I have come to learn that each of us is given raw material to make of it what we will.  Typically, that raw material aligns with our vocation, our job.  I am a university professor, which means that my raw material is paper.  I use it to collect my thoughts, brainstorm, teach, and communicate, and my students, in turn, give me paper with their work on it for me to evaluate and assign a grade.  I am surrounded by paper: books, essays, periodicals, notes.  For others, that raw material may be wood or plastic or electrical wire or pipes or engine parts.  It may be cleaning supplies or diesel trucks.  It may be fabric or patients.  It may be digital.  It may be purely intellectual.  Raw material is the stuff we use to create, and, moreover, it is the stuff we use to provide.  My stepfather was a welder.  His raw material was metal. 

What we do with that raw material says much about us.  Chuck, my stepfather, stepped into what he call his instant family.  My mother was left with five children.  Without hesitation, it seems, Chuck began coming around, eating dinner, doing odd jobs around the house.  Of course, as the oldest child, I was skeptical.  I had my loyalties and could not figure why someone would be so willing to attempt to fill in some big shoes.  As a boy, of course, I could not grasp the grander scope of things.  Chuck, like most of the men in my small northwestern Pennsylvanian community, was cut out of a singular cloth.  The steel, manufacturing, and oil industries kept the town afloat.  Chuck knew intimately well what it was like to work hard, punch a timeclock, wait for the whistle: time to start, time to eat lunch, time to quit.  Soon after my mother and Chuck met, I became a paperboy, and it was critical to the working men on my route that I got the paper in before they left for the job.  They needed to see the day’s news because that would be what they would talk about during any downtime.  Theirs was a tight community, and Chuck was a part of it. 

I would never suggest that there was never any love between my mother and Chuck.  Of course there was.  That goes without saying.  But what I am speaking about here is the way he took on the job, so to speak, of raising five kids.  He fell into a rhythm at home as much as he fell into a rhythm at work.  It was the same elbow grease, the same ethic.  Day in and day out he turned the raw material of his vocation into a paycheck that would support a family of seven.  I saw the value of that then.  As a man in his fifties, I see the sheer nobility of it now. 

As the saying goes, any fool can be a father; not everybody can be a dad.  Chuck certainly became the latter, doing what he could to do what dads do: teach, provide, discipline, love.  And make skateboards. 

Skateboard 

Chuck worked at Penn Metal 

then, welded arches and angles 

for gas and oil tanks, 

was good at what he did, 

liked it, I think. 

He drank Miller Lite from the bottle 

just about every night after work, sitting in his 

grease-stained clothes at 

the kitchen table, the 

Warren Times Observer folded neatly 

in front of him. 

At some time 

(who can remember) 

I mentioned a skateboard – that I wanted one. 

“I’ll make it,” my stepfather said. 

“I can do that easy.” 

And so he did. 

Days later he brought home two boards – 

stainless steel with a two inch plate 

welded at an angle on the end so I could 

skillfully kick it up into my 

hand like Marty McFly. 

“Steel?” I said.  “Skateboards are made 

out of wood. 

I watched him drain the last of the suds 

into his upturned mouth. 

“It took me a week’s worth 

of lunch hours,” he finally said 

before getting out his pipe and 

pinching into the bowl a wad of cherry tobacco. 

So I held up a board, examined the wheels that had been 

bolted irreversibly to the bottom of the deck, and 

said a proper thank you. 

Then I continued to add up the hours 

until, well into my thirties and with three girls of my own,  

I found myself making 

princess dresses 

out of paper.