Why I Built Tables as an English PhD (Part 1)
The thing you really dread, when you’re a college instructor of a certain age who also delivers pizzas, is not washing the indelible gunk off the pizza pans at 10:43 PM on a Tuesday night, or folding the 112th pizza box, or even the inevitable verbal abuse of a frustrated customer, but this: finally delivering to one of your students.
Of course, you tell yourself all of the usual things. It’s the economy, stupid, you tell yourself. Pizza delivery is noble work, if done well. Stop being so elitist.
Besides, isn’t it a little like an ethnography? Maybe that’s what the other pizza delivery folks think, the ones who are very careful not to bring up your day job: that you’re actually conducting a secret research project. Maybe you could find a call for this kind of research. You’ll look into it tomorrow. “Agonistic, post-colonial rhetorics in pizza delivery subcultures.”
That’s how you get through it.
But then one night, it happens: you deliver a pizza to an actual student of yours, one you are pretty sure you taught last year. You can see the instant calculus in her face. “David…wait, I had a professor named David. And this guy kind of looks like…” And then she knows, and you know that she knows, and she knows that you know that she knows, and it is an elaborate game of signaling non-recognition.
Then, for reasons you do not entirely understand, or perhaps ones you understand but are ashamed of, you have to quit.
You begin to build things in your carport. When delivering your first paid commission to a client, you meet the next-door neighbor, a semi-retired Bulgarian neurologist who is also, it turns out, the past president of the local woodworking association. He invites you to his shop, then unexpectedly gives you a set of keys.
The shop is behind an auto repair place, well away from any neighbors who might complain. Now you can go build things in an multi-room shop with pretty much any kind of power tool you can imagine: table saw, jigsaw, drill press, belt sander, planer, jointer, router table, shaper, and even an electric/pneumatic three-spindle boring machine (imagine a sideways drill with three drill bits, and a pneumatic arm that clamps down on the work piece while it bores three perfect holes). Not only that, but there is a large stock of hardwood that the good doctor wants you to use. So at least every other day, but if you can get away with it, every day, you go in, at least for a little while, and fight with dados, rabbets, lap joints, and dowels, and get sweaty, and dirty, and swear, and cut yourself, and just generally have a great time.
In the mornings, you write your dissertation. During the day, you teach your courses. And in the afternoons, evenings, and weekends, you build farm tables.
To your horror, you break a classic Powermatic 66 table saw in the shop. You were ripping some 3/4 inch maple plywood for a sideboard, and you made the mistake of attempting to pull the cut stock backwards along the saw blade. If you’ve ever used a table saw, you are probably wincing now, and unsurprised to learn that the blade grabbed the wood, and after unsuccessfully trying to kick it back (it was too heavy), the blade stalled. Before you could manually shut off the machine, it stopped.
Frustrated, you try the inside breaker. Nothing. You try removing the panel covering the power controls, and resetting the switch inside. Nothing. You try opening the motor, searching for another switch. Nothing. You try looking for a blown fuse. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
This is a piece of top-of-the-line equipment, worth several thousand dollars. Heart in your throat, you confessed to your patron. Now, you reason, you were going to be in debt to him for several times the amount of money you could expect to make in a year of building tables.
His response? “Don’t worry about it. It’s part of the life of a woodworker.” All at once, you go from paralyzed to liberated. It’s part of the life of a woodworker! You will make mistakes, and you may even break things.
And so what? Things may be mended.
Sometimes when your writer and professor buddies come over and see things you’ve built, they look at you like you’d look at a dog who can juggle. Once, another English Ph.D expressed amazement that “an English major” could actually build something functional. Another (musician) friend said aloud that the pickup truck outside couldn’t possibly be yours because, “it has wood in it.”
Still, you’ve never liked the idea that if you’re an “English person” it means you’re functionally useless in everyday life. You write songs and occasionally publish essays, fiction, and poems, but you can also change a tire, cook gnocchi with spinach, prosciutto, and blue cheese sauce, play a passable clawhammer banjo and a mean piano solo, paint a beach scene in watercolor, paddle a canoe solo, and build a farm table from scratch.
You don’t say all that to brag. You think those skills are probably within reach of anyone who really wants to learn them. But we live in a world of things, and “English people” — word people — live in that same world with others who play football, dig ditches, balance checkbooks, paint sheds, mow lawns and plant flowers, walk dogs, and catch fish.
You don’t build tables because it works out, time-to-money-wise. You are making less money building tables than you would making flipping burgers, if you parse it out hourly. Nor are you maximizing your training. You could be making more money doing freelance editing, or writing, or even adjunct teaching.
You do it because you need to put your hands on something real.
You need to learn.
You need varnish fumes.
You need to challenge yourself.
You need splinters.
To be continued…
