Learning carpentry from my father helped make me the person I am

As I have learnt to shape the timber, I’ve shaped my ideas, my characterAlone with my thoughts at the workbench, with the sanding machine’s insistently buzzing bass note singing up through my palm, I find myself trying to figure out just how long I have actually spent sanding pieces of wood. Softening their edges, making their surfaces gleam like polished marble. Carefully climbing through the grades – from the brutally coarse “low-grit” stuff to such improbably fin