Like many craftspeople, I made a fortune early on and didn’t know what to do with my time and all that money. Nah, I’m kidding. The economy makes puppets of us all. I had to work hard to stay solvent enough to lose only a little money each month. I sold cutting boards, plant stands, and hand mirrors at craft fairs making these quick little items that brought in a small bit of cash. After some years, I thought that teaching might help my income stream.
The very first woodworking class I taught was held at the Multnomah Arts Center in SW Portland. Their woodshop and the dust-making sat down three flights of stairs in the basement of an old house on the main drag there. Smart folks at the MAC.
Douglas Janacek was one of three students enrolled in that class. I don’t remember the other two. Why do I remember him? Oh a certain Slavic influence of his name on me no doubt helps. He was also a pharmacist like my favorite uncle had been. But what really made him stick in memory were his fingers.
Douglas, it turned out, had especially adept fingers. In that class, we built a small box project, butt joined together, and pinned with dowels glued in to lock the joints tight. I had shown the students how to do this by moving the glue applicator, a toothpick, from the glue bottle to the hole with some alacrity and smearing the glue around before tapping in the dowel pin.
What I have never forgotten was watching Douglas put on a good dab of yellow glue on his toothpick and holding up his workpiece and readying himself to apply the glue to the hole while I am by his side alert and there to help but as I watch him and this dollop of glue which I am certain he’s going to lose to gravity’s pull and watch it drip onto his shoes or the floor or his project with this drop now forming on the end of the toothpick and drooping and thinning at its neck and stretching out and about to fall and I’m viewing this with such interest when Douglas, good Douglas, the pharmacist by trade and by training, the man with the adroit fingers to move around hundreds of little pills, simply rotates his toothpick bringing the blob of glue up to the top of the pick thus saving it from a fall and there it accumulates and starts this wrestling match with gravity all over again.
I don’t even think he knew what he was doing so much as doing what he knew. This was a technique learned in the lab and so he used it without thinking. But his application of this method to this new skill he was learning was inspiring. His cool under the fire of a glue-up was also great to watch. His fingers rolling the toothpick astonished me as did his calmness.
Glue-ups have been known to make people cry, scream, and throw tools. Not me of course. I have always maintained my cool. Nah I’m kidding about that too. There are many things in the shop that can set my vocabulary into motion but gluing is one that is especially adept at making me howl. So much effort, so much time, so much energy spent to get to this point and I have the well-honed ability to take a high placed perfection and turn it into a muddle of inaccuracies.
Now I can fix these setbacks and I have done so and I have learned to forgive myself for being human. Perfection is always out of reach for me although I strive, oh how I strive for it. So Douglas in the end helped me understand several important qualities one needs in the shop. One is patience. He had that in abundance. The other is practice and we all need to work on that and some of us more than others.
Dowel Pinned Box
