Rev. Neil O’Farrell knows that “no” doesn’t have the be the answer.
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I was in grade school when my dad decided to build the house we would all grow up in. He wanted as his chief carpenter Carl Miller, and as the stone/brick/cinder-block foreman a man I only knew as Mr. Rakes. I never knew his first name.
Dad went to one local bank to borrow the construction loan that would be transitioned into a home loan when the house was finished. Dad’s regular bank said they would lend him the money, but only if he picked other men as builders.
Mr. Miller had a drinking problem, and he went on periodic benders. However, Dad knew him to be an excellent carpenter, who always kept his promises when he was sober. Dad wanted his excellent carpentry skills, and he thought he could work around the drinking problem by forging a strong, caring relationship that, nonetheless, would have fully understood expectations.
Mr. Rake had one leg. He’d lost the other one somewhere along the line. Although he could do anything with bricks and river rock, he really excelled as a stone mason. Dad needed several stone walls built to keep the hillside above the house from shifting downward, and he knew that Mr. Rakes could do that.
Dad told the first bank “no, thank you,” and he went to the other bank in town and got the loan he needed. Dad, who studied engineering before he became a dentist, drew the house plan on brown craft paper. It was more of a schematic than an architect’s rendering. He knew that Mr. Miller would take the broad outlines and fill in the details as the project went along. Dad would show up every morning and evening to set the day’s goals and to assess the work as it went along.
Mr. Miller did, as predicted, go on a couple of drunks in the course of building the house. Dad was patient, let Mr. Miller live with his demons for a short while, and then visited him at his simple house, and cadge him back to work by the next Monday. It never failed that Mr. Miller would show up ready to do his fantastic work.
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The house got built beautifully, including a complicated upstairs porch that cantilevered out from the front of the house, poised on its own strength and a couple of picture windows that bumped out under it. I’ve never seen another house that had such a feature. For fifty years, the house had stood solid and plumb, including that unique porch.
Mr. Rake’s work came a little later. He built several walls and a massive fireplace out of field stone. He’d quarry the stone from actual fields, loaded them onto an old car hood, pulled by a mule. The mule would take the stone to his truck, the rock would be transferred into its bed, and Mr. Rakes would show up at the house with a battered pick-up filled with rough rock in the back.
His lost leg was a real hindrance, but not as much as one would think. He’d discovered a way of planting himself, and by twisting and brute force moved the rock into place, He needed help to get the rock to near where it would be used for the wall, and he needed help in getting rock to the upper courses of the wall, but he chiseled the rock into usable shapes and sizes, and mortared them into place. Some of the rocks still had the moss and lichens on their surface from their ancient sojourn in their original resting places.
It takes craft not only to carve and place the stone. A wall needs a foundation, and it needs a drainage system so that water pushing out on the wall from the up-side doesn’t crack it or make it eventually fall over. I can say that after 50 years, there isn’t so much as a crack in those walls.
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We feel so smart and empowered to judge others, particularly when we think we are better than they, and we can keep them down. The first bank was absolutely convinced that it knew more about human character than my dad did. They also acted as if they were the only show in town. I don’t know why they didn’t realize that Dad would just go someplace else.
I’m also sure they had great confidence in their own self aggrandizement even after the house was finished, having been built by people they thought incompetent and unworthy, a house like none other in town. And they were sure that no one could build a house sketched out on brown wrapping paper.
All of us know—and perhaps have rubbed up against—those who are so full of themselves that they are perfectly comfortable dictating all sorts of their own judgments upon you. These three men who built Dad’s house were all good men, they trusted and supported each other, their word was their bond, human frailties aside, and they built a house that was very fine, indeed. That house has reared two families, and the wear it shows is superficial and not structural.
Theologically, as a minister, I might call the men at the first bank sinners. However, it would also be appropriate to call them petty and inconsequential. We might ponder why men so often aspire to this level of behavior.
I’m sure the bankers who said no, forever thought themselves correct in the decision they made. Simply, they were wrong.
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Photo: Bryn Pinzgauer/Flickr