A reader writes:
My wife says I should write this down before I start telling it wrong, so here it is.
For about eleven years the front of our house had a concrete slab and nothing over it. The plan was always a verandah. Every Christmas I would stand out there with a cup of sorrel and say, next year. My son Andre grew up playing cricket on that slab with a bucket for a wicket. Then he turned sixteen and stopped playing anything with me. He came home from school, said “evening” to the kitchen, and went into his room with the phone. I am not a talker either, so we just passed each other in the passage like two men waiting at the same bus stop.
Last year I got some overtime money and a promise of a few weeks off in the summer, and I decided the verandah was finally happening. I told Andre he was helping. I did not ask him. He rolled his eyes so hard I thought they would stay back there.
The first morning was bad. I had him digging the holes for the posts, and he dug them where he thought they should go instead of where I had put the pegs. I shouted. He threw down the fork and walked off up the road. I stood there feeling like my own father, which is not a feeling I enjoy. My father was a good builder and a hard man, and I learned most of what I know by watching him from a distance, because if you got close you got cursed. I had promised myself I would do it differently, and there I was on day one doing it exactly the same.
He came back about an hour later with two patties and a box drink, put one down beside me on the block, and started digging again. Neither of us said sorry. We just carried on. I think that was the first time I understood that he was trying too.
After that I made a decision to explain things instead of just giving orders. Why the posts sit on proper footings and not straight in the dirt. Why we treat the timber, and why the roof has to be tied down properly and not just nailed, because we are not building for sunny days, we are building for August. Why you check the level three times and cut once. I felt foolish at first, like a teacher, but he started asking questions. Small ones. “What happens if it’s not square?” “Why that screw and not the other one?” By the second week he was the one telling me the string line had moved.
We made mistakes. I will confess one of them was mine: I measured the fall on the roof wrong and we had to take off two sheets and do them again, and he did not let me forget it for the rest of the summer. He also cut a rafter short and tried to hide it behind the zinc pile, which I only found because the dog was sniffing about. We both laughed about that one eventually. Not that same day.
There were long stretches where we did not say anything at all. I used to think silence between a father and son meant something was wrong. Out there it was different. It was the kind of quiet where you hand a man the hammer before he asks for it. We had the radio on the church station some mornings and some football argument other mornings, and in between, just the sound of the drill and the neighbour’s rooster that has no idea what time it is.
One afternoon, when we were up on the ladders fixing the fascia, he asked me if Grandpa ever built anything with me. I told him the truth: no, not with me. Near me. He said, “So you’re making it up as you go?” and I said yes, pretty much. He nodded like that settled something. I don’t know exactly what. I have thought about that conversation more than anything else from the whole job.
I want to be honest that it did not turn us into different people. He is still seventeen now and still spends too long on that phone, and I still raise my voice more than I should. We are not the kind of father and son you see in the advertisement. But something shifted. He comes and sits out there in the evening, on the verandah he helped build, and sometimes he talks and sometimes he doesn’t, and either one is fine. Last month he fixed the loose hinge on his grandmother’s gate without anybody asking him. His mother cried a little when she heard.
The verandah itself is not perfect. One post is maybe a quarter-inch out if you put a level on it, and I know which one, and so does he. A visiting uncle pointed it out at Easter and Andre said, “That’s the one Daddy set,” which was a lie, and we both knew it, and I let it go.
I suppose what I want to say to other fathers, especially the ones like me who did not get much from their own, is that you do not have to know how to talk to your children in the right way. Sometimes you just need a job that needs two people, and enough patience not to take over when they do it slower than you would. I nearly missed it. I nearly hired a man to do it in a week.
— Winston, Manchester
Editor’s note
Winston’s letter reminds us that a building project is never only about the building. The shared job gave a father and son a reason to stand side by side, and the explanations he chose to give, instead of orders, did more than any lecture could have. Scripture pictures faith being passed on as parents talk with their children “when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way” (Deuteronomy 6:7), and it seems that includes when you are halfway up a ladder. If there is a small job waiting at your house, consider whether it could be done a little slower, with a helper who is still learning. And on a practical note, anything with a roof in hurricane country deserves proper footings and tie-downs; if you are unsure, a qualified builder or engineer can check the plan before you start.
Reader letters may be edited for length and clarity, and names and identifying details are changed.
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