A Man’s Workshop
This is a picture I ripped off Facebook, from my friend Andre. He built that thing. He calls it a “KTM” though I have no idea what that means.
Impressive, huh?
Take a look at his workshop. The man knows how to build stuff. With his bare hands. He’s a tinkerer, an engineer at heart, a guy who knows how to work with his hands.
I couldn’t be more jealous.
I don’t have those muscles. I barely have muscles at all. I spend my days behind a computer, and my nights and weekends too. I can’t build shit.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling sorry for myself, I blame my father for not teaching me how to build things in a workshop. He taught me plenty of other very useful stuff (don’t worry, Dad, you did a great job) but not this.
The most I ever saw my father build with his hands was a large wooden table. He lacquered it and then used a wood-burning pen to write the nicknames of all his softball teammates on it. Skuppa-C and The Zop and The Italian Stallion. Chris Herbs even made it on that table, and Eleni Penny. It was a really cool table and I’m pretty sure he built it by hand.
Greta’s family is different. They are insane, actually. Her father and brother can take apart cars and put them back together again. I don’t think they’ve paid a mechanic a dime in the past 10 years. They all have engineering degrees and could probably have a great conversation with Andre about the work he did to rebuild his KTM. I would get bored quickly, they would talk for hours.
And it isn’t just the men in the family. Greta is 10x handier than me around the house. She does all the Mr. Fix-It stuff. I make the budget spreadsheets.
One time I overheard my kids talking about our hammer that had been left in the family room. “Why is Mommy’s hammer here?” Jack said. Can you believe that?
Maybe I need a small DIY project to get me excited? Sometime I could pick up for an hour or two on the weekends.
Maybe when we move to Atlanta I’ll build a pong table. You know, for the kids.