I love and move to an anodyne suburb, enduring a quarter century of reader ridicule and lousy Thai food. It prompted me to spend thousands of dollars on tennis lessons, college tuition and, more recently, wedding cakes. I thought I was pretty much done with that period of life, when my younger son asked if I wanted to take a woodworking class together.
“Sure!” I said, despite smelling a trap. Nine weeks of 101 Introduction to Woodworking cost $495; I assumed I’d be tasked with making the arrangements and then could later dun him for his share or, more likely, not. My parents inspired me to always be open-handed and generous with my children, though … choosing my words carefully … not by direct example.
Then the amazing part happened. He signed up for — and paid — for the class. I did the same.
We began in mid-October — with seven others, heavy on the legal and computer professions. “I spend all my days looking at screens,” said a cybersecurity expert, when we went around explaining why we were there.
We identified types of wood and joints, and our teacher said something prophetic.
“You’re learning to cut things by hand,” she said. “A lot of times it isn’t going to look great.”
Got that right. We began working on picture frames. We busied ourselves at our tasks. My son and I didn’t talk much. He has been woodworking as a hobby for a few years — he made a lovely coffee table for his apartment — and were I of a conspiratorial bent, I’d suspect that after a lifetime of me forcing him to learn skills that I was already proficient at — reading and swimming and such — he was now returning the favor, as payback.
But honestly, mirabile dictu, I think he just wanted my company. Or somebody’s company, anyway.
My picture frame was more foreshadowing. The four pieces were not exactly flush. “It looks like a frame you’d see on a side table in ‘The Flintstones,'” is what I told my son. But not terrible either. We learned how to sharpen chisels, and then set to creating the aforementioned dovetail joint. If you are unfamiliar, a dovetail joint is a way two pieces of wood can be joined together at a right angle. Lace your fingers together in front of you. Like that, only wood.
I carefully measured and penciled and got all ready. Then slowly began chiseling and cutting. Then I was done. The result … the result … a jagged mouth of uneven monster teeth.
Teachers can smell fear, and just as I was regarding my unhandiwork with boggled horror, ours drifted over, her face a mask of suppressed pity. The “ohhh, gee, what have you managed to do?” was unvoiced. Did I mention I cracked the wood down the middle? I did.
“How many people quit before the end of the class?” I asked.
Not that I’m going anywhere. Just the opposite. I vowed I would retreat to my workshop, sharpen my chisels, and start making dovetail joints until I got one right. When confronted with your own badness, you can deny, flee, or own the sin, work harder, get better.
Besides, my son has already asked if we should sign up for the second class, “Methods of Mortise and Tenon Joinery.”
“Sure!” I heard myself saying.
You have to keep moving forward, and you might as well go through life head up, shoulders back, hands at your tools, trying your best at something new.
Or as Winston Churchill said: “If you find yourself going through hell, keep going.”