All the Confidence in the World

It was sometime in the first week of August of 1990, and I was a guest of the Commandant of the Marine Corps, on a small island off the coast of South Carolina for what they euphemistically called “Recruit Training”, and what the rest of the world called Boot Camp.

It was a hot and muggy day and the combination of the physical exertion and the extreme heat and the overwhelming humidity left your uniform soaking wet all the time. Then you would get chaffing on your inner thighs from the wet uniform always rubbing, and if you were not careful, you could end up with an, um, inner-thigh infection. I went through baby powder like it was water in the desert.

After a long day of classes and physical activities and then marching hither and yon and the evening meal, we came back to the barracks and took a super-fast shower, and then enjoyed our daily hour of “free time”. The name “free time” might conjure up images of playing poker and telling jokes, but alas, we were not the Air Force. Instead, we were to speak in low tones, write letters home, study our sacred texts, or polish our boots. And during the midst of all of this, we got mail call.

Mail call was the best. Dad had been in the service, and he knew. So my parents took it as their mission to write to me every day and to get as many people as they could to write to me. Dad used his new (remember, this is 1990) PC to make labels with my address that he blanketed our hometown with. I got a lot of kidding because I always had so many letters at mail call, but that was just jealousy.

It turns out there’s a little bit of jealousy in the best of us.

Anyway, I know it was 1990 because that is when I was at Boot Camp. And I know it was the first week of August because that was the week before we went to the rifle range, and I remember this happened right before we went. And I remember it was hot and muggy because it was always hot and muggy.

Always.

And so, this particular day, I am sitting on my footlocker at the end of my bed, in my underwear and t-shirt, polishing my boots when my name is called out and I run “with a sense of purpose” in my flip flops to the front of the squad bay and get my four letters. One of them was from Dad.

Mom would always handwrite her letters, but Dad’s were always written on his dot matrix printer. And on that night, I read the words he had never said out loud:

“I have all the confidence in the world in you. I know you can handle it. Sometimes I have not told you how proud of you I am of you. I really am. I know that sounds mushy, especially in a letter, but take it any way you want.”

I quietly got up and walked to the bathroom, where I sat in a stall and cried and cried. Because in 18 years I had never been the sort of person anyone had confidence in, and he had never told me he was proud of me.

I mean, I knew he was. He told other people he was proud of me, and they would tell me how proud of me he was. But he never told me. In later years, that changed. He told adult me any number of times, and not in a letter, but face to face.

But that was the first time. The first week of August 1990, when I was 18 years old, far from home and sent to learn how to kill people in the Marine Corps Approved Manner.

I don’t take praise well, and sometimes I wonder if it’s because it was so rare growing up. I was always the kid who had amazing grades except for the C or D in math class or the kid who read a lot but had terrible hand-to-eye coordination. Any accomplishment I had came with a caveat – always.

And so last night when my friend Amy complimented me on my writing in front of other people, my first instinct was to minimize it. To downplay it. All my old fears about imposter syndrome kick in, and I feel like any praise I am getting will inevitably come with a caveat, with an asterisk beside it, will somehow be less than genuine, or at least not the whole story.

I don’t hold it against my Dad that he didn’t know to tell me he was proud of me. He had been left fatherless in a man’s world at 7 years old, and when I was born he was but 20 himself, and children raising children is never a good recipe. They did the best they could with what they had, and again, to his credit, he worked hard to make up for it late in life.

When he knew better, he did better.

But there are some cycles it is up to us to break, so I try hard to accept praise when it’s handed out to me, hard as it is for me to believe.

But more than that, I hand out praise like it’s cotton candy at the carnival. Yes, I want to see your poems and artwork. Yes, I want to hear your dreams. Yes, I want to know what you’re working on. Yes, I want to know what your big scary plans are, how you want to change the world, or at least how you want to change your world. Even if I barely know you, I want to be your biggest fan. I see you doing hard things, and I’m damned proud of you for making it this far.

I have all the confidence in the world in you.

Knowing When To Sing

My favorite story my Dad ever told me:

Once upon a time, there was a baby bird, sitting in the nest. And like most baby birds, he wanted to fly. His mom had left him alone in the nest while she went for worms, and he ventured out, to try to fly on his own.

He leaped off the edge of his nest but plummeted down to the ground, where he was knocked unconscious. To make matters worse, it was very cold, and he was on the edge of death from exposure. 

