Measuring Up To Her Dad

By Jonathan Lesser

One day last autumn, after noticing that the gutters of my new house were full of leaves, I asked my father-in-law, a tradesman, if he knew a good guttering guy.

Laughter.

“We can do it,” he said. “I’ll bring a ladder. Otherwise it will cost you a couple of hundred dollars.”

By “we” did he mean me? I hoped not. This is what happens when you have a father-in-law who collects tall ladders and you’re scared to death of heights.

“Maybe we should just . . . ”

“Don’t worry,” he said, the skin of his sun-hardened face creasing as he chuckled some more, “I’ll do it.”

I want to be as tough as my father-in-law. I really do. I’ve known him for 10 years now, and for most of that time I’ve felt inferior in his presence. The first time I met Charlie was much more nerve-racking than the usual meet-the-parents. Liz was 19, I was 26 (I wouldn’t have trusted me, either), and she’d just told him we were dating.

I felt squeamish about how old I was, but he was nothing but cordial and treated me with respect. The fact that he was a tradesman, and built like one, and I was a writer – and built like one – didn’t help. Over the years, I gradually grew more comfortable around him, but no matter what sort of career triumph I had, I still felt inadequate. When Liz and I bought our first house, things got worse.

We purchased what looked to me like a perfectly fine old house in need of a kitchen update and some fresh paint. To Liz and her dad, however, it was a fixer-upper. Charlie, and Liz’s brother Mike – it’s a father-son business – said they would do the work for free while we lived with Liz’s parents. In weeks, our home was gutted. Charlie and Mike took down most of the plaster walls so they could rewire, insulate and put up new plasterboard.

They did a lot of work on Saturdays, and Liz and I would often stop by to see the progress and lend a hand where we could. When I asked if I could help, the offer was often met with, “Well, there’s nothing really at this point that you can do”. So I would go out and buy everyone lunch, or pick up paint when we were low. And if I didn’t document the progress on our house with photos, who would have? But while many men drool at the sight of saws, planers and belt sanders, I couldn’t have cared less. What kind of man was I?

I was the kind of man who didn’t dirty his hands, who literally sensed a need to wash them clean at the first feel of dust or grime. Seeing me looking utterly lost in our construction zone, always holding a camera rather than a tool – well, I give my father-in-law a lot of credit for not trying to convince his lovely daughter to “dump the wimp”.

There was one quirk to our new place. The door to the basement was in the cloakroom. Inconvenient, yes, but I figured it was acceptable. I was wrong. Charlie said we would demolish it and rebuild it in a more user-friendly spot, and one afternoon he put Liz and me in charge of the demolition. This is when my wife taught me how to tear down a wall using the claw part of a hammer. (It’s not just for pulling nails!) As I swung that hammer and the wooden lath exploded around me, I felt a rush. I swung harder. Bigger explosion. Maybe this wasn’t so bad.

Over the next several months, I helped Charlie install two microlams – long wooden beams, almost as strong as steel, that are bonded together like sandwiches – to support the sagging second floor. I helped him cut crown moulding with the mitre saw. I also patched holes with joint compound in the plaster-walled sunroom, and I re-caulked the upstairs bathroom.

But perhaps the most unexpected development since I moved in under my father-in-law’s roof two years ago is this: the two of us started to become close. I’ve spent hours in his living room while he played his beloved clarinet, practising scales over and over again like a schoolkid or playing along with his Benny Goodman albums. Sometimes I would take out a guitar and we’d swap (if not licks) stories about our fondness for music.

Liz had often said that her dad liked to read, but I had no idea how much until we lived with him. He must read a book a week, mostly biographies and history. I prefer novels and more current nonfiction, but we are both enthusiastic readers, and this has led to great conversations and several exchanges of books.

And I didn’t expect Charlie to be the type who was vulnerable enough to cry in front of other people. But I’ve seen him weep on too many occasions now to remember them all. Family get-togethers always stir his emotions. One time when I was living with him, the tears didn’t stop for weeks – Liz’s other brother, his wife and their two small children had just moved halfway across the country. Three-year-old Jack is Charlie’s first grandson, and they had seen each other every day. There was no consoling Charlie.

He was lost. For weeks, he didn’t pick up his clarinet.

Our house is now nearly complete. Only some skirting board and the staircase railing remain to be installed. Other smaller jobs I’m confident we can do ourselves. I reckon I can cut the skirting-board trim, too. I’m less intimidated by our giant toolbox and less intimidated by Charlie. Though Liz wouldn’t let me try, I actually would have liked to have taken a crack at fixing the toilet that broke last week and flooded the bathroom.

In fact, I find that I now want to take care of this place the way a man should want to take care of his body. Where once I saw the house as a weekend-ruining time-suck, I now see it as what it really is: an extension of me. It’s a living thing, and I can’t call someone every time it hiccups or we want to make it a bit nicer. I’m still staring down a huge learning curve, but it feels good to at least, finally, be on the curve.

Of course, I was lucky marrying into a do-it-yourself family. If none of that had been forced on me, if I was still just as skittish around grease and grout and plumbing and power tools as I was the day we moved, this house would be in trouble. It took almost two years of living here before it dawned on me: a man has to be able to fix things. It’s the difference between owning a home and being a homeowner.

Before we bought this house, I would never have thought of building a garden bed out of raw timber, for the simple reason that I’d never done it before. But I recently made two. Measured, sawed, nailed them together. Nor would I have thought of spending quite so much time with my father-in-law, but now I don’t think twice. I can call Charlie and he’ll be here in minutes, not only to fix something, but also for dinner, to watch sport or just to chat. He’s become one of the people in my life I find easiest to talk to. And I realise now that even he had to start somewhere. Hammer that first nail, and don’t look back.