Unhandy Man

MIDDLE AGE WAS APPROACHING, AND STEVE FRIEDMAN FELT LISTLESS. WERE THERE ANSWERS SOMEWHERE IN HIS TOOLBOX?

NOT TOO LONG AGO, I decided to build a bookshelf.

Proficiency with tools has always been important to me. As a college student, I carried Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance wherever I went. Three decades later, I recommended Shop Class as Soulcraft to friends in distress as well as to people I barely knew but who seemed sad. I promised that working with their hands— hammering and sanding, measuring and tightening—might bring them the kind of peace that yoga, therapy, and prayer never would.

I never read either book. Except for seventh-grade shop class, where I sawed and varnished a cutting board that turned out to look like a hideously deformed bluegill, most of my experience at handiness was aspirational, if not outright dishonest.

Even now, when people ask how my work is going (I’m a writer), I say I’m “hacking away” or “tweaking” or “polishing” or “restructuring” or “adding some layers.” When I am feeling especially ineffectual, I tell anyone who asks (and some who don’t) that I am “torquing” a piece of work. I make myself sound more like a granite-jawed, flinty-eyed motorcycle mechanic and less like a middle-aged man with poor posture and lower-back pain.

Did I need to build a bookshelf because the muscular verbs were no longer doing the trick? Because I found myself overweight and underearning, and if I was going to suffer a crisis, I wanted it to be something less overtly humiliating than hair plugs? Would I really be “building” anything if I merely mounted a shelf using brackets and screws? Only fake torquers ask such questions.

I Googled “how to mount a shelf.” I strolled to the neighborhood hardware store. According to the instructions, I would have a shelf mounted in 15 minutes.