My father was an old world craftsman, not in the sense that
he created exquisite furniture for people who had been born into “the purple of
commerce or who had risen through the ranks of the aristocracy.”(see Wilde,
Oscar) No, he was a craftsman in the sense that he tried to make whatever he
needed out of whatever he had on hand.
I remember many happy childhood hours with my little hammer,
straightening nails that he had ripped out of old boards. I don’t think I ever
saw a box of store-bought nails or screws in my father’s workshop. We didn’t
make trips to the lumber yard; we scrounged.
We were a two-car family saddled with a single car garage.
My father decreed that we would house both cars in a garage. The obvious solution for a typical American family
would be to tear down the puny little unacceptable single car monstrosity with
the double doors that you had to get out of your car to open and replace it
with a modern two-car edifice with a remote-controlled overhead garage door.
My father’s solution was to saw through the peak of the roof
from front to back and continued the saw cut directly down the back wall. With
the help of a few cousins imported for the occasion, he then moved half of the
garage outward to rest on a makeshift foundation he had constructed, mostly
from concrete blocks. As most of the cousins held up the roof, some of them
joined my father in splicing extensions to the beams upward to form a new,
higher peak. (Are you getting this?)
Once that was accomplished, all that needed to be done
before installing the (gasp) store-bought garage door, was to add plywood
sheets and nail roof shingles to the new portion of the roof. The cousins
leaped to the task with alacrity.
I was still too young to set shingles, but not too young to
oversee the process, so I climbed the fence behind the garage and stepped onto
the roof. As I walked up to the new, higher peak, my weight combined with
cousin weight caused the spliced beams to separate and the peak to invert,
forming an upper-case M replacing the inverted V. In other words, the plywood
beneath my feet dropped about five feet. Luckily, there were enough
straightened nails still gripping the beams to preclude the roof collapsing
entirely.
Everyone froze in position, fearing that any movement might
be detrimental to the goal of an injury-free construction site. Slowly, the
cousin closest to the edge of the roof moved down the ladder, followed by
cousins on order of their proximity to the edge. I, at the peak of the roof,
was the last to join the exodus. I marched into the house and refused further
participation in the debacle.
As I watched from my bedroom window, my father and the
cousins pushed the peak from its inverted position back to its fully upright
and stored position, adding, I’m sure, more nails to make the roof fail proof
this time. Luckily, a neighbor must have witnessed the spectacle and invited a
city building-inspector to visit us. My
father was required to go to a lumber yard and purchase beams that ran the full
length of the new garage and nail them next to the spliced beams.
With the installation of the garage door and a little
makeshift patching of the open area at the back of the garage, we entered the
universe of two-car garage families. While I had enjoyed climbing the fence to
stand at the peak of our old single-car garage, I deemed it unseemly for a
two-car garage family to spend its time on the peaks of roofs. I never climbed
the fence again.