The workbench

Originally published 10 August 2008

Our fam­i­ly home in Chat­tanooga was built in 1941, and like most oth­er homes in the city was heat­ed by coal. It had a coal bin in the base­ment, and a big gal­va­nized fur­nace with cast iron doors and grates and air ducts sprout­ing from the top like the hair of Medusa. Keep­ing it going dur­ing the win­ter required a lot of shov­el­ing, and rid­dling, and haul­ing ash­es. If the darn thing went out, get­ting it start­ed again was a chore. All this my father bore with about as much grace as you could expect of a young man with a new house and a grow­ing family.

Then, at war’s end, came gas, and a fur­nace con­ver­sion. Per­haps no sin­gle tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment of the last cen­tu­ry made a greater change in a man’s life than the auto­mat­ic gas or oil-burn­ing furnace.

But for me — ten years old — the real import of the con­ver­sion was the workbench.

My father ripped out the coal bin and used the lum­ber to build a work­bench. A real doozy of a six-foot­er, with a dou­ble-planked top and a back­board for hang­ing tools and an over­hang­ing shelf under which could be tacked the screw­tops of two dozen peanut but­ter jars con­tain­ing screws, nails, wash­ers, nuts, and bolts.

Even at that young age I was astute enough to know that the work­bench ful­filled an ambi­tion of my engi­neer father, the ulti­mate expres­sion of secure, mid­dle-class, sub­ur­ban life. All that time spent shov­el­ing and rid­dling and haul­ing ash­es could now be spent fid­dling and tin­ker­ing and mend­ing. My quin­tes­sen­tial mem­o­ry of my father is of him hunched over the work­bench with white sleeves rolled to his elbows, his tie tucked into the but­toned front of his shirt, a dis­man­tled lamp or toast­er on the work­top, a sol­der­ing iron siz­zling in his hand.

Here are some things that were essen­tial to a good workbench:

—It had to be in a base­ment or garage or oth­er space sep­a­rate from the house. It was an altar for male litur­gies, like the sanc­tu­ary of the church a place where women were exclud­ed, an escape from the per­plex­ing entan­gle­ments of matrimony.

—On the shelf above the work­bench there must be a pile of Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics and Pop­u­lar Sci­ence mag­a­zines, with their tips for home improve­ments, Sat­ur­day projects, and news of inno­va­tions for the tin­ker­er — mul­ti-tipped screw­drivers, leaf-proof gut­ters, self-rosin­ing sol­der, jigs, rigs, and thingam­abobs. Here too was a vision of the future that the base­ment mechan­ic could aspire to at least in dream: ocean-going hov­er­craft, fold­ing-wing air­planes for the fam­i­ly garage, radio trans­mis­sions with pic­tures, colonies on the moon.

—At the cor­ner of the work­bench there must be a vise. The right vise must be nei­ther too bulky nor too del­i­cate; it was an exten­sion of one’s own hands. My father had a dandy, with shiny steel jaws, that he kept nice­ly lubri­cat­ed; you could open or close it with a twirl of your lit­tle finger.

—The loca­tion of tools on the back­board must be marked by paint­ed sil­hou­ettes of the tools — ham­mer (claw and ball peen), hack­saw, pli­ers, screw­drivers, brace, rasp, wrench­es, etc. — a shad­ow tool kit.

—Wood chis­els were kept wrapped in oiled cloth. A whet­stone in its home­made wood­en cra­dle kept the blades shiny and sharp.

—Some­where near­by there must be a cab­i­net with a big draw­er in which any­thing could be thrown that did­n’t have an assigned place on the work­bench. Noth­ing was dis­card­ed. Odd screws, clips, springs, brack­ets, bits of met­al, lengths of wire, bro­ken tools, slight­ly bent nails. You nev­er knew when you’d need exact­ly that thing.

—There must always to a project pushed to the back of the bench at an inde­ter­mi­nate state of com­ple­tion. A pouty wife might lock her­self in the bath­room; a sulk­ing hus­band need­ed a more man­ly retreat.

That work­bench in our base­ment was my refuge too as I entered ado­les­cence, a place to learn and hone my mas­cu­line skills — mechan­i­cal, elec­tri­cal, plumb­ing, wood­work­ing — and sub­due my hor­mon­al frus­tra­tions in a balm of sol­der splat­ters and saw­dust. Yes, it was a male thing, hard, and bright, and suf­fused with the smells of burn­ing rosin, wood chips, and oil, guar­an­teed to hold at bay — for at least an hour or so — the soft­er, gen­tler puz­zle­ments that attached them­selves to the fem­i­nine, nev­er, ever to be understood.

My father’s work­bench served me well. I learned how to repair an elec­tric iron, change a wash­er in a faucet, and stay mar­ried to the same woman for fifty years. The sur­face of a good work­bench is akin to the bench in a sci­ence lab; it is a place apart, dis­en­tan­gled from the com­plex­i­ties of the emo­tion­al life, where one can take apart bits and pieces of the nat­ur­al world and put them back togeth­er again in work­ing order, in the process learn­ing how the world works.