The Carpenter and the Caretaker - Chapter 1

For Janice, to whom I am forever grateful for her patience and love.

Chapter One

Some people work in words and speeches. Some people work in paper. Some people work in steel and concrete. Others, like me, work in wood. As a cabinet maker, I find joy in my creations. I can take a rough piece of 1 x 2 red oak and create a beautiful chair, a door frame, or an ornate cutting board. I work in a cabinet shop and build doors. I don't just build doors, I create masterpieces. My doors are things of beauty, with ornate glass inserts, moldings chiseled with edges like diamonds, knobs so beautiful that they are considered jewelry, not hardware. Constructed without nails or screws, the joints are dovetail planed by hand to fit like tight puzzle pieces, doweled and glued tightly the way Victorian door masters of the seventeenth century would.

Wood is warm, soft, and loving. It forgives the unruly hand and chisel, but only to a point. If you drive a chisel firmly into wood, it gives a little, refusing to be scarred too deeply, but eventually its will fails and it is forever damaged. It cannot be healed or repaired to its original shape. Steel is created by Man and can be repaired, welded, and molded to its original shape. Wood is grown by God Himself, and only He can restore it.

The woodworker is a creative murderer. He kills the tree and molds the skeleton into something beautiful. In this way, the tree lives on forever, or for as long as the owner cares for the creation. Today, I will shape the skeleton of a long-dead birch tree into an armoire for a rock star. I will form the frame precisely, straight and perfect within 1/1000th of an inch. The shapes will be hand-planed until no flaw is felt beneath my soft touch. The doors alone for this beautiful project will take me 2 months each to complete. But they will be perfect in their death, even if the owner doesn't understand the love and sacrifice that created them.

My name is Brandon Dunwoody, and as funny and coincidental as it sounds, it is truly my given name. You would think a man named "Dunwoody" would avoid working with wood, for the obvious reasons of being a target of jeers. I took up cabinet making because of my father, not because of my name. Again, it is just a coincidence. I lost my father, Carl Dunwoody, years ago during a tumultuous time of my youth. I was rebellious and headstrong, and Dad was stubborn man, set in his ways. We parted angrily, and before I knew it, I was standing at his grave regretting every negative thing I ever said to him. I miss Dad. But that is a subject left to later discussion.

One gift my father gave me was perfection in my craft. Although I am considered the finest cabinet maker in the western United States, I could never have matched him in his perfection as a woodworker. I guess you could say I come from good stock. As a cabinet maker, I have been called "the obsessed perfectionist".

I am the carpenter.

Stay tuned for chapter 2, due Sunday, Oct. 26.