Along came a cow, who crapped on the baby bird. The heat of the cow crap enveloped the baby bird and warmed him. Revived, the baby bird began to sing.

A cat was walking by and heard the baby bird singing. The cat grabbed the baby bird out of the cow poop and promptly ate him.

There are three morals to this story.

  1. Everyone who shits on you is not necessarily your enemy.
  2. Everyone who gets you out of shit is not necessarily your friend.
  3. If you are warm and happy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth shut.

 


I’m going out of town for a few days to see an old friend, and will be largely offline until Wednesday of next week. I’ll see you then. 

The Journal

My Dad was a quiet man. He seldom raised his voice. He virtually never cursed.

And he was an intensely private man. You would never know who he voted for – you might suspect, but you would not hear it from him. He never, ever, put a bumper sticker on any car we owned.

He shunned the spotlight. His goal was to be both indispensable and invisible, content to do his work well and sure it would shake out in the end. As he told me once, “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”

He probably had undiagnosed ADHD, I am diagnosed, as is my niece, his granddaughter, and it is hereditary. And he bore lots of the signs, if you knew what to look for. And for many of us who have this diagnosis and yet manage any degree of effectiveness, it is because we have developed coping mechanisms.

And one of Dad’s coping mechanisms was his journal. We didn’t really know it existed. I mean, Mom knew he kept notes of things – sometimes she would come in the room and he would be typing on his phone, and if she asked what he was up to, he would say, “Just writing something down before I forget it.”

It was a simple program he kept on his phone, where most days, he would put anything he wanted to remember later. I found it when he died, when we were going through his cell phone. From July of 2013 until two days before he died, there were notes for nearly every day, and some days had multiple entries. Sometimes there were multiple paragraphs, and other days merited a single sentence.

On July 20, 2013 he changed the oil in the tractor, and there was 695 hours on the engine. On August 25th of 2013 he wrote “Hugh Jr was nearly arrested in Raleigh yesterday for feeding the homeless.” For their 48th wedding anniversary, he noted they ate Chinese food at Hunan’s, and another entry that day mentioned he topped off the freon on the AC. They would rent cars to go on trips out of the state, and I know now that in November of 2017, they rented a 2017 Ford Fusion Hybrid that got 43 MPG on the trip to see Mom’s family in Oklahoma.

There were notes related to work – contracts he had signed; purchase agreements he had entered into. The weather figured prominently, as did the grandchildren. We know how much the drill he bought at the pawnshop cost, the interest rate on the truck loan he had been quoted, that Lowes screwed up his order for a new dryer for the house in 2016.

If these seem innocuous, that is largely because I am sharing the non-personal ones, but you get the point. He recorded birthdays and what gifts he bought, where they ate dinner when he and mom went to town, major news events. He noted (without comment) both the election of Trump and the removal of the Confederate emblem on the state flag of Mississippi, the record low temperatures in the winter of 2014, the time my brother’s son was the scripture reader in church, along with the notation that he did a good job.

In short, they were the record of how he spent the last seven years of his life. And it was a tremendous gift to us, even if he had no reason to expect anyone but him would ever see it.

I downloaded the file to my laptop, and the formatting was horrible as a result, but I spent the last six months or so, in odd snatches of time, cleaning it up, and then had it bound for Mom. I gave it to her for Christmas this year.

I don’t know that I really needed to know that Dad had a coupon for Taco Bell that day in 2015, or that the belt for the lawnmower in 2018 cost him $34, or that when the tornado hit our county in 2015 and he worked 3 days straight on virtually no sleep that he kept a record of which reporters he talked to, but I’m glad I know those things now. I feel like I know him in a different way than I did before. There were no revelations, but lots of confirmations. Countless times as I was working on the formatting, I would read an entry and find myself nodding my head, as if I saw that coming.

So, one of the habits I have now is that I put Evernote on my phone, and every morning I open a note with today’s date, and throughout the day I jot down anything I want to remember, in either sense of the word – things I need to have a note of, or memories I don’t want to lose.

We don’t have kids, so I don’t know who will read it, or if anyone ever will. But after seeing Dad’s journal, and the gift it was to us, it just made sense.

Rituals Hold Us Together

In the Before Times, I used to travel to New York City a great deal, and a thing I love to do when alone in a different place is to explore its churches. I’m weird like that. And Manhattan has some amazing churches.

