Three lessons from my father

I have just had that gut-wrenching experience of putting my dear father in a nursing home, for permanent high-level care. A bloke who, in his prime, could turn his hand to anything from the dark art of cost accounting to the greasing and oil-changing of a 1937 Dodge.

Probably from having been a teenager in the sixties, I can see now that I spent a lot of time devising lessons about what not to do in life, based on an opposition to some of what he did, which from here looks pretty self-righteous on my part.

Now, as he sits in his favourite chair, diminished, I see glimpses of the younger, resourceful, capable dad. I have started to collect the positive lessons from my father. Here are three strong and memorable ones for me:

Keep your left hand behind the cutting edge

When you are holding the chisel in one hand, and the piece of wood in the other, you don't want to be in the position where, if the chisel jumps, you end up chiselling yourself. Keeping your left hand behind the cutting edge was just a piece of dad's common sense imparted to young, enthusiastic but impetuous carpenters who went down the shed to "make something". When I look back, it was also about risk management. You can take some simple enough steps to prevent damage, without really compromising the ability to achieve the outcome. Apply a bit of care to the way you set something up, and then execute it. Think about it while you are doing it. Keep your form.

On another level it's about what is worth what. Seemingly keeping that bit of wood a bit steadier with your hand in front of the chisel, and risking a deep gash and some stitches – or taking it a bit slower, even clamping the wood to the bench instead. Sometimes the bit of extra time saved, or the effort, isn't really worth it.

You can have a go at really big things

My dad was, by training, experience and inclination, an accountant. That didn't stop him from tackling some really big projects. We had a block of land down the south coast. With four kids at school, the only way there was going to be a holiday house, in dad's view, was if he built it himself. There was room down the back, in the chook pen, to build a set of dummy foundations. At his workplace, the temporary office premises where he had been overseeing a factory start-up, were being pulled down. He bought the discarded timber beams for a song, each one of them 12 inches x 2 inches (that's 250 mms x 50 mm), and a giant saw-bench that the builders had been using. He ripped the big beams into 4x2s and 3x2s for the frame of the new holiday house.

He built the roof first, sitting it on the dummy brick piers. It was a hip roof, not an easy-way-out gable roof. That meant a whole lot of compound mitre cuts, blending two different angles, for all those rafters as they met the hip coming down from the ridge. I wish I had watched all that, and got dad to show me how to use that thing with all the dials and numbers called a "rafter-graph". I have tried to cut compound mitre joints since and I know how hard they are to pull off. He must have cut 25 or 30 of them. He assembled the roof with the double-headed nails they use for concrete formwork; numbered all the beams; then pulled it apart easily because of those clever nails. Then he built the wall frames. Left them intact, hired a bloke with a truck and had it all carted down the coast. We all had a hand in putting it back together, dad and my brothers and I. It's still there 40 years later. And everyone still loves going there.

Building a house isn't something your average accountant does. Dad did, because he was prepared to have a go at it – at something really big.

Bricolage

There's a current trend called "decluttering", throwing out anything that you don't need for the present or the immediate future. There is, however, a competing theory known as "bricolage": taking whatever you might have at hand, and using it to address whatever need you currently have – even if it means having stuff around, just in case you might need it to address such a need. Dad always had a fair amount of stuff down the back. It is arguable that he had too much of it. (Actually, it's undoubtable). But his first response to doing a job was to assess what he already had, rather than writing out a shopping list and then going out to buy it. A wedge to keep a door open. A bookshelf. A set of swinging boards to hold scores of tools in a confined space. That idea of thinking about how some issue, some challenge, can be dealt with by using what you already have, has been a wonderfully helpful, life-long example to me. Even though it means I have to find somewhere to keep that supply of assorted lengths of timber, empty containers, a variety of fasteners and a wide array of seldom used tools – just in case.

I reckon bricolage applies just as importantly to people. I have twice started new jobs, each time with advice from the HR director that "you really need to get rid of so-and-so out of your department – we thought we would wait till you started so you could do it." Each of those two so-and-sos were not "got rid of" – they knew a whole lot more than me about the company and the job I was supposed to be doing, and they were already at hand. Each of them re-invented themselves to be consecutively the two best, most loyal team members I ever had. So often, it's all about what is already in the kitbag.

What I find sad now is that I can't tell dad about the importance of those three lessons to me. His cognitive ability has slipped just beyond the capacity to take it in. I tried a little while ago to remind him, on his Father's Day card, of "keep your left hand behind the cutting edge", and he just gave me a friendly smile. So I learned one more lesson out of the whole process: acknowledge the lesson to the teacher while they can still appreciate the acknowledgement. But dad: thanks anyway.