Handcrafted Read online

  It was just the boost I needed. I jotted down the tools he mentioned: A table saw. A drill press. A hand planer. Some chisels. A dado blade for my table saw. “You know what a dado blade is?” he asked. I didn’t. “You can cut tongue-and-groove joints with it and a bunch of other stuff. Get it. Okay?”

  As we drove home to Dallas later that week, I dreamed the whole ride about one thing: building furniture. My grandfather was willing to invest in my tools, which meant I’d have everything I needed to really develop my craft. “Could I somehow build furniture full-time?” I wondered aloud to Kelly. How cool would it be to set up some kind of furniture business? The two of us talked for hours about the possibilities, and by the time we pulled into our driveway, I was sure this was my new path. There was only one thing standing in my way: my job as a copier salesman.

  During my lunch breaks, I swung over to Home Depot and priced out the tools my granddad had asked me to look for; then I sent him the grand total. Though I was overwhelmed with work for the next few months, my desire to build furniture never dimmed. Little by little, I began prepping. I’d need a real shop. That meant I’d have to finally repair our garage floor, which looked like it had withstood a major earthquake. Until you have to break up a cement floor on your own with a sledgehammer, two hundred square feet doesn’t seem very big. But I got it done. Over two days, to save money, I beat the crap out of that cement and cleared it out so a concrete company could pour a new slab. I got rid of the old concrete Shawshank Redemption–style, throwing out a few pieces at a time in the garbage each week. It was months before the pile was all gone.

  Not long after I overhauled the garage, Granddad’s check for $1,250 arrived in the mail. A few days later I was at Home Depot having my own tool shower, thrown by Verner. I’ve had many great moments so far in life, but a truly special one was setting up that garage with all those woodworking tools.

  No, I didn’t know what I was doing, and in a way, I still don’t. But I did have a sense of what it took to build something from scratch. My grandfather had shown me that. When he was building the new Roost up in the mountains of Dahlonega, Georgia, I watched him as he and his workers took a chainsaw and cut out notches in giant beams so they would fit together. Years later, I’d take on projects that called for some interesting joinery and details, and that’s when my granddad would come to mind. He mostly used the tried-and-true approach—basically, he just tinkered around as long as necessary until he could figure out how to construct something solid—and that stayed with me. Through trial and error, you just have to stick with it. It might take a little longer to build something lasting and beautiful, I’ve learned, but it is well worth the effort.

  I kept going to my day job, and I must’ve been doing something right because I had managed to land two big clients that would eventually be among the company’s most lucrative accounts. Trouble was, I was miserable. Maybe I should’ve tried to figure out a way to balance rewarding work at night in the garage with unfulfilling work during the day, but I couldn’t escape the sense that I needed to get out. It just didn’t feel right. And after three months, I chose to follow that feeling—I quit.

  On my last day, the owner’s son called me into his office.

  “So you’re leaving,” he said from behind his desk. “Clint, are you sure?”

  “I’ve been so thankful for the opportunity,” I said. “But, yes, I’m sure.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to build furniture.”

  He stared at me. “Furniture?”

  “Yes,” I said confidently. “Furniture.”

  “Do you have clients lined up?” he pressed, out of a genuine feeling of concern, as he truly was such a nice person.

  I told him I didn’t. “I know it sounds crazy,” I admitted, “but I’m sure.”

  I also wasn’t doing this without a partial plan to avoid insolvency. The week before, I’d called up my old boss, Mr. Thomas, at the mortgage licensing firm. “I’d like to return,” I told him, “but only if I can be there part-time.” My plan was to work at the firm for half the day and spend the other half setting up a small furniture company. Can you believe the guy agreed? Around the office, he’d had a reputation as a bit of a bulldog, but if he believed in you, there was no one more loyal. I’ll always appreciate that he gave me the chance to chase my dream.

  Soon after, I came up with a name for my new venture: River Dog Furniture Co. I never did file the paperwork to form an LLC, but the company felt no less real to me. Soon I was building tables for two of my coworkers and one for my boss’s middle son. And then after completing those projects, for two years, I didn’t touch my tools.

