He was my lead framer. He was in his fifties, was lean, wiry, and tough as the nails he ran through his Hitachi nail gun. He had started framing before nail guns were used, and had, as the old cliché goes, forgotten more about framing than I had ever learned. I was 25 years old, was two years into a crash course on project management and was in charge of building a 5000 square foot Montecito-style mansion in the oak studded hills of the Nipomo Mesa. He was the leader of the team I had hired to take the project from a massive, three-tiered slab of concrete to a livable structure.
The Framer would put on reading glasses when he was looking over the plans, and if I interrupted him, he would stare sharply at me over those glasses with a vaguely professorial look that struck me as ironic in juxtaposition with the rest of his obvious workmanlike bearing.
His border collie went everywhere he went; seated in a place of honor on the toolbox in the back of his diesel chevy truck. The dog always had a chewed up frisbee golf disc in her mouth and would drop it at the foot of the Framer at frequent intervals and sit back expectantly, waiting for him to throw. The Framer had developed a solid backhand huck and would send that disc a country mile in any direction and the dog would disappear for several minutes to go find her beloved disc and return it for another throw. There was no nook or cranny on the jobsite where that dog wouldn’t find him. Once I was standing on the ridge of the roofline in discussion about the next material drop, when the dog scrambled over the top of the second ladder she’d had to navigate in order to make it up to our 24’ elevation, trotted over to her boss and dropped the frisbee at his feet. Without missing a word in the conversation, The Framer bent down, picked up the disc, and hucked it off somewhere into those oak studded Nipomo hills. The dog scampered off over the newly laid plywood sheathing, down two ladders, and streaked off into the chapparal to find her precious disc.
The framer was of a different sort from most. While he had the leathered brown skin, the smooth moving hands of a craftsman revealing a strength that only comes from repetition with tools and materials over many years, and he walked with jock-like self-confidence that framers always carry, his self-confidence stopped short of a swagger: he didn’t use the colorful language and coarse jokes that are so typical of the trade, and his crew seemed to all be family members. It was several weeks into the job that I learned The Framer and his whole crew were Jehovah’s Witnesses which fit the puzzle together neatly and gave context for his welcome variation from the coarse behavior of a typical framing team.
Naturally, according to the dictates of his creed, The Framer eventually broached the subject of faith with me. I am myself a practicing and faithful non-denominational protestant. According to his faith, my beliefs are heretical; according to my faith, his beliefs are heretical, and while we made a good effort on our lunch breaks to resolve these age-old differences established by greater and smarter men that we, neither of us was able to convince the other to abandon his community for the other’s. At the end of the half hour, we would drop this greater endeavor and return, united, to the humble effort of building a home.
While he was never able to convince me to become a JW, he did convince me of the value of Red Dirt Country music which blared from the jobsite radio constantly. The Framer loved the Texas/Oklahoma music scene, and devoted a few weeks’ vacation each year to embark on a pilgrimage to Austin where he and several of his family (and framing team) would set up trailers along with thousands of other attendees to a Texas Country music festival and wander around from campfire to campfire, with guitars in hand, and join in with the jam sessions that erupted spontaneously among fans who had spent all day being inspired by the artists who had perfected the sound that they loved.
This genre was new to me, but I was in the middle of a folk music phase and found this to be an interesting offshoot from the path I was already treading. When The Framer and his boys discovered I was a fair hand on the mandolin, they immediately and without reservation invited me to a weekly Monday night jam. We would squeeze a drum set, a bass, and couple electric guitars, an amplified acoustic, fiddle, and now my mandolin into a tiny, half-rotted shed behind some relative’s house (I never did find out who) out in the country. We took periodic breaks from enthusiastically banging out melodies to step out of the sweaty shed and ease the ringing in our ears. The Framer and some other relatives always sat some thirty feet away from the shed around a roaring fire pit with a cold beer in hand, just enjoying our music from what had to be the most appropriate distance, staring peacefully into the orange flames that lapped cheerfully at the massive purple black sky.
Times change and contracts end. I got a girlfriend and Monday night jams were no longer available to me. I took a new job and wasn’t running large framing jobs anymore. It was more gradual then abrupt, but The Framer’s presence eventually disappeared from my life. I don’t know the last time I saw him, but I like to think maybe someday, if I find myself at South by Southwest wandering from campfire to campfire with my mandolin in hand, I might stumble upon one where sits an old Framer, now in his seventies, retired and quite comfortable in his chair, with his kids and grandkids around him, and of course, a border collie curled at his feet, lovingly clutching a chewed up old frisbee golf disc.