Workmen
Workmen were once a common sight to me. They rode on bikes, walked in bib-and-brace overalls with rule pockets sewn into the right leg by the knee. The stuff of work wasn’t played and there were no woodworking gurus because workmen were, well, real workmen. Another thing. When I shook a man’s hand back then it had grit and grip. I could feel muscle and sinew, fatness in a workman’s hand didn’t exist for me.
I think too that workmanship is a term that left with the workmen who once earned the name. Workmanship was the result of an honest man who didn’t know then what caulk was. I would say that he would hope that it never existed. Men such as this never hid their work but muttered to themselves momentarily and with grace removed a failed part and replaced it with correctness. A bad joint could happen from time to time, but no workman I ever knew fudged his work because he truly cared for the standards and also his good name was something he earned by the integrity of his own hands.
I watch a man work on a boat here in Penrhyn. It brings rest to me to watch his hands flex to task and wood take shape beneath each shaving. He owns the boatyard business by courage to go against the tide and restores wooden boats and such, builds masts, repairs decks and stuff like that that keeps them afloat. When I sit on a deck with him and he talks about boats and the new deck he’s building on his own thirty-footer, and you see the planes lying there and the saws and the chisels, I see a workman, feel his pulse and know being a workman sets him apart.