The Work Bench

by David M. Howell
©2004 (From the collection of short stories: “Not In Your Life”)


Through the weathered metal screen, lightning flashed on the black southern horizon. Somewhere over South Bend or Elkhart, Indiana a storm was raging. I sat on my father’s lap watching this magnificent performance too far off to hear the crescendos and thought how lucky the people were who lived under the lightning to be in the front row. My father and I relegated to the edge of the arena could only catch glimpses of nature’s grand symphony.

I was all of seven at the time putting my father at just 36 years old. A young man. And here he sat at his bedroom window with its chipping white lead-based paint explaining the phenomena of lightning to a child.

Storms have always held a special fascination for me. My mother tells the story of my birth on a blizzard so fierce my father couldn’t get out of the driveway to take her to the hospital. I was born at home. This very home. In this very room. Whether snow or rain, I can sit and watch them with equal enthusiasm. There’s an energy to a storm as it spills the contents of its life accenting and modifying the landscape beneath it. Not unlike birds over freshly washed cars or patio furniture.
Storms were a part of my father’s life. He worked a full-time job and managed the growing acreage of our farm. Along the way he and my mother raised seven children. It seemed that there was always something growing in and around our house.

My brother Tom and I would follow him to the remote corners of the fields. We’d sit atop fifty pound bags of 12-24-12 fertilizer and sacks of orange-coated seed stacked neatly in the bed of the beige GMC pickup as our father relentlessly passed over the freshly turned soil. Dust kicked up as if to get out of the way of his John Deere tractor and four-row planter. Corn in one field, soybeans in another. He was his own storm leaving the barren ground renewed with life and purpose. That’s what he did. That’s what he was good at. He planted seeds and then nurtured the crop into something of substance.
He did that with his children as well. Across my family there are three teachers, an engineer, a paralegal, a state trooper and a writer. That’s a good harvest and skillful crop rotation.

****

The phone rang just before eight on the morning of June 3rd. It was my sister, Kathy.

“Dad’s Dead,” she said. Two words that differ only by a single vowel now separated our father from the rest of our lives.
You don’t think much about who you are until such moments. I, of course, asked the necessary questions. When, how. who knows, who should I call? But the real question I wanted to ask but couldn’t was, why?

My father had lived exactly 75 years and one month the morning he died. But to me, he will always be that young, 36-year old man. He will always be there with a silly comment or the opposing view of a contrarian. He will always seem to have the right answers. Even though we’ve grown apart and our worlds are so different. I know that the fears and struggles he experienced as he looked out that window so long ago are the same fears and struggles I face today. On this moving sidewalk of life, all of us get on and off at different times but while we’re on board, we see the same things, share similar experiences. It’s our vantage point that shades our perspectives.

I gathered myself up, called my mother and listened with the absent mind of a child. There are some things in life you hear but don’t totally comprehend. Like the far off lightening, I could see the storm but could not feel the storm. The reality of the last 40- minutes had not percolated to my consciousness. I talked to my mother as if I was gathering facts for ad copy.

Heading east the Skyway out of Chicago on an hour later I contemplated the why. We are creatures of superstitions. We live our lives through myths, metaphors and allegories. Everything has to mean something. The Titanic was built by professionals. The Ark by armatures. We constantly look for parallels and connections often at the risk of ignoring the coincidence of any given situation.

It’s our superstitions that give us permission to fool ourselves. They provide comforting answers to the question of “why?” This self-imposed structure give us the latitude to move on. Breathing room in the confined claustrophobic isolation of our emotions.

This is the reason babies are born all wrinkly and pudgy. So they can be molded. Shaped and crafted into an individual with programmed superstitions and beliefs that act like water wings when we wade to the deep end of life. It has to be a labor of love because who would spend all that time and energy perfecting something that’s only going to disagree with you later. A sculptor can take confidence in that his work will never argue a political or religious philosophy. It won’t break curfew or listen to “that music.” It just sits there as a demonstration of skill and ability.

My father was such an artisan. With his own hands he molded and transformed seven of us from infant piles of people stuff into blocks of solid independent sometimes secure human beings.

****

At my folk’s house I sat with my mother and youngest sister, JoAnn as the morning events were retold. Mom waking on cue to make the morning coffee while dad slept in. When it was time for him to join her in the kitchen she crept up the stairs to wake him.

