Confessions of an Amateur Carpenter

"Although I have never pretended to be a great fisherman, it was always important to me that I was a fisherman and looked like one, especially when fishing with my brother."
-Norman Maclean, from A River Runs Through It

I first read this line in 1997. How many times these words have rung true in my life since. I'm not necessarily referring to fishing, but to other skills men should be stereotypically good at, like fixing things around the house. Tonight I hung a door in a house that I am convinced is not square- the house, not the door. The door is on, but it doesn't fit so well.

You see, it started about two months ago when my wife, while caught up in the excitement of our friends buying a new house, decided to start looking around town for a deal. 4.5% interest and a buyer's market were clear signs that we needed to look at a bigger house, and we found one. But over the course of a month of offers and counter-offers, we finally came to a dead end. Okay, no problem, except that we had decided that if we were going to put our house on the market, we had better fix it up. The wheels were in motion. There was no going back.

So I set out to fix all the little problems our little house had, and there were penty of them. Patching sheetrock, rewiring, and painting, we prepared our house for my sister and brother-in-law, the latter of which flips houses for a living. It was decided that new floors in the office and kitchen, new counter tops in the kitchen and bathroom, new fixtures throughout the house, faucets, and such would spice up our little abode, making it much more marketable. But since we were now not selling it, we would just force ourselves to live in a house which was more pleasing to the eye.

In the course of a weekend we flipped the three rooms previously mentioned. Never having done many of these skills, I found myself asking my brother-in-law for help many times over, each time surrendering my Man Card, for this is not typical "man behavior." It's like pulling over to ask for directions while on vacation.

I felt stupid the whole weekend. We moved at a snail's pace, and when they left here Sunday night, the only major job left was to hang a door. Now we have come full circle in this story.

I won't go into all the details, but I will say that the darned door is hung, and it sticks something aweful. Sawing, planing, and sanding, I did all I could to keep from totally wrecking that poor door if only for the reason that I didn't want to buy another one if I whacked too much of it off. It opens and closes, but barely.

I wanted to look like a handy man in front of my brother-in-law, and I'm sure I failed. My wife knows the real truth about my sad skills, so there's nothing I can do to change that perception. The thing is, my father-in-law is a true do-it-yourself handyman and my wife's hero for one good reason- he's been around the construction site a few times. He can fix anything, just like my dad. Thirty years ago he was probably where I am now, a man gaining valuable skills by fixing-up stuff around the house. Learning by screwing up doors, successes coming few and far between. To my wife, her dad hung the moon, and that's how it should be. But I can't compare myself to him or others with valuable experiences, just like I can't compare my students' education levels to mine. As math teachers would say, it's apples to oranges.

So tonight I will hold my head up high because I am the man who successfully hung the office door. When it's discovered in the morning that the door sticks something bad, I'll return to my incompetent reputation and surrender my Man Card again. That or blame it on shifting tectonic plates.