Occtober 8, 2025
-by Frank Macdonald
The article was titled The Lost Satisfaction of Manual Competence.
I wonder if I ever possessed manual competence. It seems to be a question I ask myself every autumn, just before beginning to winterize the house.
Oh, I am not without experience. I did work as a carpenter’s helper on several construction jobs from Edmonton to Boston without ever getting fired. Of course, on these jobs, due to union regulations, I was not allowed to hammer a nail. If I did, the result would be the entire crew walking off the job in a strike action, a non-carpenter doing a carpenter’s job.
Oddly, almost every Friday afternoon, once lunch had been eaten and the crew knew that the paychecks were in their pockets and the taverns taverns were open, some carpenter’s helper would pick up a hammer, drive a crooked nail into piece of wood, shutting down the whole project until Monday morning. Carpenters bought that guy lots of beers that afternoon.
I don’t recall any of my crooked nails causing a project shutdown.
Genetically, I must possess a manual competence gene.
My paternal grandfather was a gifted and exacting carpenter.
My father, while not being an official carpenter, was capable of building a house over our heads while his family was living in it. It was a house he was building for my mother who, unfortunately, died before the final nail was driven. It is my Psych 101 belief that he never stopped building that house for her.
It was a task for which he never recruited my assistance. Or if he ever did it, was so long ago, I don’t remember. But not so long ago that he would ever forget that area in which his son was so hopeless. That left me to shovel the driveway or mow the lawn.
In high school, I had to take a manual training course. I made a book-holder, one that sits on the top of my desk to this day, one that I occasionally examine with awe and pride because it is a pretty fine result, in the pursuit of which I never lost a finger to the bandsaw, never drilled a bit through my palms like a modern crucifixion, and never got over my father’s surprised appraisal.
But by then I was on my way out of school, out of home and away to be a carpenter’s helper elsewhere. No carpenter I ever worked with encouraged me to pursue the trade. Fathers, fathers, fathers, everywhere!
As fortune would have it, I find myself in a house that seems to be aging faster than myself. It is in need of tinkering in some places, in need of heavy equipment construction in others, and tiny little bits of attention elsewhere. It is those tiny bits of attention to which I direct my skills, a loose wainscot board, a tile trying to lift itself off the floor as though it had a more important place to be, a ceiling tile trying to come down to meet it. Looking at them, I am reminded of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. The script I have in mind is quite different. Whether through the use of thick glue or large spikes, this loving couple will NOT get together.
The loose wainscotting is caused, like so many of the world’s other problems, by loose tongues. It seems over time some sort of shrinkage in what others might call the “French kiss” that binds one piece of wainscotting, tongue and grooves to its neighbour. (When you think about it, the wainscotting or those tiles, there is a lot of romance to be found in one’s humble adobe.)
Still, when a person is busy plugging leaks and drafts, adding more plastic to the world’s already lethal overdose of the stuff, there’s not much time for cuddling. Even a Harlequin Romance can be useful plugging the space between a window and the wall to which it is supposed to be attached, but isn’t. With a chest-expanding moment of pride you remind yourself that you had nothing to do with putting that window in. In fact, the person who did chased you away because he believed you had nothing to add to his trade school taught skills. (I suspect the spirit of my father hovers over these moments of manual incompetence).
Getting back to the article mentioned at the beginning of this column, it laments the lost satisfaction that comes from possessing manual competence. I can identify with that sense of loss whenever I examine my carefully crafted book-holder. I clearly had more confidence and pride in myself when I was in grade 9 than I do two university degrees later.
Competence or not, the calendar keeps coming round to see what, if anything, I have learned in the art of protecting my thermostats from January drafts or February blizzards.
All that is required, really, is to face the problem and listen through sensitive ears or a Ouija board as Dad tries, like an ever-hopeful parent, to instill some of the family talents into a son who, for one brief moment, gave him a flash of hope when, over a half century ago brought home a book-holder that made the old man smile. My personal compensation is that that book-holder now holds my own books. But they are books that do little to plug leaks and drafts. So, my annual apprenticeship continues.
