Archive Columns: City Living

Philadelphia Carpenters

    Raise high the roof beam, carpenters!  And then fly to the convention center, there to raise high the curtain rod in that expert way of yours.  Next, operate those confusing wing nuts, using the formula memorized after years of apprenticeship, and hidden from the layman for his safety (shhh, left for loose, right for tight, keep it to yourself).

     Do not stop, union carpenters!  Continue to edify us with your indispensable skills.  Show us how you so deftly assemble the pre-assembled assemblages using your sophisticated power tools, the ones that the commoner, without your craftsman's skill, could never master.  When we ponder the power drill, for example, so dangerous so arcane, with its tricky on/off trigger configuration, not to mention the mysterious little switch above the thumb (shhh, left for loose, right for tight), we rejoice in your presence.

    Oh union carpenters, where would convention exhibitors be without you, you with your erudition on the nature of left and right, plumb and tilted, level and sloped, to say nothing of the aforementioned loose and tight?  Yours is a knowledge more profound than theirs, a technique more developed, an ideal more pure. They, who are without your expertise can only sigh wistfully at your example.

    Who would not pay, pay dearly even, to witness the sublime way you have with a two-by-six, now using it to shim a riser, now to persuade a carpet layer to your philosophy?

    Of course, the carpet layer and the other fine union men already share so many of your core belief s.  That a conventioneer should be eager to pay the union man more than the non-union man, so that the union man will be happier, this is an obvious truth universally embraced.   For if the union man is not happy, will not the convention exhibitor wander about tormenting and recriminating himself, asking "Please, is there not some far greater sum I can pay, so as to make this union man merry?"

    But deep in your philosophy lie tenets that challenge even other union men, dogma beyond all but carpenters, articles of faith so knotty that only those holding a hammer seem able to penetrate their mysteries.   It is not your inquisitive, indeed Jesuitical fascination with work rules.  This is impressive but not unique.  How many unions can dance on the top of a ladder, or how many unions does it take to annoy an exhibitor?  You know the answers to these, of course, but others do too.

    No, your creed is a deeper, harder one, for you believe that you should be hired when you are neither needed nor desired.  It is an exquisite doctrine, and yet generous too in the way that it allows others, however imperfectly, to glimpse the loftiness of your self-esteem.  But that is not the hardest point of your faith.  You, alone among men, union or otherwise, have a clear vision of an after-life.

    Alas, no harps will be playing in this after-life since no musicians will be there at all, nor waiters nor drapers.  These people lacked a prophet to show them the vision. It is beautiful, though, this after-life.  Though harpless, it is still, appropriately, in the clouds, and it features a convention center where union carpenters are hired even when the re are no conventioneers to hire them.

Back to Top