Manual Drive

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Dance used to be part of every culture, every life, but that has obviously gone by the wayside. Our hands, though, remember.

I am deliberately watching people’s hands now because I suspect they are sending us a signal: We are still out here. Don’t forget.

I buy cheap tools, and break them.

My father owned countless tools, kept them locked in a red Craftsman tool chest on black wheels. He had to lock his chest at lunch, and again after his shift, or the men with whom he worked would borrow his tools, and his chisel would never come back.

When his car mechanic days ended, Buddy landed his final job, at Erie Forge and Steel, a block-long factory building as bleak and utilitarian as the name suggests. Mammoth slabs of tempered metal would come to the forge on railcars, and it was my father’s job to plane them, to work from blueprints, to sculpt them in such a way that they would become parts themselves, parts of larger tools, of industrial hammers shipped by sea and assembled for use in Yugoslavia or the Ukraine. What my father did was similar to the woodworking many men now do in their basements as a hobby, except if my father made an error, cut away too much from the left side or the right, misformed an angle by a fraction of a degree, it wasn’t just a piece of wood ruined: The company would be behind thousands of dollars in metal, thousands of dollars more in time and missed deadlines.

He took me to his workplace just once, the summer after high school, showed me around with little enthusiasm. But I could tell he valued the calculating he had to do on this job, how much math was involved, the fact that, over all the other men, those with many more years of seniority, he had been given the biggest hunks of metal to work on, the most precise jobs.

Buddy took me to the worst part of the factory, the dirtiest and loudest, and he pointed. "See this," he said. "This is why I’m sending you off to college."

When my father died, he left behind his big red tool chest. My brother-in- law took the tools, and I think the chest as well, but I rescued a tie tack from the top drawer, given to my father from a salesman from Snap On Tools. I wore it to my first job, a journalism post in Pittsburgh, needing for some reason to advertise my blue-collar lineage.

When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon and not stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago.

—Henry David Thoreau

The poet Robert Bly traces "the decline of men" to the disappearance of physical work. Thoreau might very well agree. My hands would agree, too. They were never happier with themselves than when I had the hatchet in my grip, swinging away at the lilac. They knew what to do, what they were, what was expected of them, and we all three liked it.

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