The Beauty of Building

The grandkids were transfixed watching our friend Allan pile mortar onto new bricks as he transformed a line of collapsed bricks into a rustic footer for a new wall. This wall will be one of two needed to enclose the space below our sunporch, turning an area used for bikes, garden buckets, and a grill into my new office!

To be fair, Hank’s motive for launching this project is straightforward. He’s banking that Professor Carol will get tons more work done in an enclosed space, rather than perched at the kitchen table where everything derails her.

He’s right. I am highly distractable. Even when no one is around, I distract myself, working in fits and starts, darting from the top paragraph of one page to the final footnote of another. I read several books at a time and rarely manage to sit more than 30 minutes before flinging myself into something physical, be it vacuuming, hauling loads of laundry, or watering the garden.

A memorable day in my life came decades ago when I toured Chartwell, the manorial home of Winston Churchill. His glorious study, packed with books and ringed with leaded windows opening onto a picture-perfect lawn, was also ringed with polished wooden ledges that held a host of books and writings he worked on simultaneously. He apparently stood as he worked, too, moving from project to project. At last I found a role model to justify my methodology!

But I digress. Hank’s friendship with the aforementioned Allan harkens back to their mutual stretch in the Army. I can imagine them, two young, smart guys, both terrific musicians assigned to the same Army band, responding to the experience of being stationed in West Germany. Their minds were caught between the richness of the culture around them and the shadow of worry as to when their band might be shipped out to Vietnam.

In the decades since the army, Allan and Hank have kept an active friendship. At one point when we visited Allan, I remember marveling at the way he had gutted and rebuilt an older house into a ravishing showplace. It never occurred to me that one day he would offer his talents to us.

Hank and I don’t do building projects. We build publications, proposals, and courses. The ten years we spent on our Texas ranch raising goats forced us to pick up new skills, but they had more to do with tractors, cutting hay, and dehorning goats. Okay, there was that one goat shed Hank and the children built, but, after that, the list gets thin.

Yet, here we are, our lawn buzzing with activity, piles of lumber, stands of windows and doors, and Hank and Allan, dedicating themselves to a concentrated set of workdays. The rickety deck has come down (we’re lucky it didn’t fall down). The framing for the office walls is going up. And Hank, who ordinarily pours over performance picks and book designs, has been ripping out yucky boards and chiseling away foam insulation.

People build and remodel all the time. Still, in today’s era, fewer folks know how to do practical things. The skills required to plumb, lay tile, wire circuits, or install sheetrock used to be taught by grandfather to father to son. How many children in American even witness the execution of such skills today?

Yet, amidst all of the despairing news about higher education, one thing delights me. Trade schools are coming back. Whisperings of new institutes devoted to the trades, as well as the recasting of old ones, seem everywhere these day . . . and just in the nick of time. The retirement and death of the last generation raised at dad’s knee is well upon us. Few young people have stepped up to take their places. If you’ve tried to hire someone lately, you know what I mean.

Some of these new institutions are taking on a decidedly “classical” bent. The practical training they offer is woven together with an emphasis on ethics and character building. Some programs incorporate studies in the humanities or require a commitment to mission work wherein the new skills will be honed to benefit others.

The key to it all is dropping the stigma that settled on those studying the essential trades after the Second World War. What a foolish stigma! When your sewerage starts backing up on a Friday night, whom will you greet with more enthusiasm: the weary plumber who shows up an hour after you call? Or your 20-year-old majoring in Sensitivity Studies, pulling into the driveway for a weekend visit?

My brother long ago earned a bachelor’s degree in Marine Biology with the intention of becoming a Marine Biologist. His life was changed by the Vietnam War. He ended up a math teacher, but still longed for a connection to the underwater world. While in high school, he had spent summers laboring for a family friend who was an electrician, so he  decided to formalize that skill and earn an electrician’s license. That license enabled him to earn significant extra money to fuel extensive summer dive trips to the most exotic spots you can imagine.

His, of course, is just one story. But why shouldn’t our children grow up to master math and welding? Art history and carpentry? Indeed these things overlap more than we realize. Shouldn’t the skills of the hand be enriched by the capacity of the heart?

Furthermore, as more parents question whether the chaotic state of today’s universities merits a lifetime of debt for their starry-eyed teens, we can expect, and rejoice, in the entrepreneurial spirit that is reclaiming and recasting “Trade Schools.” These institutions are taking as their models the ancient respect for human labor and ingenuity, skills that are both essential and palliative for mankind.

So take heart, and hand. And if you are at one of those life junctions with your children, think broadly about what next step makes the most sense. It could be that equipping your children with abilities sorely needed in this world might be the key to their real, ongoing education and service to this world.