Mary Kettl: Lifelong love builds to crescendo

By Mary Kettl, Special to the Journal | Sunday, May 14, 2006

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I like to build things. When I was little, I had Tinker Toys, an Erector Set, blocks and 58,000 pieces of Lego.

The best part of visiting our grandma was playing with her Lincoln Logs, although I got in trouble once for asking if Grandma had known Lincoln personally.

My mother, who was generally supportive and did not get unreasonably angry when she stepped on a Lego in her bare feet, was less happy about my outdoor building projects, which often included construction materials I found in the trash cans along our alley. Apparently, the sight of her child carrying garbage around the neighborhood reflected badly on her parenting skills, as did my attempt to build an igloo, which involved cutting snow blocks with a concrete trowel and using my little sisters as a frame. I was not, as they claimed, trying to bury them alive, but that was the end of igloo-building.

In eighth grade, I convinced my mother to let me sign up for shop class.

Most girls still took cooking and sewing, but kids in shop got to make gavels. Like many teenagers, I was a big fan of parliamentary procedure, and I wanted to have my own gavel. I also knew that sewing students had to wear the clothes they made in some kind of school exhibition, which I thought would be embarrassing. I was afraid to wear ill-fitting pants in public, but I was more than excited to carry a gavel.

So I took shop at East Junior High, the only girl in a class of 33 evil boys, some of whom you might have seen on “America’s Most Wanted.” The teacher had his hands full with boys who were trying to re-enact the Inquisition by sticking their hands and other unsupervised body parts into the sheet-metal bender. I learned OSHA rules and colored safety posters:

“Don’t run with tin snips! You’ll poke your spleen out!” But when it came to actually making things, I was on my own.

My favorite project was making a sheet metal dustpan because I loved heating up the silver soldering compound and spreading it over the joints. I soldered that dustpan forever. Really, it’s just five pounds of solder with a handle. My mom still uses it. But I got a C in shop because I didn’t complete as many projects as the boys. Frankly, I think I should have gotten a higher grade because I was one of the few students who never had to be rushed to the emergency eye-wash station.

My enthusiasm for construction has continued into adulthood, though because of my strategy of “measure once, cut five times, drive to the lumberyard, and start over,” I am usually assigned the position of “stand here and hold this.” This is an important job, and it allows me to practice my construction vocabulary, just in case an opportunity to use the word “soffits” ever arises in conversation. I also get to wear a heavy tool belt slung with a hammer, tape measure, screwdrivers and other cool-looking tools. It doesn’t matter that the only thing I really know how to work is the pencil.

One of my favorite construction projects was volunteering with the Lutherans in Custer, who were building a new church a few years ago. A friend put me on the volunteer list, explaining that they would take anybody, what with their “least of our brothers” policy and all. The first day, some friendly older men invited me to help put up insulation.

“Soffits!” I exclaimed cheerfully, letting them know that I had construction experience.

“Uh, no,” said a nice man uncertainly. “My name is Bill. Biiiillll,” he repeated.

It was my job to grab the end of a roll of insulation and climb a scaffold to hand it to the guys on top. Insulation is not heavy, but the sanctuary walls were about a thousand feet high. I am terribly afraid of heights — I can’t even wear high heels — and I made 40 trips up and down that thing. I had to. The other volunteer guys were in their 60s and 70s; God forbid they break a hip in the service of Our Lord.

“I’m not even Lutheran,” I sobbed quietly as I kept climbing, “If I fall to my death, they’ll probably just go have coffee!” I’m sure the weeping made guys on the scaffold nervous, but they were just glad I’d stopped talking about soffits.

The most difficult job at the church was screwing heating system panels into the basement ceiling. Each aluminum panel was 4 feet long and 4 inches wide and took 10 screws. There were over a thousand of them. That’s 10,000 screws in the ceiling, not counting the 600 that I dropped on the floor.

For three days, I stood on a ladder holding a cordless drill over my head. To understand what this is like, go find something moderately heavy in your house — say a radio, a toaster, an unabridged dictionary — and hold it above your head like a starter-pistol. By the end of the first hour, I was praying for my battery to run out. By the end of the second battery, I understood why the Statue of Liberty has that look on her face. By the end of the third day, I could no longer raise my hand above my waist. To brush my teeth that night, I had to hold the brush on the counter, lean over, and move my head back and forth.

But I’d do it again. Especially if they let me help with the soffits.