Member-only story
Time Traveling Through Carpentry Class
A short story about tasting unadulterated freedom.
In my junior year of high school, I was in carpentry class. I was lucky to go to one of those awesome, public schools in small-town America where everyone was on a first-name basis, most of the teachers doubled as coaches in some capacity, and we still had woodshop and metal shop classes.
The Introduction to Woodworking class was about half female students but all the other shop-related classes, were complete boys’ clubs, with half the class hiding chewing tobacco in their lip and others secretly using the lathe to make pipes to smoke weed.
Many of the students worked for their fathers doing general contracting and were extremely talented. Others just wanted easy credits and pretended to sand a cutting board they had been making for two months. They usually put more energy into messing with others’ projects, stealing boards and tools, or penciling obscene phrases and pornographic stick-figure scenes onto the inside of nightstands or the underside of coffee tables.
The teacher was a legend, who had been at the school for over thirty years, named Mr. Stevens. He really was great at teaching drafting, how to use the machines safely, and make something we could be proud to take home. Many of my family members went through…