In the church world, churches that have a lot of order and structure to their service (imagine robes, chanting, and incense) are called “High” churches, and churches that do not (imagine a preacher in jeans behind a lectern) are “Low” churches, and most churches find themselves on a spectrum between those two poles. I grew up in a “Low” church environment – my people tended to distrust things like written prayers and creeds and robes.

So anyway, most of the churches I would explore in Manhattan were High churches, which always felt like a different world to me. And sometimes, there would be a service going on when I was exploring, and so I would watch. And on the particular day I want to tell you about, I was in a large Episcopal church that was mostly empty of people when I walked in, but people slowly began to trickle in and sit down in front of the altar, and so I sat in the back of the room to watch.

It turns out they were there to baptize a baby. And the couple and the godparents went up to the front, and the priest came out in his robes, and on the front row was what were obviously the grandparents, or maybe even great grandparents, as they were very frail. And on the end of the row against the wall was an elderly lady who was obviously in some sort of cognitive decline so severe as to be nonverbal.

I tried not to stare, but I found her fascinating. Because while she was obviously confused by her surroundings, she did not miss a cue in the service. When the priest began the Lord’s Prayer, she mouthed along to it in perfect timing, despite the fact that 30 seconds before she appeared to not know where she was. It was as if the ritual of the decades of recitation had worn a groove in her brain that the dementia could not erase.

Yesterday, my mom and brothers came to my house for our Christmas celebration, which we did a week later than normal because of some scheduling problems. It was the first Christmas we celebrated together as a family since Dad died (we couldn’t gather in 2020 because it was before the vaccines were available). His absence was constantly noticed, of course, and his name came up perhaps 50 times in the four hours or so we were together.

I have been dreading it for weeks – not seeing my family, who I love – but the shadow that would be over the gathering with Dad’s absence. But yesterday I realized a thing I had known, but not formulated before: Rituals hold us together.

We ate the foods we had eaten when Dad was alive. My nephew, the family pray-er, said Grace before the meal, like he did when Dad was alive. We sat in the living room after the meal and passed out presents, the way we did when Dad was alive. We told stories to the younger generations of our childhood, the way we did when Dad was alive. In other words, it was a lot like every single Christmas we had when Dad was alive – but Dad wasn’t alive.

It’s not that he wasn’t missed – he was tremendously missed. But the rituals we have developed over time gave us structure and routine that was independent of Dad being there. The rituals gave us things to hold onto, so when we didn’t know what to do, we just did the thing we normally do.

The rituals held us together.

I think about the rituals that we have in our cultures: Easter and Christmas and Passover and Ramadan. Harvest festivals. Graduations. Baptisms. Bris.  Bar Mitzvah. The recitations that give us structure: The Apostles Creed, The Shema, The Lord’s Prayer, The Pledge to the Flag.

The times may be good or bad, the fortunes around us rise or fall, but the rituals persist, and adapt, and sometimes shift around the edges, but remain fixed points in a changing, fluctuating universe.

The rituals hold us together.

Keeper of the Pictures

I am the keeper of the family photos. I think most families have someone like that – I have a dusty suitcase filled with snapshots of people I do not know.

I also have a hard drive full of photos Dad had started scanning, as well as the pictures from his iCloud account I downloaded when he died. There is no organization at all.

My dad liked to take pictures.  Of everything.

When he was young, his pictures were more artistic. He wouldn’t have used these terms, but they were his creative outlet – his art, if you will. We were poor as dirt until I was a teenager, so money spent on film and developing was money that took from other things.

As he got older and digital cameras became common, he moved more into documenting in addition to creating. So I have countless pictures of some store he visited on a road trip. Or a piece of woodworking he admired and thought he might want to try some day. Or receipts he needed to submit for reimbursement.

I have like 30 Gig of pictures I need to sort though, most of which aren’t important at all. It’s a little overwhelming.

But I get the urge, sometimes, and I decide that the first thing I will do is just delete the photos that nobody will ever, ever need.

Pictures of receipts. Odometers. Random signs. Such as that.

Last night, I got such an urge and was clicking through them, deleting with abandon, when I came across a picture that stopped me cold.

It was a row of bottles of juice of various kinds: Orange, grape, apple. No context. No captions. Totally random.

But it wasn’t random to me. I know what’s going on here.

