Willard Street Words

Publisher’s note: Every Saturday we treat you to Earlywood, a free excerpt from one of the thousands of pieces I’ve written since 1996. Sometimes it’s from a magazine article. Or a book. Or (in this case) a blog entry from 2021. Each entry has been updated or annotated with some modern context or point of view. Enjoy!

The sign over Chester Cornett’s shop in Elizabethtown, Ohio.

Every shop I’ve worked in has a set of built-in aphorisms – things that are said when you encounter a moment of truth at the bench or when the clamps come off. Michael Dunbar’s chair shop probably had more than 100 sayings that he and his instructors had developed. Taking a class there was like living inside Confucius’s “Analects.”

We have some at our shop. Some of these are said out loud. Some are muttered under one’s breath. Others are too private to speak.

“Let us all now drink to the success of our hopeless endeavor.”

This is a Russian dissident toast that I learned in college. I say it to myself as a little pra…