A Metaphor made Manifest

By Bobby Neal Winters

Last Wednesday I was either teaching or in a meeting every hour from 9am until 4pm.  My 4pm meeting was a half-hour telephone call, and then as I drove home I got a call from someone who had missed my 2pm Zoom meeting.

My schedule was tight. There were no gaps, no cracks.  Every event flowed exactly into the next.

When I’d gotten the last of my schedule done, I went to my garage and I cut dovetails.

That’s what I’ve been working on lately: I am learning to cut dovetail joints by hand.  I will forgive you for not knowing what dovetails are because one year ago I didn’t know what they were myself.

I’d heard the word dovetail.  I have even used the phrase “that dovetails nicely,” but when I did so, I was a fraud.  I didn’t feel it. I didn’t have an appreciation for the phrase.  I didn’t know from whence it came.

Now I do.  I don’t know that makes me a better person, but I do feel a bit more...smug.  That’s it: Smug. Smugness is what I am feeling.

Let me now transition from being smug to being pedantic. The two dovetail as it were.

A dovetail joint is a way to join two pieces of wood together. If you have an old chest of drawers, open one drawer a crack and look how the front of the drawer is connected with the sides. If you see the wood on the corners of the sides fan out into something that looks like birds’ tails (dovetail) the drawer has been made using dovetails.

The joint consists of two pieces.  One one piece, has the eponymous dovetails and the matching piece has the pins.  The idea is that you cut the pins so that they mesh so tightly with the dovetails that a thin layer of glue will barely fit between them and not much else. The flaring out of the dovetails helps hold the pieces together.

Tightness is the name of the game, so I cut them with a Japanese dovetail saw.  The saw is very thin so that it has a very small kerf (look it up). Japanese saws cut when you pull toward you rather than when you push so that they don’t bend in a tight kerf.

One marks the dovetails in a very particular way.  It is almost ritualized, and that word “almost” might not belong there.  There might just be different denominations of dovetail cutters.

You can measure with a ruler and divide the end of your board that way.  The folks on YouTube sometimes deride that as being too mathematical.  The alternative is to use dividers, which are similar to a compass, to mark the ends of the dovetails.  I find this much more satisfactory, and, ironically, much more mathematics.  It harkens back to Euclidean geometry and constructing geometric figures.

You learn this process by watching someone else do it, but you don’t really understand until you do it yourself.  Let me rework that last clause: “until you do it wrong yourself.”

When you do it wrong, thinking that detail didn’t matter, you get to the end and...ssss...there is a gap.  The joint still functions, but it’s not as beautiful as it was in your head. You see the reason it was done that particular way.

Your wife will look at it, and say that it’s beautiful. But you know what it’s supposed to look like.

This semester my Wednesday schedule at work fits together as tightly as a very finely crafted dovetail joint. It all consists of talking to people and listening to people.  Paying attention. Taking notes. Making promises. Trying not to make promises.

I begin to suffer from a malady I call “too many conversations.”

I’ve been a part of too many conversations during the day.  I start replaying some of the conversations in my head, and they are never the conversations that went well. Words swirl in my head like sawdust in a shop vac.

The ritual of marking, measuring, and cutting focuses me.  I am no longer in a world of words whirling in my head.  I am in a realm of things. The world of reality. It is a good world; a solid world; a world that is just better somehow.

In this world, I can see the mistakes I make and work to fix them.  An ugly gap? Fill it with epoxy resin. The wood is not even?  That is why God invented random orbital sanders.

The dovetails aren’t perfect.  Well, they are never going to be, but they will be better next time.

My central task these days is making a cabinet of drawers for my shop. I am using cedar pickets from the fencing section of Home Despot [sic] for the drawers.  They are cheap and they smell nice when you cut them.  Good for practice.

The wood is, however, horrible for this purpose.  By this I mean it is very soft.  It is very hard to get a tight fit and very easy to break and make it ugly. But it’s good for practice, and I am the only one who I need to please.

The stack of drawers in my cabinet is a history of my introduction to learning dovetails. The latest is better than the first. You can stack them from bottom to top and see the difference.

It all fits quite nicely.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )