Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [19]
That helps explain why, every few years when I was a kid, my dad would announce that it was time to enlarge the house. He and my mom would decide we needed a new bedroom or a larger living room. “Let’s get to work,” my dad would say, and we’d pull out the tools. He was a dentist, but he had taken drafting courses in high school. He had a big plywood drafting table he had made himself, and he’d sit there for hours with his T square and a pencil, drawing up plans. He was always reading Popular Mechanics and Popular Science, clipping articles about the latest home-building techniques.
The goal was to do everything ourselves, to learn what we didn’t know and then have at it. My dad taught himself to do the carpentry, the electrical installations, even the roofing—and then he taught us. When we were doing the plumbing, my dad and I would heat the copper joints together, holding the solder, letting it melt from the tip of a soft wire. When we did electrical work, we knew we had to get it right: If we didn’t, we risked electrocuting ourselves or burning down the house. None of this was easy, but it was satisfying on a lot of levels, and we were learning how to learn.
My father liked to use craftsmen’s adages, such as “Measure twice, cut once.” The first time I heard that particular phrase was after I had cut a piece of wood to go in the framing of one of our hallway walls. I cut it without paying close enough attention and it turned out to be too short.
“Go get another two-by-four,” my dad told me, “and this time, measure more precisely. Then start over and measure everything again. Make sure you get a consistent answer. Then cut the board a little wide of the mark, just to give yourself an option. You can always make a board shorter. You can’t make it longer.”
I did as I was told, very carefully, and the board fit right where it belonged in the wall. My dad smiled at me. “Measure twice,” he said. “Cut once. Remember that.”
THE FOUR hammers in the house, one for each of us, got a huge workout. In the morning, before it got too hot, my dad would send us up on the roof to pound nails into the shingles. He never considered hiring a contractor or a roofing crew. For one thing, we didn’t have extra money for that. And besides, as my dad saw it, this was a great family activity.
My sister, Mary, smiles at her memory of my dad driving us into nearby Sherman, where he had once come upon a certain house owned by a stranger. He loved that house. So when we were in grade school, he’d bring the whole family to sit in front of it while he sketched on a drawing pad, studying the parts of the structure that he liked. One day he’d sketch the roofline. A week later he’d come back and sketch the front steps. He wanted our house to look like that house, and he found his way by sketching the particulars.
My sister likes to say that watching my father expand our house showed her that anything is possible. “You can learn anything you want to learn,” she says, “if you sit and figure things out logically, if you study something similar, if you keep working at it. You can start with a blank piece of paper and end up with a house.”
This idea that “anything is possible” has been a bit of a mantra in my adult life, especially in my marriage. Lorrie reintroduced me to those words. And at the same time, my father’s example remains there in the back of my mind, showing me the way.
That’s not to say I always fully embraced my father’s sense of the possibilities. On Saturdays, when my sister and I would have loved to sleep in, he’d wake us up at 7 A.M. so we could get an early start on whatever the latest expansion was. We’d work until lunchtime and then he’d suggest that we take a nap so we’d have the energy to get back to work later in the afternoon.
Even if we couldn’t fall asleep, we pretended, so he wouldn’t send us back to work right away. “Just keep your eyes closed,” Mary would whisper to me. “He’ll think we’re still sleeping.”
Though we dragged our feet at times, I did feel I had a stake in all of the construction