A Future Starts With a Single Cut

Paul,

I so want to be a woodworker but I don't really see how to do it. Every where i turn it's not really what I am learning the way you show it. Any help would be appreciated.

Alex

Ontario, Canada

Answer:

His hands were gnarled, veins rose in periodic knots beneath a parchment skin where bones peaked and troughed, leading to uncut, nicotine-stained fingernails. He pulled up the saw he bought “new in 1895”, sliced its teeth into the wood and I watched in silence as the Beatles sang “She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah!” somewhere off in an insignificant background. A perfect dovetail emerged by sight from the strokes. For the first time in my life and by this one act of supreme power and control, an old man made entry into a world that determined the course of my life with the same progressive power.

By this we charge the future of young lives–acts like this take the ordinary and make the extraordinary happen!

Since then I have never listened to those who say contrary things to the way I choose to make the things I do. Opinions are nothing more than opinions. They often interrupt a clear path a man or a woman chooses. When you learn to master the true art of working wood the doors open to pursue any course into the future.

Nothing offered today lures me like the man cutting a dovetail 52 years ago. It was a pivotal point in my life and I have lived by it throughout a wonderful work-life every day. So don't care too much about what others might say you can or can't or should or shouldn't do, choose your future and make it happen as best you can!