A thing you have to know for this to make sense is to know that Mom was in a bad car wreck 25 years or so ago, and it hurts her to stand for long periods of time. So, when there was something where you had to stand in line, often Dad would do it for her.

I said no context, but that’s not totally true. It was one picture in the middle of a bunch of pictures from about 10 years ago, when he and Mom went on a trip to Texas for a family reunion for Mom’s family. And the picture before this one was of a serving table full of food, like you would see at a potluck.

So what this picture tells me is that he stood in line to get them some food, and when it came time to pick a drink, he didn’t know what she would have wanted. So he took this picture to take back to her so she would know what juice options were available.

It’s the most Dad thing ever. He wouldn’t have wanted to make a mistake. And Mom isn’t predictable like that. So he took a picture so he could let her pick.

I have seen this exact scenario played out dozens of times. I can write the scene; I know it so well. He was so kind he wouldn’t want to take a chance on getting something this small wrong.

And just like that, I realized I wasn’t ready to delete this picture. Or any pictures.

So I close the folder one more time. I’ll try again later.

Maybe.

Grief (not a poem)

I don’t know how to explain
That it isn’t just that he died.
It’s that the world I lived in died too.
Because I have never lived in a world
That didn’t include him.
I don’t know how to explain
That sometimes the grief washes over me
And then I can’t breathe, I can’t function.
So the report doesn’t get written, the form not filed
And my dreams get deferred.
I don’t know how to explain
That it isn’t your fault I’m distant.
It’s not you – it’s me. It’s very much me.
I am learning how to live in this new world.
And I don’t like it here.
I don’t know how to explain it. So I don’t.

Dad and the pocket knife

One winter in the early 2000’s, I was practically penniless. I had gone through a career change, giving up my gig as a “Financial Adviser” in order to save my soul. A nasty divorce ensued, and I had been legally homeless for a few months earlier that year, when I lived in the backroom of the small (failing) bookstore I bought as my “second act”. I moved in with my girlfriend as a way of surviving that winter.

She invited my parents to Christmas dinner that year, without telling me she was going to. I was pissed – largely because my parents and I were going through an awkward phase after my divorce, but not the least of which was I had wanted to avoid having to buy them the sort of present you open in front of other people. You know – nice ones.

I honestly forget what I ended up buying Mom, but I knew Dad, and when in doubt, Dad was always happy to get a tool or pocketknife. I scrimped and saved, and believe me when I tell you I had no money, so I was waiting as long as possible in the year to buy him something. You would not believe how scarce money was for me that year.

Finally, 2 days before Christmas, I went into the small hardware store near our house to look at knives. I had, unfortunately, waited too late, and all the lower priced knives were sold out. But there was a large yellow handled Case XX sitting in the display case that was about $60, which was about $20 more than I would have paid elsewhere and about $35 more than I had planned on spending.

But when I turned 15, I had bought a hunting knife with my birthday money, and I had bought a Case XX, because Dad told me what a good brand it was. Dad told me at the time he always wanted a Case XX knife, but he couldn’t justify the money.

So anyway, here we are, some 17 years later, and I was feeling a lot like a failure and had just watched my life fall apart and everything was turning to crap, but I could buy my Dad a knife he would want and be proud of, and it would be from me.

So I bought the knife. He ooohed and awed over it at Christmas, and he was beaming. I was glowing, knowing I gave my dad something he actually wanted.

It’s been nearly 20 years since I thought about that knife. That girlfriend and I tried really hard, but it didn’t work out. Eventually I would close the store and move to NC to work out some crazy ideas I had about how we could address homelessness. It was there it all turned around for me.

And then last October, Dad died, and Easter Sunday of this year I was standing in their bedroom, going through a box of his things Mom had put aside for me to look through, and there was the yellow handled Case pocket knife.

It’s scratched up now, and the blades are worn from being run endlessly over an oilstone and there is some staining, but all of that is patina from use. You see, my Daddy not only liked my knife, but he used it.

Dad would never hurt someone’s feelings. Ever. If he hadn’t liked it, he never would have said anything, but he would have just slid it into a drawer and forgotten about it.

But no – he used it, he carried it, and obviously liked it. And now it is mine again, and it is far more valuable to me now than it was that Christmas all those years ago, and it has cost so very much for it to come back in my possession.

Indispensable and Invisible

Like many children, I ran away from home.

Not literally – I was way too chickenshit for that. I did dream of building a raft and going down the Mississippi from Memphis to New Orleans on it after reading Huckleberry Finn, but it never happened.

No, my childhood was about wanting and desiring what I did not have, and rejecting that which I did have. And so as soon as I was able, I left.

One example of this is that while I am naturally like both of my parents – my mother’s boldness and passion, my father’s introversion and peacemaking – I saw those things as flaws to overcome, rather than gifts to embrace.

Our heroes often contain what we lack. How many bullied children have looked up to Superman and dreamed that they too could save the day and be respected for their strength? Our conception of God (or gods) often does too, but that is another conversation for another day. As the meme’s say, y’all ain’t ready for that conversation.

My heroes were rich. Assertive. Full of confidence. Respected for their business acumen. Donald Trump. Lee Iacocca. Gordon Gecko.

Or strong, physically. Lee Haney. Sylvester Stallone. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I had no heroes that worked behind the scenes for systemic change, who showed up and did the work and were respected for their work ethic, their persistence, and their wisdom. That isn’t to say I did not know such people: I did, and was raised by them. But I did not see those traits as traits to be admired.

So I ran away to become strong and rich. I was a Marine and then a salesman. I was strong and if not rich, I made good money and learned that lesson many people who aspire to wealth learn – how to fake it: You lease cars you cannot afford to buy, you buy your designer suits at factory outlets, you learn enough about wine to drop tidbits into conversations at dinner in the restaurant you put on your credit card.

But this post isn’t about that – I have covered that ground elsewhere.

Even after I walked away from that life, I still tended to approach things as someone assertive and full of confidence, full of privilege and assertiveness. Like, imagine Gunnery Sergeant Hartman from Full Metal Jacket, but after he joined a contemplative order of monks.

In some sectors of the Christian Tradition, they lift up aggressive voices that conflict with the status quo and call them prophetic, and if they are not honored, they are often respected. I often got put in this camp, and thus received social recognition and reinforcement for my privilege and brashness.

It becomes an endless cycle, however, and you have to keep amping up the aggressiveness or else you risk someone else being more aggressive that you are, and thus eclipsing you and then you no longer get the social reinforcement you crave and are feeding on. And then, like Icarus, you may end up flying too close to the sun and destroy yourself in the process.

When I moved to Jackson three years ago, I was exhausted after more than a decade of being the angry prophet that vigorously defended my community’s right to exist.

Exhausted.

The last three years have been a time of rebuilding and reflecting. Of doing good work that nobody on Facebook knows about. Of building local relationships. Of learning how to actually organize people to action, instead of just making them angry. Of learning how to change things when you are not the one in charge. Of learning how to take care of myself. A time of learning how to fall in love with a place and its people.

It is not lost on me that had I embraced the models I had at home, I could have saved myself a good 25 years of striving.

After I was an adult, my Dad once told me his goal over his career had been to be both indispensable and invisible.

“Son, if the only way people know you are important is that you told them you were, then you weren’t important anyway.”

I’m trying, Dad. I’m trying.

Grief: A metaphor

It’s been a rough week.

A friend died earlier this week, very suddenly. She had overcome a lot, had provided hope to a lot of people, and now she’s gone.

I’m not quite ready to talk about that yet.

But it stirred up some thoughts about Dad’s death last year.

A friend who lost her dad a few years ago and I were talking this morning about Dad’s death, and she asked how I was coping.

I told her that if was as if when he died a piece of glass shattered, with sharp edges and jagged pieces everywhere. And for weeks, these pieces just tumbled around, slicing and stabbing. It was really bad.

But as time went on, they rubbed up against each other, and eventually the edges wore smooth. They are still there, easily observable, but for the most part, they are softer, less abrasive, almost beautiful, like sea glass.

But every once in a while, you find a sharp edge. It catches you by surprise when it happens.

It happens less often than it did. But it still happens.

My workshop

On the 12th day, I’m grateful for my workshop.

When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time with my dad’s Aunt, Louise. Her husband, Lonnie, had died right before I was born, and so he was someone whose shadow loomed large in my childhood, but who I never met.

Uncle Lonnie was Louise’s second husband (y’all gonna make me devote a whole one of these to her before I’m done), after she divorced the drunk sign painter. Lonnie worked for Ford Motor company as a machinist, and had a good union job with benefits, but the thing that made him remarkable was that he was also a mechanical genius.

