The Moral Lessons of Carpentry

Some lessons are best understood physically ...

Long ago I acquired a simple set of bookshelves. Why? Because back then the only available book formats were "hard" or "soft," not digital, so those of us who read were constantly filling up our living space with hundreds of examples of both, and always running out of space to store them. OK, my house is still like that, but I can see my physical books beginning to follow my music collection into the cloud.

At the time I considered these shelves cheap and nearly disposable. They were plain, unfinished pine boards, carelessly joined together, with a back of thin plywood. But compared to furnishings available now they are a masterpiece of fine cabinetry. Don't talk to me about Ikea. Just try to find something that is actually solid wood, not particle board covered in plastic. And if the backing isn't Masonite it will be even less substantial cardboard -- with a wood-grain paper face. Not wood, but a picture of wood. By contrast these pine shelves were actually joined using grooves cut in the side pieces, not those annoying little metal studs that seem to be universal now.

Moral Lesson No. 1: You don't know what you've got until time has gone by.

I coated the bare wood with a couple of coats of urethane varnish, and made a fateful decision to improve the attachment of the plywood back piece. Why fateful? Read on. I wasn't happy with the way it had been stuck on with staples. It was loose in places and felt flimsy. So I added some carpenters glue and additional nails to make it more solid.

For years the resulting piece served me faithfully, supporting the hefty weight of some portion of my library. The collection grew to occupy several additional bookcases until finally, because it no longer matched the decor, my lowly pine shelves were banished to the pantry and the more menial duty of supporting the bric-a-brac of contemporary kitchens -- chopping and mixing appliances, crock pots, garbage bags and the like.

Also on the shelves were some hurricane supplies, including (until recently) four gallon containers of water. It turns out these cheap polyethylene jugs are not really designed for long term storage. Having survived unneeded through one hurricane season, they were still standing by when one of them sprung a leak. The resulting small flood -- it's remarkable how much larger a gallon looks when spread flat over a large area -- soaked the bottom of the shelves and whatever items had been stored lower down.

Moral Lesson No. 2: Always do disaster planning.

So Saturday found me out back with the empty shelves on a table before me, attempting to remove that thin plywood from the back, the lower portion of which had now de-laminated due to what we might call "excess humidity." In short, I had lived to regret my attempts to attach it more securely. The wood wanted to peel away from itself rather than what it was glued onto, and the nails were harder to remove than the staples. What might have been a simple task became a matter for a hammer and wood chisel, followed by rasps to remove the residue of wood fibers and glue.

As I worked, in the back of my mind I heard a voice that I wished had been there at the beginning. You don't want to attach that so permanently, this experienced old carpenter would have counseled me. Those staples are there so when the day comes you want to remove or replace it, it will just pop right off. But that guy wasn't there when I needed him.

Moral Lesson No. 3: Plan for the future, because that day will come.

Once I had an entirely opposite, more cheerful carpentry experience. It happened when a friend gave me this wonderful old radio from the 1930s. No, it didn't work. Many years ago it had suffered some catastrophic component failure with the result that a transformer inside it had melted all over the chassis. It used vacuum tubes, of course, and most of them were missing, with an extremely low probability of being able to be replaced.

I decided it would make a great speaker cabinet. In spite of the symmetrical cabinet design it had only a single speaker on one side (with a torn cone), but with the innards out of the way there was plenty of room to mount two of them for stereo. I picked up a couple of 5-inch full range car speakers from Radio Shack and prepared to mount them.

The side that already had a speaker was easy. All I had to do was unscrew the old one from the piece of plywood it was attached to, then screw in the new one. But the plywood on the other side was solid because there had never been a speaker there. No big deal, I just had to unscrew the plywood (note that it was not GLUED in place) and cut an opening in it.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered the other side of the plywood was already marked in pencil for the cutout! We can only assume that it was easier to tell some helper in the factory to mark all the wood pieces, but then to only cut the ones that would have speakers attached. Maybe there was a deluxe model of the same radio that did have speakers on both sides. That would certainly be in line with American patterns of efficiency and consumer marketing. Or maybe the guy in the factory just figured that some hobbyist might want to add another speaker some day, not even imagining such a thing as "stereo" sound.

At any rate I experienced the great joy of applying my coping saw and following the outline that had been drawn on the wood for me by a nameless craftsman over 60 years in the past, someone who really and truly planned ahead. It just doesn't get any better than that.

