“A friend is someone who holds you in their hands,
wheat and chaff together,
and blows the chaff away.”
George Elliot
“He changed my life,” the stranger
said at my father’s memorial. It turns
out that he’d worked with Dad at the Coast Guard station at Two Rock. “I was a dope-smoking kid with no
interest and no skills, and in three short months of working with him, I went from rebellious to respectful. My whole
life was turned around. When I left the
Coast Guard, I went out and got a job working in construction, and from there
to running community water systems. I never saw him again, but when I saw his obituary, I cried. I
knew I had to come.”
As I stood there surrounded by chattering
friends and family, the one lucky enough to receive this stranger’s story, I realized
that this is why we have memorials, or celebrations of life, or funerals –
whatever you want to call them. It’s so
that people who have known a person on the outside of family life can bring
their stories, their remembrances, to the ones who knew that person wholly,
wheat and chaff together. The ones who
now stare death in the face and may be suffering the fact that sometimes the
chaff was all they saw.
The stranger described the tender,
dedicated way my father had shown him how to think about a problem and find the
answer, how to pick up his hammer and saw, cutting up pieces to pound together,
making something new. As he spoke, I remembered
the time my father almost hit me with his hammer when I moved in too close, trying
to learn how to repair a double-hung window.
But the stranger was telling me something I needed to know, so I stayed
quiet and just soaked up his words.
“I hope he was the same as a
father,” he ended, looking around the room full of people who were all
strangers to him. I followed his gaze
and my eyes caught on my brother, who suffered the most from my father’s
attention given to other people. I
didn’t answer, mostly because I was still sorting my wheat and chaff and didn’t
want to mar the stranger’s glowing distillation, which was helping.
In another part of my sister’s
house, where we had gathered to celebrate Dad’s life, some students were chatting from Sebastopol high
school’s wood shop. He’d volunteered
there for years, right up to the last weeks of his life. The students had brought their most recent
projects to display in honor of what they’d learned from Dad. “Before, I didn’t really care about
anything,” one young man told me. “I was
sitting in the back of the room texting and goofing off, so the shop teacher
told me to go talk to Dave.” The
stranger’s story from the 1970’s replayed forty years later, cementing its
truth: my father loved to show people how to work with wood, how to make
things, fix things, how to be resourceful and creative and survive, spirit
intact. That’s really what he gave away
freely to life, and somehow we are all better for it. That’s really what I learned from him, even
if I can’t turn bowls on a lathe or repair a double-hung window.
The chaff is not nothing. It is necessary: it protects the wheat kernel
as it grows and becomes a byproduct after it is separated. It is like the sawdust on my father’s shop
floor below the table saw and the planer, a byproduct of some pretty terrible cutting
and shaping of what once was a living tree into a table or bowl, relatively
inert. We’ve all got our piles of sawdust
to deal with, even after the carpenter who made them is gone. The blessing of memorials is that we also
have the kernels, sometimes held only by others, to appreciate.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a recovering carpenter’s daughter who writes. You can send her your sawdust stories c/o
P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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