Dave

The Christmas journeyman

I remember back in the late fifties, the phone calls into our old wall phone at three in the morning.

They were always for my dad.

No, he was not a doctor.  Even better, he was a plumber, a master of his trade.  I am not sure that when he signed up for the trades that he knew he would be called on to rescue widows, single moms and college graduates from freezing to death at 32 below zero.

When he finally would get home after spending the night crawling on his hands and knees under a trailer or down a well, I never once heard him wish for another job.  He did wish for an end to the sale of cheap trailers in Saskatchewan, but he never complained about his job.

His hands were all callus and everywhere else was muscle.  I was impressed.  He looked like a tough guy, but his heart was a marshmallow.  My mother wielded the wooden spoon.  My father never laid a hand on me, except in a 50’s style uncomfortable hug.

The trades and the tag of journeyman go back forever.  My grandfathers were carpenters and my son-in-law is a heavy-duty mechanic.  My brothers and I took a shot at plumbing and in my sorry case I quickly found out that turning a piece of flat tin into a product called a ‘squared around’ was geometry.  Geometry and I were not close friends.

To my father’s dismay or maybe relief, I left the apprenticeship and became a teacher and a public servant.  These were the two types of customers he insisted were the worst for looking over one’s shoulder and commenting about the invoice. It took me years and one good book, to fully understand that my father and his profession was messy but heroic. The book, Flushed: How the Plumber Saved Civilization, is a wonderful glimpse into the role of plumbing taking us from merde thrown out the window to it disappearing down a comfortable ceramic throne.

So, Dad goes to this guy’s house at two in the morning and heads into the basement with the guy following.  Dad does his diagnosis and finds a wire has become disconnected.  He fixes it, packs his tools and writes out an invoice for $25.00 (long time ago). The guy is quite upset.  I watched you and all you did was fix a wiring problem and now you want to charge me $25.00.

Dad, cool as heck, says, excuse me a minute.  Then he writes out two invoices.  One is for five dollars for fixing the wire.  The other he writes out for $20.00 for knowing which wire to fix.  We have some very narrow definitions these days about what constitutes a knowledge worker.

Speaking of stories with a piece of wire as a protagonist…

It was four days before Christmas in 2022 and we woke up to that chill that says ouch.  Our boiler was stone dead, and we were without heat or hot water.  Hoping for a simple affordable fix like a blown-out pilot light we called our favorite plumbers.  A fine young man soon showed up and went to work.

It did not go well…

My dad’s pipe wrench resting on the misbehaving boiler

The next day an expensive part was replaced by another fine young man and what may have been a supervisor. These guys had iPads, for heaven’s sake.

Needless to say…

So now it’s Christmas Eve.  We have some space heaters keeping the severe cold at bay and water boiling on the stove but it’s almost Christmas and we could use some good news to keep the Grinch at bay.

Late morning a knock on the door.  This time it’s a fine-looking older man, about my age, who says he is Dave, an electrician.  Let me take a look, he suggests.

He does so…

However, I peek in and notice that Dave does his looking flat on his back looking deep into the deeper innards of the boiler, instead of the innards of an iPad.  He calls me.

Hey Bob, look at this crisper.  I learn that a crisper is a red wire turned black by being in the wrong place at the wrong time (like Christmas). He had nailed it.

We were soon back to heat and hot water thanks to what seemed to me to be basic knowledge of what should come from any superannuated tradesman.  This was a man who obviously would have preferred to be home with his family at this holiday juncture but who, without hesitation, answered the call to be with us.

Well, it was not us at that moment, just me.  ‘Us’ was out shopping.

He was almost done and ready to get home when I got the call.  My wife had the clutch jump out of its pants as she drove down an icy hill in Christmas traffic.  She was now very, very, very stuck in traffic, ice and anger.  I had no available car and was frantic on how to get to her.

“What’s the matter?” asks Dave from the boiler room.  

I explain…

Help me pack my tools, says Dave.  We’ll rescue her.

And he does precisely that.

There is a part of his story that I still can’t unhear.  As we drive through the snow and cold, as per the old guys’ code, we share a few stories.  His was not pretty.

Kidney cancer, pandemic holdups, spreading cancer, spinal collapse and no treatment options left except the one he was on.

He never stops smiling as he tells me these matters of fact.

I cannot help but still see him crawling on my boiler room floor to find the hidden crispers with the bottom end of an old man that went paralyzed a year before.

I felt like I was in a Christmas play.  For Dave though, it was just what he does, his work, his values and his commitment to being a decent hardworking human being.

I grew up in a generation that for the most part, was parented by mostly blue-collar workers.  We got the singular message.  You should do better.

The pressure was on to go to college and the message was clear: the white collars were better than the blues.  The trades were starting to feel like a second-class career.  Shop classes in high school were for losers and a degree in gender studies sounded far more promising than a call to keep planes in the air, fixing transformers in a storm or repairing my boiler in a deep freeze.

Don’t misunderstand, full disclosure, I went to college and did some good work, but sit Dave and I in a coffee shop to compare notes on careers.  I probably got more coffee breaks and made more money and never worked in the cold, but his work still has and will have for years, electricity coursing through it.

Remember that old phrase, the working class?  I don’t hear it much anymore.  Many folks now would rather be seen through some form of identity lens.  Fair enough, I suppose but why do we hesitate to identify as a worker? When did it go out of favor to say, I stand with the working class, the working poor and the working stiff?

In my home province they are now short 10,000 tradespeople.  What will it take to turn young folks’ heads toward the apprenticeship option, to the cold, to the callus and to helping make things and fix things and to not just expecting it from others?

I am proud of my dad, my son-in-law, Dave and the millions who still know how to work.  We need to give trades-based work its pride back. 

They deserve it.