A carpenter measures twice because the wood does not forgive. My father earned thirty-seven rupees on a good day, and not one plank was ever wasted in our house.
The economics of a single plank
When material costs more than a day’s wages, you do not experiment. You measure, and then you measure again, and only then do you cut.
I grew up watching a man be careful because carelessness was not survivable. That is a different education from being told to be careful, and it goes in deeper.
Waiting as a technique
He would set a joint and wait. Then set it again, and wait again. Nothing was hurried into place; nothing was forced; glue and gravity were allowed to do their share.
As a boy I found this maddening. I wanted the thing finished. He was entirely untroubled by my wanting it finished, which I now recognise as the more useful of our two positions.
The same waiting, in a different room
Years later I was kneeling in a chapel with nothing to show for a long stretch of asking, and I recognised the feeling.
It was the same waiting. It had simply moved rooms. The joint was set and I was being asked not to test it yet — and the impatience I felt was exactly the impatience of a boy standing at a bench wanting to know why we could not just carry the thing outside.
What he never said
He never once drew the parallel for me. He was not a man who explained things, and I doubt it had occurred to him that he was teaching me anything at all beyond the trade.
But St. Joseph was a carpenter, and my father was a carpenter, and I have never been able to hold those two facts apart. Whatever patience I have was learned from sawdust before it was ever learned from a rule of life.