Kind people and real estate agents would probably say that the house I grew up in had “character,” which is another way of saying that it was full of my father’s construction missteps.
He (or just as often my mother, to needle him) could point to almost any spot and tell a story about how, for example, he had entombed various tools inside walls as they went up. There was a carpenter’s level between the living room and the hallway, a hammer just off the kitchen, screwdrivers sprinkled here and there, even a saw. I used to imagine the kind of puzzled looks that his old tools, dark and dusty between the studs, would cause if the house ever fell or was torn down.
He remodeled as he went along, leaving our house filled with ghosts — outlines where a doorway had once been, now closed up but with a hint of the framing still visible through the plaster, perhaps to make people wonder why he ever put a door there in the first place when he and my mother undertook to build the house from the early 1940s into the 1950s.
They built a home on hopes and sweat but without any particular vision about the finished product.
I loved that house, and what I’ve come to realize is that I loved it not in spite of its flaws, but precisely because of them, something the Japanese call “wabi.” Howard Rheingold explores this concept in his book “They Have a Word For It — a Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases” (Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc., 1988). The idea is that a work’s flaw — its wabi, if you will — is what gives it unity and humanity. Without wabi, a thing is incomplete, imperfect — in the end, deeply flawed. Whatever it means to the Japanese, I think it applies just as well to a sense of home.
The house my dad built had all the wabi you could want, and more. And in looking around at the houses my friends and family also love, I keep coming back to the flaws and the stories — the lost tool behind the wallboard that fires a child’s imagination, the slightly out of kilter porch step that recalls a family project, the gouged wall from an unforgettable Thanksgiving dinner.
In the mountains just outside Salt Lake City, for example, there is a tiny cabin that has been in my wife’s family for three generations. The place is all wabi: the windows mostly don’t open, the stone hearth is blackened from the smoke that won’t go up the chimney. The wooden back steps are wobbly, evidence of numerous cob-job repair efforts over the years, including my own with some surplus boards from the shed and a pocketful of nails.
Everyone loves the place to death, and when far-flung relatives are in town, they almost always spend a few nights there, if only to sleep on the old bed that pitches to one side, or the swaybacked one that feels as if you were in a hammock.
Perfect flaws are everywhere once you start to look for them. In Ocean Grove, N.J., there’s an old Victorian hotel on the beach where my wife and I used to spend summer weekends before our children were born. The place is a paradise of plumbing wabis.
Think of the loose bannister knob that Jimmy Stewart kisses on his way up the stairs in the final scene of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The knob sums up everything about his drafty old barn of a house — and life — that doesn’t quite work in its individual components but in the end creates the perfect whole.
Perhaps I am just rationalizing my own error-prone style. But even I recognize there is a difference between the perfectly realized error and plain old ineptitude. Ineptitude was at work the day I tried to repair a 50-year-old doorbell in a house we once owned in Connecticut.
The doorbell wiring had been connected to the main electric system and built into the walls when the house was constructed, and I can still see with vivid, horrifying clarity the moment when, in pulling a replacement wire through a wall, it broke off in my hands. Both wires were entombed, never to be recovered, at least not without a sledge hammer. The subsequent visit by the electrician did not give our house more character, even remotely.
Indeed, I’ve become convinced that there are some real hard rules about household wabis.
The first is that you can’t buy a place, find its errors and appropriate them as your own. If a previous owner botched a porch, it’s just a mistake, plain and simple.
The second rule is that the overall project that produced the wabi must be a success. If all you see is the error or the sloppy work, you’re out of the wabi ball park and into the realm of the inept.
Third, the error must somehow tell a story. The best wabis happen when the whole family works together and can jointly retell how things went askew.
The house in New Jersey we have lived in for the last year got its first wabi this summer when my 10-year-old twins, Anthony and Paul, helped me build a trellis just off the deck in the backyard. Everything was perfect: we dug the post holes, mixed the cement, plumbed everything up straight. But when we went to put on the top piece, the board was warped in an upward curve and the middle post wouldn’t quite reach.
We sanded and sanded, but finally just attached the board as it was, and now when I look at the finished work, I see the tiny gap where the pieces don’t quite meet. In that gap I see my sons digging and stirring cement, and lining up the posts, and I feel again the beautiful summer day when we sweated together with our shirts off.
And I see my father. In the walls of our house, he left the archeological trail of his education as a builder and the stories of the early years of my parents’ marriage, through the winters when they used to huddle for warmth around a kitchen stove as work progressed around them, and then as the family — and their ideas about design — grew. He achieved what I could never do, building a house without a plan, teaching himself as he went along. In the end, the flaws were his monuments.