I don’t say that lightly – there were cars in the 60’s that rolled off Ford’s assembly line due to his patents (well, that Ford owned, that whole work for hire thing, you know). He wired the houses of pretty much everyone I knew growing up. He could plumb, do electrical, weld, build with brick, concrete or wood – he could do it all.

He had a workshop behind their house – a small 10×16 or so shed he had built, with his tools lined up above his workbench, a drill press and a lathe on the other side. And Aunt Louise told me that when he got home, he would eat supper, and then he would go out to his shop and work.

As a ten-year-old boy, I would go out to his shop when I would stay over at her house. It was dusty, having not been used since he died. The tools were gone, but the racks were still there, and so was his workbench. The lights he had wired still worked, and the fixtures he manufactured out of pickle jars still did what he had intended. It was a magical place. I would sometimes just sit there on a milk crate, soaking it in. I have, as an adult, been in gothic cathedrals and felt some of the same feeling, like I was in the presence of some higher intelligence just out of my reach.

Uncle Lonnie was the dominant man in my dad’s life after my grandfather died when Dad was 7.

My dad was a tinkerer – an inch thick but a mile wide when it came to skills. He could rebuild your engine, wire your house, fix your radio, cut down your tree, repair your air conditioner, weld a trailer, build a house. He wasn’t amazing at any of that, but he could do them all, and perhaps most importantly, he wasn’t afraid to try something he hadn’t done before.

He told me once that it had all started when he was 8 or so – his father had passed away the year before, and his mom was working at the grocery store on the corner for a dollar an hour – money was hard to come by, and there was none for frivolities. A lady at the church had a bike her daughter no longer used, and was going to throw it out – Dad took it and he and Lonnie rebuilt it.

“It was a girl’s bike, and it was in bad shape when I got it. But I didn’t have anything to lose, so I figured out how it worked, and then I asked him for help, and we fixed it. It was having that bike or have no bike, so I was motivated,” he told me once.

But Dad never had a workshop when I lived at home. We lived in a 1,000 sf home, the five of us, and there wasn’t room for things like that. And there wasn’t any money for things like that, either.

So, his projects would live on the kitchen table, or on the porch, or on the tailgate of his truck as an impromptu workbench. But he really wanted a workshop.

A few years before he died, he finally built one. He knew retirement was coming up, and he planned endlessly for what life was going to be like after he retired. He would build furniture, he would do blacksmithing – he had hundreds of pictures of pieces of furniture he saw out in the wild that he wanted to capture because he liked the way it was shaped, or fastened or was built.

But the shop just filled up with things  – projects he intended to work on in retirement – tools he got on clearance he would need in retirement – bargains on materials he would need in retirement.

My Dad was supposed to retire in June, but then the pandemic hit and he didn’t feel he could ethically leave his job as Emergency Management Director for his county at such a bad time. He died in October, from COVID.

He never got to retire, never got to build things in his shop, never got to while away an afternoon there, never got to actually use it, in any real sense of the word. His shop is nice, and a lot of thought went into it, but it doesn’t feel like anything to be in it, because he didn’t get to really make it his. It’s just a building he built.

After Dad died, I inherited some of his tools. Like Dad, I have always wanted a workshop. I always have projects going, and tools scattered everywhere and…

Then we bought a house. And a pandemic hit. And my Dad died having never used the workshop he longed for and looked forward to.

So this spring and summer, I built a workshop.

It’s small – 10×16. But I mostly use handtools, and I don’t use it for things that aren’t a workshop (like, this isn’t where the freezer or the bikes go), and so it works for me. I also like to tinker, but mostly I’m a woodcarver and small wood furniture maker, and for that it works perfectly.

In some ways it’s nicer than either Dad’s or Lonnie’s. It’s insulated, and I have a window unit air conditioner in it, and led lights and Wi-Fi and clerestory windows and a small TV and an Alexa for music. I really wish Dad could have seen it.

Mostly, I’m glad I get to use it while I’m still young enough to enjoy it. I’m glad I get to actually use it, get joy from it, and get to have a creative workspace that I don’t have to clean up when we need to set the table, a space that is mine to shape and be shaped by.

It’s not perfect yet, and in some ways is still unfinished. But most evenings after supper, I go out to the shop and work.