Frank Has No Idea How Good He Is

Frank Has No Idea How Good He Is

Frank brought a vase to the woodturning club last night. Four hundred individual pieces of wood — walnut, maple, cherry, whatever else he'd been hoarding in his garage — arranged in a geometric pattern and turned down to walls three millimeters thick. The whole thing probably took him two hundred hours. He is seventy-eight years old and retired from the post office.

I brought a bowl.

It's a good bowl. I want to be clear about that. But standing next to Frank's vase, my bowl looked like something a child made on a dare. The kind of object that earns the word "charming" from people who are being kind.

I told Frank his vase was magnificent. I meant it the way you mean things when you're slightly humbled and mostly just glad you got to see something beautiful in person. He looked at it for a moment, shrugged, and said: "It's okay, I guess. The walnut gave me trouble."

The walnut gave him trouble.

There is a particular kind of person who produces extraordinary work and remains, somehow, genuinely unmoved by it. Not falsely modest — that's a different creature, the one fishing for the compliment they already expect. Frank wasn't fishing. Frank was reporting. In his own accounting, he had set out to do a thing, the walnut had been difficult, and the result was okay. The gap between his internal standard and the finished object was all he could see. The rest of us were looking at a masterpiece. Frank was looking at a problem he almost solved.

This is both the engine of his excellence and, in some small way, a kind of tragedy. The vase will never be as good to Frank as it is to everyone else in that room. He will always know where the walnut fought back. The rest of us get to experience the thing he made; he only gets to experience the distance between what he made and what he imagined.

You could argue that this gap — between vision and execution, between the ideal object and the real one — is precisely what keeps a person working. Close the gap and you stop. Frank has been turning wood for decades and he has never once closed it, which is why he keeps showing up with things that stop a room.

But I keep thinking about what it would cost him to look at that vase the way I looked at it. Just once. To stand in front of four hundred pieces of wood fitted together with the patience of someone who has nowhere better to be, and think: I did that. That's mine. That's good.

The walnut gave him trouble. The walnut also did exactly what he asked.