Sunday Essay: Sundays

Painting by my pal Douglas Moulden. You can find his work at https://www.douglasmoulden.com/

   
                                                                   Sundays	

         Oh, blesséd Sundays.  I never worked on a Sunday and for that I have a deep fondness for them that is not religious in any way.  It was the one day I could depend on to rest.  Every other day of the week could assault me by 6 am, either with a phone call from a subcontractor telling me that the concrete wouldn’t arrive until afternoon or the lumber truck was stuck in a ditch.  Sometimes I would have to stop by a carpenter’s house and shag him out of bed because I knew he was going to be still drunk or working on a dandy hangover, either one was fun to mess with over breakfast.  “Hey Tommy, you gonna want the grits with butter and honey or the biscuits and gravy?”  He’d look at you with death in his eyes, slurp hard on his coffee and the rest of us would laugh good and long.
	On Sundays, I didn’t have to babysit anybody’s hangover except mine.  I didn’t have to spend a bunch of time explaining why to get the header lined up before punching nails into it.  They may have bitched endlessly about tearing apart a header but I always paid for their time to learn these lessons, sometimes over and over.  I would warn them, that they get two fuck ups and after that, it was just like baseball.  Nobody gets four strikes.  I couldn’t afford to keep them on the crew if they couldn’t learn a simple lesson.  It was jobsite Darwinism.  The ones who caught on fast and quickly got up to speed, the ones who began to anticipate the next move or the next problem, they got more money, more responsibility.  The other ones walked off the job bitching up a storm about unfairness but I wasn’t being unfair.  I was saving them time and me money. 
         Go someplace else, I’d say.  Try washing dishes or short order cook, maybe drive a truck in a lumberyard.  But if you don’t have decent math skills, some geometry in your brain, quick hands, an iron back, indefatigable arms and sharp eyes for danger before it gets dangerous, you gotta go somewhere else before you get hurt or hurt me by leaving a hammer on top of an 8 foot step ladder.  How about you don’t lean a stack of 2x10’s against a wall so they can start sliding toward me and knock me out?  You told me that you had put two 16 pennies in those braces but I only see one 8 penny nail.  Are you trying to kill someone on this job?  Jesus, I could not fire a man any faster than saying, “Please get off my job and don’t touch anything on your way OUT!”  That exclamation mark indicates my top lung shouting which was always a quality I treasured in my voice.  It came in handy when backing up trucks or bringing a bundle of lumber down from a crane and it was necessary when I saw a ladder set up stupidly or a skill saw blade guard jammed open with a shim.
         On Sundays no one was trying to kill me or steal from me.  I would sleep late, maybe to 7:30 or 8:00, having dreamt of taking my arms off with my work jacket and hanging them up on that bent railroad hook that could take any weight you put on it.  I think it was the quiet that I treasured most on Sunday.  No generator, no compressor, no nail gun cracking away while a skill saw shrieked and radio blared another “Somebody Done Somebody Wrong Song”.
         It was hard for your love of wood to survive what we did to lumber every day.   We had to brutalize those 2x4’s, slam them into position, beat them and bend them as quickly as possible or that dollar per hour shrank away from us as our hours per square foot grew.  I remember jobs when everyone got paid but me.  I also remember in high school, cheerleaders urging me to pin my opponent when he had me in a half Nelson and I had not a prayer.  Some jobs just got you by the ass and didn’t let go until you set that last door and got your last draw. 
         I plonked down in the truck, breathed the sigh to end all sighs, propped the check on the pulled-out, never-used ashtray and wondered how else I could make a living.   But I knew I was kidding myself.  I was hopelessly in love with the feel of wood, to say nothing of her smell and the infinite ways her grain had of soothing me. I had fallen under her spell so long ago, when I was playing with blocks.  I loved it even then, the sound they made, clock-clock, as I stacked them and marveled at the tiny header I had made and what weight it could bear.
         Even with the few crap jobs, the very few I lost money on, the occasional idiots I had to work with or the rare conniving subs, I never really lost my love.  It was strained at times, like a marriage, but I never lost it.  On Sundays I could cuddle my wife until the boys came charging in.  It didn’t take long to recharge my batteries because the pull was so strong.  After a week’s vacation, my hands were indescribably itchy and I began to lay them onto random pieces of wood.  I would stroke them slowly, like petting a dog, maybe run my fingers across the grain just to say hi. 
         Today is Sunday.  I am retired but tomorrow my son and I will be building shelving and I am looking forward to it.  It’s exactly like hanging out with a very old friend, a friend from childhood. Now, a small part of me thinks Sunday is a little too long.

The coat on the left, for cold weather, is my nearly 30 year old indestructible Filson, on the right is made by Duluth Trading, back when they made good stuff.

I used to gather drywall buckets of railroad spikes for my students to make stuff out of. This was some old hay wagon wood and spikes bent and pounded out of the forge for the kids to look at as an example of taking old, free things and making something good.