I’m renovating a house and yesterday at long last I went to pick up the countertop for the kitchen island. It was a difficult job, a top and two sides, formed together. In August, the guy at Lowe’s who orders my windows had recommended the fabricator, a father and son team with a German last name in a little town an hour upstate from me. I’ll call them the Dietrichs. I faxed them the complex drawings and because my wife wanted a special laminate it took a while. The Dietrichs were hard to get a hold of. They have lots of work. I sent them a couple small checks to goose the project. I’d call a lot and sometimes get the father, Burt, who has a thick German accent, but he’d put me on to William, his son. In the end it took two months before William finally made it in one day last week, then took off to go snowmobiling. Yesterday I rented a truck with an 8-foot bed at Lowe’s to pick it up.
Driving up their road I had a sense of excitement. I love meeting the small-town craftsmen you meet renovating a house. They’re characters, a lot of them: independent, self-employed guys who scrape by, filled with hard-won wisdom about the working life. I like their stories and their wit.
The Dietrichs had a big warehouse/shop on a somewhat-commercial road in
a small town. I pulled in near the loading dock, next to a boat on a
trailer and a snowmobile. As I came to the front door, a man of about
70 came out. He said, "You are here for your countertop," in a German
accent. I said, "You’re Burt." He said, "No I am William." "But your
accent," I said. "I am from Iraq," he said. "Good, I’m from Syria," I
said. A little weird.
Inside it was cavernous, well-heated, and neat. Well-swept. I saw my
countertop across the room. It looked perfect. A dog with a neckerchief
ran up and challenged me. Looked a little aggressive, like a ridgeback.
I gave it wide berth.
William Dietrich appeared from an office. About 40. Like his father, a
burly-chested, goodlooking man with a square reddish face and evenly
spaced square teeth. Powerful, masculine. I admired the piece. It was
beautifully made. William disappeared to get the bill. Burt stood off
to the side. I said, "Where are you from?" "A place called Bonn," he
said. "B-o-n-n." "I’ve heard of it," I said. I had an intuition that he
didn’t like me. I was curious about him, but I decided to leave him
alone.
The dog brought a ball up to me and I started playing with her. I threw
it across the warehouse and the dog brought it back. William came out
with the bill. I wrote a check and said, "What’s the dog’s name?"
"Anya," he said.
The father called out from across the warehouse, "The dog’s name is Adolf."
I threw the ball again for the dog and said, "Go get it Adolf. Good Adolf."
The piece was very heavy. I dropped the gate of the truck and prepared
the bed with blankets I’d brought and then grabbed one end and we
carried it out. I bet it weighs 280 pounds. I handled my end and the
Dietrichs and a friend dealt with the other end. I’m proud of how
strong I am. We got it in the truck and I had to deal with strapping it
in. One leg of the thing was against the cab and I feared it would get
scratched up. But the Dietrichs didn’t help me put the strapping on. No
one looked for a piece of cardboard to protect the end. There weren’t
enough blankets either. I took off my canvas jacket and put it on one
end of the piece, then strapped it in. From the loading dock, Burt
advised me. "Tie it low, tie it low" he said in a nicer voice. I
wondered if his antisemitism hadn’t gone sour in his mouth.
A friend and I wrestled the thing into my house at 5. It fit perfectly. I
called the Dietrichs and Burt’s German voice answered. I said it was a
beautiful piece of workmanship and thanks. He said Thanks back and we
both got off the phone.
At dinner last night my wife and her sister were both creeped-out by
the story. "There’s prejudice everywhere," I said. "Yes, but that one
is, as the kids say, so last year," my sister-in-law said. My wife said
that in my niceness to the Dietrichs I was displaying
reaction-formation, a psychological response where you freak out in the
emotion of a situation and do the opposite to what you feel. I told her
I was trying to show that they had no power over me, to disarm the
father and float over him. "But he has a hold on you or you wouldn’t be
talking about it," she said this morning, when it came up again. I do
remember on the drive back wondering how much of my clothing they
expected me to take off in the cold to protect the countertop. I
thought of the Jews taking their clothes off by the Dnieper, or the
Danube, or all the other Eastern European rivers, and wanted to scream
at him.