  I know that sounds nuts, and given how passionate I was upon returning from Georgia, it was. But I just let the rest of life get in the way of my dream. My part-time job eventually grew back into a full-time one, with more and more responsibilities and greater pay. I kept my tools, and week after week I promised myself that I’d get back into the garage. But then I somehow wouldn’t. It’s not that I’d lost the desire, much like I had never completely lost the desire to pursue a music career. But maybe making furniture was just meant to be my hobby, because I had no idea how to turn it into a business.

  In the five years since Kelly and I had left Baylor and launched into our happily ever after, I’d held five different jobs, been fired once, cut our European mission short, and lost cherished family and friends. And now, with most of my twenties in the rearview mirror, I couldn’t escape the thought that I should set aside my crazy furniture-building ideas and just grow up. In the midst of this confusion, Kelly and I decided it was time to take the next logical step—have kids.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  Rough Cuts

  Let’s say I’m making a tabletop from eight-foot boards. There they are on the floor of the shop, lined up in nice rows and resembling what they will look like when they’ve been joined. Now I’ve got to prep them for that eventual union. It’s incredibly important that this step be done well. Get it wrong, and it can create big problems down the road. In most shops, you use a face jointer and an edge planer to rake across the wood to square the boards and create a uniform thickness. It takes time to get each piece right. There will be waste and sawdust everywhere; parts of the board you may have loved will be gone forever. But when you’re done, though the board is still a board, it’s that much closer to fulfilling its ultimate purpose.

  By the summer of 2006, Kelly was pregnant. Every day after work, we would go for long walks around the neighborhood, the whole time dreaming and talking about baby Harp. It was such an exciting time—until every evening when I once again noticed where we were actually living. Busy streets. Stray dogs. Overgrown lawns. The neighborhood was changing for the better, but slowly. Our fixer-upper was still as awesome as ever, but it was tiny and laid out in a way that would make it impossible to escape a wailing baby. Maybe it was time to cash in on our investment and move.

  Here’s the thing about parenting. Even before your child arrives, you begin looking at the world through a different lens. You want the best for that kid, even when he or she is still just a tiny dot on an ultrasound screen. As soon as I learned we were expecting, I began yearning for a house with a bigger backyard, in a neighborhood with a park close by, people walking their dogs—on leashes! A bohemian existence is great when you’re a couple of newlyweds just trying to set up your life was my narrow-minded opinion. But now, with a child on the way, what I wanted had shifted. So we put our house up for sale and began looking for a more family-friendly home.

  On April 30, 2007, we closed on the sale of our little white house. We’d purchased our fixer-upper for $120,000 less than two years before and were able to sell it for $165,000. The next day, we used the earnings from that sale to put a $20,000 down payment on our second home, this one in Richardson, a nice Dallas suburb. The closing went off without a hitch, and we moved into our new place on May 1. Nine days later, our son
was born.

  His arrival was a nail-biter for sure. We showed up at the hospital the night before Kelly would be induced. We spent the night watching reruns of The Office and tried to get some sleep. By six thirty the following morning, things were moving along fine. At seven, however, Kelly was being rushed into the OR for an emergency C-section because our baby’s heart rate kept slowing. We were terrified. The medical team had wheeled her away so quickly that I’d barely had a chance to say good-bye. I stood alone with my delivery day mix CD in what we thought would be our delivery room and tried to pull myself together. The nurses eventually came and took me to the OR, and by seven thirty, I was cradling my son’s little pink body. While the doctors sewed Kelly back up, I kept wondering, Shouldn’t somebody be taking care of this thing? In that moment, I couldn’t quite take it in that the “somebody” was me. Kelly was still coming in and out of consciousness because of all the anesthesia, and I was just trying to keep my head from spinning off my neck.

  “What’s his name?” asked the nurse as she lifted him from my arms so she could clean him up. Before then, we’d kept that an absolute secret. But now, to the first person who’d asked, I proudly replied, “Hudson Kenneth Harp.” My grandfather, father, and I all had the middle name Kenneth. The tradition was alive. The nurse smiled approvingly. After she finished her duties and handed my son back to me, I felt like I should sign something or pay a cashier. It was weird. I went over to Kelly, who was just coming out of her drugged state, and held Hudson right up to her face. “He’s beautiful,” she whispered. She then closed her eyes and faded back to sleep.