When she couldn’t she called my sister who was there before the first police car could arrive. We talked about “things” when my brother Tom was going to get in from Houston. When Kathy would be there. What arrangements needed to be made. All the while I stood at the kitchen counter waiting for my dad to come into the room, sit in his favorite chair and tell us what to do.

It was all so surreal. You can imagine yourself dealing with life issues but when you face them they become the dark storm clouds standing at the edge of reality. The only shelter available is memories—those moments etched into our soul. Like visiting a familiar place, they act as havens of reflection. We uses them to direct us in times of stress, when making difficult decisions, they confirm we’re doing the right thing.

Memories aren’t all institutional. Some are just postcards of our life. Fond reminders that we’re not alone. That we’ve shared something, a moment, a laugh or even a tear. These are the escape hatches I lurch to now. Remembering my father playing kick-the-can with us one August evening. Firing up the bright lights of his Super 8 camera to capture the excitement of Christmas morning. Or just watching him pass the picture window of our tiny living room as he pulled up the driveway returning from work hoping he brought home some Wrigley’s Spearmint gum. Memories are the paint on life’s canvas.
The phone kept ringing distracting my mother from our conversation driving her back the event that now stood as a directional change in our lives. TJ, JoAnn’s son was just learning to walk so he alternated between crawling and stumbling away. Both of which drew her attention to the management of the next generation. Left alone, I sought refuge in my dad’s workshop.

He’d spend hours here in the basement fixing, building or just tinkering with things. The palm-oiled tools now rested long in cobwebs. They have sat idle for some years. Though inanimate, they longed for the leathery grasp of his well-exercised hands. They will never be used with such precision ever again. And yet proof of their experience is not in the worn smooth handles or scared workbench, but in the bookshelves, cabinets and very soul of the house. You cannot take the craftsman out of a creation. There is the soul.

It was here amid these oxidized implements of creation that I came to realize the gift that my father carved into the landscape of his life. Us.

What greater achievement can one man claim then to have given life. With diligence and patience he sat unselfishly tooling our beliefs and behavior, slowly crafting each one of us into the work of art we are today.

There are no monuments that can compare to my brothers or sisters. They are the legacy of a life’s achievement without equal.

As I sat on my father’s lap watching that distant July storm I was really sitting on his workbench. He wasn’t explaining the lightning, he was cultivating a passion for knowledge. I was just one of seven do-it-yourself projects he worked tirelessly on throughout his life.

The last time I saw my father was at my brother Jim’s wedding a month earlier. We gathered around the hotel dinning room to have breakfast as a family. It’s been at almost thirty years since we all sat together. There were thirteen of us with extended families creating a three-generation timeline. My father joked with us all. Smiling, his inner smile, at the masterful display of his workmanship. I’m sure, watching us interact, he felt the same tug of pride as Michelangelo when looking up at the completed Sistine Chapel or as Mozart when he heard an allegro played for the first time.

Thinking back on it, I now understand there is no “why.” In the search for answers we conjure the “why” to avoid the answer we already know. Because. We experience death because we experience life. They are inseparable. None of us are getting out of this alive. Death is a stage, like pregnancy before birth only the gestation period is longer. Yet we seek to explain it in order to comfort ourselves. To appease the superstitions. We ask why to understand the mark drawn in the sands of time. Because solves the unsolvable. It’s every child’s answer when escape is futile.

“Why can’t I hear the thunder?” I ask from my father’s lap.

“Because the storm is far away.”

“Will it come here?” I ask in anticipation.

“No…not this time.”

“Why?”

“Because,” my father said not taking his eye off the horizon. “Storms are random…but eventually, one will find you. That’s nature’s way.”

Leaving the workshop, I headed back upstairs. My sister Kathy and her daughter Erica have arrived.

Half way up the stairs I passed the bows and arrows that my father once used as sport. He’d set up bales of straw in the yard and taught Tom and I how to shoot. The now unstrung bows made me think again, why? But this time my father answered me. Because, I heard my father whisper. That’s nature’s way.

I knew he’d planted into the texture of my soul the ability to weather this storm. I’m thankful to harbor the spirit of such a craftsman.