The Man Who Could Build Anything

When we were preschoolers, he built a small white table and three diminutive stools for my sisters and me, so that we would have a place of our own at which to color or play when we came to visit. As we entered our teen years and began to care about boys, he gave us vanity tables for our bedrooms, precisely measured to fit the odd corners of our available spaces, and so sturdily built that twenty-five years later, they still serve as reliable, unshakable stands for 30" television sets. When the middle one of us married, he created a unique domed hope chest, lined in cedar, for the foot of her bed.

He understood why, when I moved into an apartment of my own for the very first time, I wanted a drill and toolbox for my birthday. And so he sent them to me.

He could repair lawnmowers and bikes, cars and dishwashers, install doors and floors, make beautiful turned lamp bases on a lathe.

In a lifetime of loving handiwork, the most impressive things he constructed were two gorgeously crafted wooden-hulled boats which he could use to take his children water skiing in the summers of the mid-1950s, and one semi-underground, environmentally forward-thinking beautiful home for himself and his wife.

And when I say that he built boats or a house, I don't mean that he hired architects and designers, bought plans, and generally paid for the construction.

I mean that he took over when his builders went bankrupt and nothing was done but the pouring of the concrete exterior walls. For six years, he went every day to that house, inch by inch building it himself. He not only acted as his own general contractor; he did drywall, cabinetry, staircases, and flooring, sometimes redoing what he'd paid someone else to do because he couldn't bear that the finished product was 1/16 of an inch off-center. If it couldn't burst and flood or electrocute him, he would tackle it and do it well. So well that the "professionals" would just shake their heads and murmur that they'd never seen anything like it in their ___ years on the job.

They always meant that line as a compliment.

He repaired airplanes for the Navy during the War. Was something of a prodigy at Ford in engine (carburetor, I think) design. Only had a high school diploma.

He loved spaghetti dinners with garlic bread, the turning of the summer to fall, and the smell of salt-air near the ocean. Having grown up in the Depression, he abhorred orange marmalade (the predominant flavor of those lean years at his house) and the notion of purchasing anything on credit of any kind. He was a meticulous man with a firm handshake and a penchant for stories about the power of mind over matter.

He was a man of few words, except when we three girls were dandled on his knees begging for a story about three alligators (or three kangaroos, or three tigers, or three you-name-its). He always obliged, telling us outlandish tales of three sibling creatures who got in and out of the most thrilling adventures. It was a wonder to me as a small child that anyone could just invent like that. Spin a story without warning. Make it up right there on the spot. Despite his own preference for three-dimensional work over books, I am sure that his endless story-telling helped foster in me my love of literature of all kinds.

He taught me the important adage that, in any kind of construction, one should always measure twice and cut once.

He taught me, through his relationship with my grandmother, that love can last decades and still make you hum lightly when you kiss.

He taught me that with patience and precision, one can learn to build anything -- from a story to a marriage to a three-story house.

He was my grandfather.

And the world has contracted a little since he's gone.