  During our couple of days in the hospital, we were advised to let the nurses take care of our baby overnight so we could get some rest. That went fine on the first evening, but on the second morning, Kelly woke me up, anxious that they hadn’t yet brought him to her. I kept telling her everything was fine, but she was adamant. I should have believed her. The phone rang.

  “Hi, Kelly,” said a calm voice. “This is a nurse downstairs. Hudson has weakened and he’s hypoglycemic. The doctor is almost here and we want to give him a feeding tube.” I put Kelly in a wheelchair and we whipped through the halls. We got to the nursery in record time, and for the next three days, we stayed by our son’s side. He had gone from a healthy seven pounds nine ounces at birth to a scrawny five pounds. He would rebound in the neonatal intensive care unit, but we remained terrified. The three of us—Kelly and I, as well as Kelly’s mom, whom we call Mimi—took turns at Hud’s side every hour he was in the NICU. Mimi insisted on taking the first shift so we could get some rest. Hours later, when Kelly went down to relieve her, she stood quietly at the door and listened to her mom saying to Hudson, “You’ve got to get big so you can go play at your new house, and so your mom can yell out the back door, ‘Come on in, Hud, supper’s ready!’ ” Kelly remembers that moment like it happened five minutes ago.

  When our son was finally released from the hospital five days later, I wanted to take his nurse home with us. The entire earthly existence of this little miracle was now solely in our hands.

  Those first few days back at home, I channeled all my worry into a project. It had been a couple of years since I’d built anything, and as a proud new father, I decided to build Hudson a big-boy bed and an armoire. Yeah, sure, our son was only days old, but I figured I’d get a jump on it. I was in the garage late one Friday evening when Kelly’s cell rang.

  “This is the lab at the hospital,” said a nurse. “We did some screenings on your son while he was here, and he has a condition called MCAD. Please make sure you feed him every three hours without exception, and call the doctor first thing on Monday.”

  “I’m sorry, um . . . who is this?” stammered Kelly. “And MCAD—what?”

  The nurse explained that MCAD—or medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency—is a metabolic disorder that prevents the body from breaking down certain fats and turning them into energy. It’s a genetic enzyme deficiency, and apparently Kelly and I, both silent carriers of the recessive gene, had passed it on to our beloved Hudson. That’s why he’d become hypoglycemic in the hospital. It’s also why we had to be sure he ate regularly to keep his blood sugar from dropping to a dangerous low.

  If we’d been riddled with anxiety at our son’s birth, we were petrified now. The one piece of good news, our doctor later told us, was that the condition could eventually get progressively easier to manage the older he got. In Hudson’s case, it has. In fact, you’d never even know it’s there.

  But on the evening when we got the message from the lab, we went into survival mode, starting six months of feeding our son around the clock every three hours as we’d been instructed. My wife stayed up for the eleven p.m. feeding and I took the two a.m. shift. I remember sitting on the couch with Hudson, watching reruns of Family Ties as I tried to feed him and put him down, knowing that a short few hours later, I’d be back up and getting ready for my workday. Both Kelly and I were beyond exhausted.

  Later I realized that I never did get to press play on my delivery day CD. It’s funny how life can sometimes just sweep you along. One minute, you’re creating CDs and making plans, and the next, you’re scrambling to keep your child alive. In carpentry, there’s a rule: measure twice, cut once. Yet no matter how accurate you’ve been in your measurements, chances are, you’re going to make a mistake, or something will be slightly off and you’re going to have to adjust. But hang in there—don’t lose hope. Keep making your way through the rough cuts—and, yeah, you’ll finally figure it out.

  * * *

  Kelly and I had decided that once Hudson was born, she’d trade in her teaching job to work at home as a full-time mom. She still dreamed of possibly becoming a college professor one day, but she first wanted to focus on nurturing our son. Hudson’s metabolic disorder had suddenly made that more necessary than ever. It also meant that it was time for me to get a big-boy job so I could better provide for my family.

