(I first wrote this story in 1999, more out of hope than anything else. In hindsight, twenty-six years later, it has turned out to be far more accurate than I knew at the time.)
For many years now there’s been a carpenter working on my house. When he first began to work, there was some major remodeling that needed to be done. It hurt to see that so much of the house I had built myself needed to be torn out and replaced. But it had to be done, and so I learned to live with it. And time after time I watched the carpenter rebuild the sections he had torn out, leaving them better than they had been before. Much better than I could ever have built them.
And as time passed, more and more of the remodeling work was completed, until it seemed all that was left for the carpenter to do was keep up with a minor repair here and there, and maybe add a little decorative detailing in the corners.
Then one day I discovered that an entire wall of my house had been torn down, leaving just a gaping hole. Confused and angry, I tried to figure out why the carpenter had done such a thing. I looked closely at the hole and the pile of scrapped lumber. It didn’t make any sense; I could see that the wood had been sound. The wall had been doing its job, supporting the ceiling and keeping out the wind and the rain. There was no reason for it to have been torn down. No reason at all. Furious, I fired the carpenter and threw him out of my house.
Then, alone once more, I fell down onto the floor and wept for my beautiful wall, now ruined and in pieces. And I shivered at the cold wind blowing through the gaping hole.
Time passed. Despite my fears, the ceiling didn’t fall down. I learned to wear a coat when the wind started to blow. And still, every time I passed the hole where the wall had been, I cursed the stupid carpenter who had torn it down.
One day I noticed that a piece of plywood had been nailed across the hole, blocking some of the cold air. I looked closer. Someone had been working to rebuild my ruined wall. It looked like the carpenter’s work. He had come back while I was asleep.
“Fine,” I thought. “If that stupid carpenter wants to play games, then let him. Somebody has to fix the damned wall, and it might as well be him. He’s the one who tore it down, after all.”
And so the wall was slowly rebuilt. When the carpenter saw that I wasn’t trying to stop him from working he started coming in the daytime as well, and the work progressed a little faster. I watched carefully as he did his work. The new wall was a little thicker than the old one had been, and the supports looked a little firmer, but other than that it looked just the same. He hadn’t done anything that seemed worth tearing down a wall for.
I waited until it looked like the carpenter was pretty much finished, and then confronted him. “What the hell did you think you were doing?” I demanded. “You tore down my wall, and then built it back just like it was. Why? What were you thinking?”
“Yes, it does look almost the same,” the carpenter replied. “But that’s just the outside. On the inside I’ve strengthened the supports, and put in a lot of extra bracing. Your wall is now a lot stronger than it used to be.”
“So what?” I asked. “It was strong enough already. It wasn’t cracking or threatening to fall. The ceiling didn’t sag. The wall was doing just what it was supposed to do.”
The carpenter nodded. “It held up the ceiling, yes. But it wasn’t strong enough to support the weight of the second story. That’s why I had to rebuild it.”
“You’re crazy,” I told the carpenter. “I don’t even have a second story.”
The carpenter nodded again, then smiled. “You will,” he said.