Some projects live in your head for years before your hands ever touch them. Mine was a keeser: a chest freezer converted into a dispensing system for homebrew, cold beer of various kinds on tap in my own house. My wife wants beer. I want mead. My son wants root beer. I’d wanted a keeser for the better part of fifteen years. I’d priced it out, talked myself out of it, priced it again. This Labor Day weekend, I finally got up the gumption.
It came together the way these things do when you’ve waited long enough. I saved the money, watched the holiday sales, found the deals, and ordered the parts on the cheap. Then I spent most of the long weekend building it. I milled wood, stained the collar, and once the woodwork was done, did the unthinkable of drilling holes through 10 hours of effort.
By Monday, it was mostly together. Over those few days, plenty of people wandered through the porch and looked it over. “That’s really cool,” they’d say. Every one of them meant it, and every one of them was kind. I was proud of the thing.
Then Steve Lipetzky came by to pick up his son. Our boys are friends, and he’d made the trip a hundred times. This time, he stopped. He saw the keaser and went straight to it, the way you go to something you recognize. He looked it over. He worked the parts with his hands. He told me he had one of his own, bigger than mine, but not as nice. It was plainly a big deal to him, and watching that, it became a bigger deal to me.
Steve is a Professional Engineer. I capitalized that title because it is formal and it truly matters. He didn’t just say a kind thing and move on. He read the thing. He understood what I’d done and why, and he could talk about it from a place I couldn’t reach on my own.
We tend to think praise is a gift, that the kind word is the thing we give each other. But the deeper gift is different. It’s someone standing in front of your work, seeing it for what it actually is, and being able to talk about it from real knowledge. Appreciation is warm. Recognition from someone who understands the craft is something else entirely.
It wasn’t the best build in the world. There are a dozen things I’d do differently next time, even though I fully intend there to never be a “next time.” But it had something to it. I know that now, not because a lot of good people told me it was cool.
To be honest, it matters that my wife and my son think that it is amazing. It matters that my father-in-law marveled. It matters that my son’s friends were trying to understand everything that I did. But what mattered most of all was that a person who had been down the path, who had expertise in the area, looked at it, saw what the historian had cobbled together, and said it was good.