  My position at the mortgage licensing firm was going well and I enjoyed my coworkers, but I had no benefits. My hourly rate was excellent, but I’d never intended for it to be my forever job, so I began searching. I searched my heart, my head, and the internet. For a hot minute, I thought about med school. The nurses and doctors who’d guided us through Hudson’s crisis had helped us greatly, and I wanted to do the same for others. But who was I kidding? School had never been my thing. I switched gears and began looking for something more administrative, a job similar to my current one, only in the medical field. I flipped through the contact list in my head and made some calls.

  Back at Baylor, Kelly had a sorority sister Jeffie. I’d once fixed her car—a skill I’d picked up during a childhood full of repairing crappy cars—and she was eternally grateful. Kelly had heard that Jeffie’s husband, Chris, was working at a medical company in Dallas. She suggested I ring him.

  “Chris, hi, this is Clint Harp.” Years earlier they had supported us on our Paris journey, so this was a bit of a reconnection.

  “Yes, Clint!” he said. “How are ya, bud?”

  “Well, I’m great,” I said, “just looking for a job. I thought I’d see what you had going on over there. Right now, I’m the director of operations for a mortgage licensing firm and would love to do something like that in the medical field.”

  Chris thought for a moment. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “We really don’t have any openings like that here. But there is a position open for a sales rep in our Houston office.” Before I could inquire about the details, he added, “By the end of the first year, you should be making six figures.”

  While I was all in on the salary—we really needed the money—I wasn’t sold on the sales field. For crying out loud, during my stint as a copier salesman, I could remember lying in bed at night feeling my heart pound from the stress of needing to meet sales quotas. Medical sales especially made me uncomfortable, although at the time I couldn’t tell why. And this might sound strange if you’ve never lived in T
exas, but even though I enjoyed our time in the big city of Dallas, I never saw myself moving to the Houston metropolis. For one thing, I was raised an Atlanta Braves fan and couldn’t stand the Houston Astros. For another, a large city with millions of people and horrific traffic sounded awful to me back then. But all that went to hell when I heard the words six figures. Over one hundred thousand dollars in one year? Go ’stros!

  Four months after that call, we’d sold our house—yes, the one we’d just purchased—and loaded up our U-Haul. I’d landed the job and we were going to Houston. I strapped four-month-old Hudson into his car seat and we made our way down Interstate 45. A moving truck filled with everything we owned trailed behind. On the way, electronic road signs flashed warnings at us: “Houston is experiencing inclement weather. Tropical storms and hurricanes are on the way. TURN AROUND.” We ignored the signs and kept right on driving. Six figures! 401(k)! Paid vacation! Move it or lose it, hurricane, we’re coming through!

  * * *

  Sales is a wonderful career for those that are passionate about it. I’ve had the pleasure of working with amazing salespeople in my life and had great experiences with people who love the field. But if you don’t love it, it can be a nightmare, just like anything else you’re doing but don’t really want to do. And when it came down to it, I hated selling infusion therapy for all the same reasons I’d once deplored making cold calls for copy machines. In this case, my potential customers were hospital social workers and case managers and of course doctors. Here I was, this preppy thirty-year-old goofball in a suit, trying to sell a medical pump as I attempted to bridge gaps in culture, knowledge (as in I had none), gender, and just about every other chasm you can imagine. Bridging gaps is something I’m all about, but it didn’t feel right for me while also trying to make a sale. I’m sure if I’d truly gotten to know those I was attempting to connect with, they’d have as much in common with me as the next person. But when you show up at a hospital, peddling pumps, you have only seconds to establish a good rapport. I did it by sweetening the deal. “Would y’all like some brownies?” I’d typically start with. So creative. Most would show moderate interest and welcome me into their office. Flattery and my dimples—in place of much knowledge of medicine—got me in. And when Christmas rolled around, I was slinging around Godiva chocolates to anyone within range. That worked okay at first, but then it started to feel gross.