And by the way, you wouldn't believe the sound that comes out of this simple unsealed enclosure. With the speakers pointing in opposite directions the sound reflects off the walls in a spacious and non-localized way, while the central location acts like a center channel speaker to fill in the gap between left and right. Maybe those guys back in the '30s knew something about acoustics, too.

Back to the Classics

"If music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die."

Like many others in Miami I grieved over the loss of WTMI, our only classical radio station, when it got sold and transformed into something ugly back in 2006. There was a glimmer of hope afterwards when someone tried to transform an AM news station into a classical music one, but this was doomed to fail. Few of the advertisers who had kept TMI afloat were interested in the wasteland of the AM dial, and the poor sound quality of AM was one of the reasons for inventing FM in the first place--not to mention stereo.

I'm old enough to remember our first classical station, WVCG, "The Voice of Coral Gables," that dates back to the 1950's. That's where my parents whiled away Sunday afternoons with the Metropolitan Opera, and where our family launched into mornings with the program deliciously titled "Burnt Toast and Coffee." Quite likely my lifelong addiction to caffeine can be traced back to this childhood first impression.

WVCG abandoned the classical format in 1967, though I have to say I didn't notice because I was too caught up with rock and folk at the time. Hey, it was the sixties. There was a 4-year hiatus until WTMI started up in 1971, just in time to feed my renewed interest in building my own collection of classical recordings.

For 30 years they served us faithfully, even as cities like Chicago and New York lost their classical stations. The program quality was always excellent, with the hosts dishing up as much information as music and serving as a resource both educational and entertaining. The format focused on complete works instead of fragments -- you were more likely to get the full symphony instead of just the adagio, which would leave the knowledgeable listener waiting for a climax that never came.

WTMI was also the home of Alan Corbett, who added his own light touch as a DJ. Following a performance of Rimsky-Korsakov's Night on Bald Mountain for example, he once came on to announce, "That was Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra" -- but in the voice of Mickey Mouse, a nod to its appearance in Disney's Fantasia. "Thank you, Mickey," he then added in his own voice.

Alas, Corbett is no longer with us, nor is WTMI, which was sold in 2006 and converted first to a pulverizing techno-rap format, then Caribbean, and now, with new call letters, "black talk." Talk about an identity crisis!

But this time we only had to wait less than two years for a replacement, thanks to the good people of American Public Media, who also bring us things like A Prairie Home Companion on Public Radio.

Classical South Florida is on the air as WKCP 89.7 FM in Miami and on a repeater station at 101.9 in West Palm Beach, not to mention 24/7 streaming on their website. Which brings up an interesting question: Now that we are consuming our music through the Internet and carrying it around with us in matchbook-sized iPods, is radio still relevant? Even the old network of shortwave broadcasts, which used to be the only way to get a world-wide audience, is being dismantled because the Web offers greater availability, higher reliability, and better sound quality.

I used to have a shortwave receiver myself, and would while away hours on it, laboriously fine-tuning to pick a station out of the radio noise, and getting a kick from hearing the BBC, Radio Moscow, and Middle-Eastern music from Turkey. But that radio died years ago, and I haven't missed it. Online you can tune in anything from anywhere at any time.

As I write this I'm listening to a recent live performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony by the Minnesota Orchestra, which was readily available by browsing the archive of past broadcasts. The sound is great in 128-bit MP3 format, which is Linux and Mac-friendly, and I had the chance to hear it when I had a block of time available, rather than being a slave to a radio schedule. I can even pause it or hear it again if I want to.

So the answer to the question is, first of all, that radio has become more than it used to be. A "station" is no longer just a spot on the local dial, but a nexus of connections on the web of the Internet--connections between performers, listeners, sponsors, venues, reviewers--and not just local ones but national, international, global. The station can offer content of its own, too, such as live broadcasts not available elsewhere. As radio, like TV, goes digital, a single station can even broadcast multiple program streams at the same time.

And second, call me old fashioned perhaps, but as much as I like to manage my own music library and choose what to listen to and when, there is still a place for a steady background stream of news and music, a soundtrack for our lives in which we have a chance to discover something new and unfamiliar as well as old favorites.

I can pull my van onto the road and punch a button. One says "talk to me," and WLRN and National Public Radio let me know the news and tell me what it means. Another says, "I feel jazzy," and WDNA, the local affiliate of Public Radio International feeds me a diet of jazz by those I know and those I do not yet know, with BBC news on the hour.

And the newest addition says, "play me something beautiful, I don't care what," and in the words of Shakespeare that they are so fond of quoting on the air,

"Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony."