A Father's Advice

My dad has taught me a lot -- mostly by simply living life. I've grown up watching him run a business with integrity and hard work. I've watched him and worked alongside him as he strives for quality workmanship on every jobsite. I've watched him demonstrate humility and love (to his fellow man, to my mother, to us kids) and leadership and a constant dependence on God to lead and provide.

A story that sticks out is recently, I was shopping for new stage shoes. I needed a very specific style of shoe for my purposes (that is, for the show that weekend), and I found two -- one new, by a quality brand, for $95; and the other for $10 at a thrift store. Ordinarily I would have jumped for the higher-quality shoes without question, but this was at a time when my finances were at an absolute low, so the price tag gave me pause. Should I just take the cheaper shoes for now and replace them in a couple months when I wasn't scraping to pay rent?

I usually would call my mother in this situation but I couldn't get a hold of her, so I called my dad at work and explained the dilemma. He doesn't know the first thing about dance or dance shoes or really anything in this world of mine filled with tights and makeup and hairspray, but I figured any outside opinion would help clarify my own at this point. I was truly torn.

Normally he makes decisions slowly, weighing the pros and cons of each option (now you know where I get it from). But once I'd explained it, he said without hesitation, "You know that I always spend the extra money for a better quality tool. It lasts longer and it's easier to use. To me, this is the same thing -- these are your tools. I would spend the extra money for better shoes that will last longer and be better for you in the long run."

So I did. I got the $95 shoes. So far, I have no regrets (except maybe the fact that I broke them in during opening weekend). But something about the moment struck me... how this advice from a contractor with no performance background or training whatsoever so perfectly applied to my situation. My parents have often said they struggle with how to guide me as I pursue a world so foreign to them, but this guideline he'd developed from years in his own vastly different work was exactly what I needed.

Not only that -- for the first time in my life I felt that someone outside the arts saw my work as legitimate. And not because they were 'trying' (code for 'saying the right things and not meaning them')... they just did. There are no words to describe that feeling, especially coming after years of striving and straining for years for people to see me as a human with needs and wants and strengths as well as weaknesses -- instead of as God's failure. A weight lifted in that moment. My dad saw my work as serious and treated it accordingly. That was one of the best feelings in the world.

The Story Of How I Did Not Lose My Arms

In the spirit of a kinder, gentler, happier time (back when this blog had a name very obviously thought up by a fourteen-year-old), I shall now relate a probably-mundane story from my day.

Friday we were hanging trusses (that's 'roof parts' for you big-city pencil pushers). So I'm on the absolute top of a rickety scaffolding (on wheels -- blocked wheels, but wheels nonetheless) some two, two and a half storeys high. Below this rig is six inches of concrete. My dad is on the top of the wall to my right, and my uncle is on the wall to my left. On the ground in front of me is the telehandler ('crane,' pencil pushers). Attached to one of the forks of the telehandler is a chain -- wrapped around the carriage and hooked back on itself so the other end dangles free.

The process is as follows: a truss is carried over the ground to the telehandler and positioned so that the centre, the peak, is under the chain. The free end of the chain is looped around the centre post and hooked back on itself so the telehandler can raise it up to us.

These trusses are forty feet wide, and since they're made of 2x6s, they're kind of floppy. Hence three of us up at roof height -- to control the thing. Because I'm in the centre, I'm responsible for the tallest and heaviest point of the truss (a really smart place to put the 5'3" 150-pound college kid -- the centre of the truss is twice my height). The chain and I are the only things holding it upright until my dad and my uncle get some nails in (and even the chain has to be a bit slack so my dad and my uncle can make sure it's seated properly).

We developed a pretty good rhythm over the first ten trusses. So on the last one, the eleventh one, the telehandler brought the truss up to us, my dad got his end set in place but not yet nailed down, I grabbed one of the 2x6 'webs' near the centre to steady it, my uncle stretched out to grab his end. Something happened -- I'm not sure what, but my dad said later that the telehandler dropped the truss on the walls a bit abruptly, enough to bump it -- but I saw the chain on the top post of the truss come undone. The hook just jumped right off the chain. I saw blue sky where the grey chain link should have been.

Suddenly I'm the only thing preventing a 250-pound truss from falling several storeys to crush the telehandler and the operator as well as destroying the truss itself -- oh, and we're already two and a half weeks behind on this job. Every muscle begins to tighten, begins to brace for that terrifying few seconds when the truss will be pulling against me, trying to fall, before my dad or my uncle will be able to wrench it back -- if they even can, being twenty feet away from the balance point.

All this flew through my head in a split second as I watched the hook drop back into place on the same link of the chain that it had just left.

Those muscles that had begun to tense had not yet finished tightening as commanded. It all happened that fast.

The telehandler operator's response when we told him what happened? "Oh yeah, I totally planned that."

The Free Alberta Highway

Two days ago I was driving on the Anthony Henday highway that goes around Edmonton. The purpose of this highway, I'm told, was so one could go from the south side to the north side in fifteen minutes. To the credit of whoever planned it, that is generally the case.

Unfortunately, even though the highway has only been in heavy use for like three years, they have already decided that rather than fill in the moonscape that is 50th Street, they must do their construction on the almost butter-smooth Anthony Henday.

I'm here to tell you few things are more frustrating than sitting in an endless string of traffic going exactly six kilometres an hour for a good half hour (at least). Those orange construction signs line the roads, telling the traffic to condense into one lane but when nothing materialises in the cleared-out lane, the impatients pull out and zoom ahead -- only to finally reach a physical barricade a kilometre later and have to merge back into the lane they just left. Which makes the lane insanely slow for those of us already in it because these idiots keep sticking their hood ornaments in our way so we can't just suck up to each other's bumpers and keep the impatient blockheads out.

So they merge in and we continue. Beads on a string, being slowly added at one end and pushed along a thread, no hope of escape.

Finally, after almost half the highway, we see evidence that the construction signs might actually be telling the truth -- there's a pair of highway maintenance trucks.

As we pass it we see... two men, one holding a shovel.

That's it.

I have been delayed for a half hour because of two men and one shovel.