Written by I still have a stool I made in 1979, my second year in this country. There is a gap in one of the joints you could put a coin into. I kept it on purpose.
I keep it because a chair I made one year later has no gaps, and I did not become a different man in that year. I just did it a hundred more times.
When Carmen and I came to California in 1977, I had no trade and no connections. I took whatever paid that week. In 1980 I was on a framing crew, mostly carrying and cleaning up, and I started watching the older men. What I noticed was that they did not rush to cut. They talked, they measured, they drew on the wood with a flat pencil, and only then did they pick up the saw. That was the whole secret, and it was free. I just had to pay attention.
For years after that I was still one pair of hands among several. I framed the wall I was told to frame, I fixed the thing I was called about, and I went home. Then in the spring of 1984 a contractor asked me to take a renovation — not one part of it, all of it. Materials, timing, the schedule, the costs, the crew, the phone call when something went wrong. He did not know how much I wanted it. I said yes before he finished asking.
I did not sleep well for two weeks. Not from worry about the work — from going through it in my head, over and over, in what order it had to happen.
We opened up the back of the house, reframed it, put a new roof on that section, and brought the kitchen and bath up to something the family could live with. It took until August. I made mistakes, and two of them I paid for out of my own money rather than argue. When it was done I walked through it alone before the family came back. Empty rooms, no furniture yet, dust on the floor. I put my hand flat on a stud and thought: I can really do this. Not “I got away with it.” I can do this.
After that, people called because they trusted my work. That is the whole difference between having a job and having a trade.
Ten years later my daughter Sophia needed a desk. She is the one who never wanted to learn any of this — Elena tried it once, Miguel came over on Saturdays, but Sophia would come out to the garage, sit on the step, talk to me while I worked, and go back inside without ever picking anything up. For years I took that a little personally. That was my failing, not hers.
I built that desk at night, in a cold garage, two or three hours at a time — most of it standing. I cut the dovetails by hand, four corners, and threw the first set away. I rushed them because I thought I already knew how, from reading. I did not. I burned four good boards learning that reading is not the same as cutting.
It is the best work I have ever done. Not the biggest and not the hardest. The best. And I think it is because it was the one thing I made where I had no time at all and still refused to cut a corner.
She used it every night for six years. She has moved four times since and it has gone with her every time. She still has never picked up a tool, and that turned out not to be the point.
So if I can leave one lesson for the people coming after me, it is this: you are going to be slow, and slow is correct. Everyone who is fast now was slow first. Speed is what is left over after you stop making mistakes. Do not chase it.
And do not start before you understand the whole thing. Sit with it. Draw it on paper. Open the wall and look. The saw is the last step, not the first — and once the wood is short, you cannot make it long again.
I came here with no trade and no English to speak of. I will tell you what I found: the wood does not care who you are or where you came from. It only asks whether you paid attention. That is the fairest deal I was ever offered in this country, and I took it.
Take your time. Keep your tools sharp. Show somebody else when it is your turn.
— Pablo