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Welcome to Stuff I Learned Yesterday. My name is Emilee O’Leary, my favorite book of all time is Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, and I believe that if you aren’t learning, you aren’t living. In today’s episode of Stuff I Learned Yesterday I share a lesson I learned from my dad about the importance of having the right tools to perform a task.
Fun Fact
Did you know the first crossword puzzle didn’t rear its head until 1913? The word game is considered to be the most popular word game in the world and it’s just over a hundred years old. Arthur Wynne, a journalist from Liverpool, published the first crossword puzzle on December 21, 1913 in New York World. He called it a Word-Cross, but a few weeks later a typesetting error occurred in the newspaper and the name changed to Cross-Word, which is the term that stuck. Wynne’s puzzles were diamond shaped and didn’t have the traditional black boxes we see in many modern puzzles. Inspired by the game Magic Boxes, Mr. Wynne used his wit, his humor, and his cleverness to construct a puzzle that would require a person to solve multiple puzzles within a single puzzle, but each puzzle you solve helps the overall puzzle to become clearer.
Tools For The Real World
The word tool carries so many connotations that literally every direction I could go with this installment of stuff I learned yesterday would be a cliché. But I’m going to do it anyway because I’m eager to hold onto the tools my dad left me. From metaphorical tools to literal tools, our parents are the first people to equip us with the building blocks of life. And my dad loved tools.
For the first several years of life, we can’t use much in the way of physical tools. First we’re too small to even handle them and too innocent to understand them. Then when we’re big enough to actually hold them, we’re not smart enough to use them properly. Eventually our physical strength and awareness of safety and handling come into alignment and we can take full advantage of the purpose of a tool.
My dad loved to whittle. He always had a knife or three on him, so often when the family was just sitting around and chatting, he’d grab a piece of wood and just start whittling away. He was a very creative guy and whittled some really cool things in my lifetime. He had a very specific style that was both amusing and extremely clever, and amongst the many things he’s built and crafted, they’re pretty unique remnants of his character. Watching him work with his hands as a young girl, I can remember just wanting to saw, for sawing’s sake, or carve wood, because I saw him work so steadily and with such concentration.
One particular attempt at whittling came to mind as the full picture of what I learned from watching my dad formed. I was pretty young, probably younger than ten. I found a block of wood, I found a knife, and man, whittling was a lot harder than he made it look. Rather than thinking there was some technique involved in the craft, I was pretty certain that my struggles with whittling were because the knife I was using was dull. I went out into the garage and looked around for something bigger and sharper and discovered a chisel knife. While my dad worked in the garage, I sat on the bench nearby and got back to work. You remember my comment about being old enough to manage a tool but being too young to know how to properly use it? While I worked the chisel with my right hand, I held the block of wood with my left hand, in a very dangerous position. The chisel slipped off the wood and landed square on the knuckle of my left thumb. Yowtch, being the operative word.
I remember yelping, which got my dad’s attention… He grabbed my hand and quickly wrapped his hanky around my thumb, then picked me up and brought me inside. I don’t remember crying, though I have no doubt I might have been. But my strongest memory of this experience is of my dad immediately attending to my injury. Even though it was my own fault and my own poor judgment, I don’t remember him scolding me for using his tools, I just remember him holding me until the bleeding stopped. I didn’t need stitches, but I got a scar out of it. It’s a really good reminder to me of the time I wielded a tool before I’d learned how to use it properly.
Here’s what I learned.
I don’t necessarily believe that this experience was one where I connected the dots between having the ability or means to use a tool and knowing how to use said tool, but it did make me more cautious. Some of us will always have to touch the proverbial hot stove before we know that it’s not a good idea to do so, but I don’t really feel like I’m that sort of person. And I think I owe a lot of it to my dad.
My dad was more than an advocate for tools. He was an advocate for using the right tools to do a job, and he demonstrated that by talking through a problem and scoping it out before jumping in. There were very few times when he used the I-told-you-so reason, at least in a serious way, and he hardly ever told me not to do something, but I consistently saw in him a methodological approach to new situations.
In using the chisel knife, I wasn’t quite old enough to see the potential danger of the tool I chose and the position my hand was in. I didn’t have enough experience to consider accounting for the unexpected, such as: what if the knife slipped –or– what if someone surprised me? A lot about the way my dad approached projects helped me learn about gaining context for tools. Even when we’re old enough to hold a tool properly and know its proper usage, there is another dimension, a dimension of context, that also goes into properly wielding that tool.
There might be several tools that could be used for a single job, but which one would be the most efficient? In my dad’s case, that often meant building something of his own, like a trailer or a ramp, or using a combination of tools in order to accomplish a task.
Ultimately, it was the time and attention he gave to every project that made him such an incredible craftsman. He knew so much about the different types of wood that he’d be able to tell you how a particular type would behave when trying to use it in a specific way, why one type would be preferable over another for a specific project.
When I’d ask him to come hang something at my apartment, he’d show up with his entire tool bag because it had everything he needed in it. He’d have anchors for the screws I had on hand, or a power tool instead of my screwdriver. He’d have a level and a tape measure, turning something simple into something slightly more complex because he saw the lasting value in taking just a couple more minutes to do the job the right way.
If there was a problem he’d ask questions about the situation, questions I would never think of to ask, because experience had taught him a lot about the same symptoms rearing their heads as a result of different causations.
Tools make our lives easier, but they can also hurt us, and what wasn’t always clear is the depth of experience my dad had with each tool. I watched my dad whittling as a little girl and thought that it looked so cool, I wanted to do it too. But when I picked up the same tools to attempt the same project, I could not produce the same outcome as he could. And even though he showed me that to properly hang something on the wall it’s smart to use an anchor, I’ve broken more anchors than I can even count in trying to use them on my own.
Throughout his life, my dad demonstrated that taking the time to understand context for a situation will aid significantly in selecting the right tool to perform a task, but he didn’t always demonstrate the ramp up time he took in getting to know tools. He had plenty of accidents with tools, from slicing off the top of his middle finger to being electrocuted, he often had to learn the hard way too. But just because we don’t see that learning process doesn’t mean it didn’t happen… and that’s something that I’m trying to remind myself of lately. Even if I know context and know my options, if I don’t know the tool, the end result will be unpredictable.
I’m Emilee O’Leary and this has been Stuff I Learned Yesterday.
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