Archive for May, 2009

His hands were gnarled and bent, twisted by time, hard work, and arthritis. But the old man proceeded with the slow precision of a surgeon out of habit, memory, and deep unspoken emotions. His name was Giuseppe Lanza, an aging master craftsman. He was a small man, slightly hunched over, walking with a cane and growing frailer with each passing day. Some would have considered him minimally educated, but he was packed with the wisdom of ages. He seemed to know so much about so many things. I was in awe of the old man I saw; he had for sure earned a degree in living. For hours at a time at ages 13 and 14, I simply sat there and watched him carve, sand, and string as he deftly recreated models of ships he had worked on as a young shipwright back in Naples, Italy. I would carefully examine each of the ships he had already built that now sat on shelves on the walls until I found some part or some design feature whose purpose or function I didn’t understand. In looking back, I must have pestered him with a thousand questions, but he always stopped what he was doing to explain it in his accented English. When I asked a question twice, he would simply try a different way to answer it until I understood what he was doing. He never scolded me for misunderstanding.

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