Lumber Yard Quotes

Suddenly William loomed over him, scowling, snarling and bloody, his suit dirt-stained and ripped. “Do you know. How many strands. Of hair I lost. On my way down?” Whatever. “Math was never my thing, but I’m gonna say you lost…a lot.” Electric-blues glittered with menace. “You are a cruel, sadistic bastard. My hair needs TLC and you…you… Damn you! I’ve gutted men for less.” “I know. I’ve watched you.” Paris lumbered to his feet and scanned the rocky bank they stood upon, the crimson ocean lapping and bubbling in every direction. The drawbridge was only a fifty-yard dash away. “Don’t kill the messenger, but I’m thinking you should change your dating profile to balding.” Masculine cheeks went scarlet as the big bad warrior struggled for a comeback. … “One of these days you’re going to wake up,” William finally said, “and I will have shaved you. Everywhere.” “Won’t make a difference. Women will still want me. But you know what else? What I did to you wasn’t cruel, Willy.” He offered the warrior a white-flag grin. A trick. A lie. “This, however, is.” He grabbed William by the wrist, swung the man around and around before at last releasing him and hurling his body directly onto the bridge.

Your mind is like a spinnin’ wheel, rotatin’ endlessly and pointlessly until threads are fed in, when it starts producing yarn. Information is the foundation to all rational thought. Seek it out. Collect it assiduously. Stock the lumber yard of your mind with as many facts as you can fit in there. Do not attempt to distinguish between important facts and trivial facts: they are all potentially important

Never did I learn to think in terms of The Niggers. When I grew up, and I did grow up with black people, they were Calpurnia, Zeebo the garbage collector, Tom the yard man, and whatever else their names were. There were hundreds of Negroes surrounding me, they were the hands in the fields, who chopped the cotton, who worked the roads, who sawed the lumber to make our houses. They were poor, they were diseased and dirty, some were lazy and shiftless but never in my life was I given the idea that I should despise one, should fear one, should be discourteous to one, or think that I could mistreat one and get away with it.They as a people did not enter my world, nor did I enter theirs: when I went hunting I did not trespass on a Negro's land, not because it was a Negro's, but because I was not supposed to trespass on anybody's land. I was taught never to take advantage of anybody who was less fortunate than myself, whether he be less fortunate in brains, wealth, or social position; it meant anybody, not just Negroes. I was given to understand that the reverse was to be despised. That is the way I was raised, by a black woman and a white man.

Last Saturday he set out to fix a screen upstairs. He went to the basement to get some nails. Downstairs he saw that the workbench was a mess, so he started organizing the workbench. Then he needed some pegboard to hang up the tools, so he jumped into the car and went to buy the pegboard. At the lumber yard he saw a sale on spray paint, so he bought a can to paint the porch railing and came home totally unaware that he hadn't gotten the pegboard, that he had never finished sorting out the work bench, and that he had started out to fix the broken screen, which we really needed fixed.

The plan: to build a garden walkway made up of dozens of wooden squares. I decided I’d slice railroad ties into two-inch thick pieces for the sections. That’s what I told the clerk at the lumber yard. “You got a power saw?” he asked. “No,” I said. “Can’t I just use my hand saw?” He nodded slowly. “You could. But I just have one question. How old do you want to be when you finish?” —JUDY MYERS

Bryan threw the ball to Dad. Dad threw it back. Bryan swung the stick again. He hit the ball! Now we were really playing. The ball sailed toward the fence. I ran after it. The goslings ran after me. And then something amazing happened. Something I had never seen before. Brewster ran. He heaved himself up and lumbered across the yard. He wanted the ball! It hit the fence and bounced off, right at him, and he scooped it up!

The Celts were a woodland people, their culture born from the deciduous rainforests that once covered much of the country. But as the English subjugated the Irish, they cut down these ancient woods. They cut them for the lumber needed in their naval yards and the charcoal to fuel industry. They cut them to empty the land of places like Lackavane, where the Irish could hide, regroup, plan and launch counterattacks. And they cut them to sever the most tangible link the Celts had to their culture and language.

I was speeding with the train toward Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present and alive. I could only think of it as a dead and embalmed, labelled and costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every railway bridge and fire-proofing building that is going up to-day. On freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on lumber-rafters, among the fireman and the policemen, the demand for courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every day of the year somewhere, is human nature in extremis for you. And wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost under the length of hours of the strain. As I awoke to all this undealized heroic life around me, the scales seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began to fill my soul.

The United States government effectively put a three-trillion-dollar Band-Aid over the problem and changed nothing. The bankers were rescued; small-scale debtors—with a paltry few exceptions—were not.14 To the contrary, in the middle of the greatest economic recession since the ’30s, we are already beginning to see a backlash against them—driven by financial corporations who have now turned to the same government that bailed them out to apply the full force of the law against ordinary citizens in financial trouble. “It’s not a crime to owe money,” reports the Minneapolis-St. Paul StarTribune, “But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts.” In Minnesota, “the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009 … In Illinois and southwest Indiana, some judges jail debtors for missing court-ordered debt payments. In extreme cases, people stay in jail until they raise a minimum payment. In January [2010], a judge sentenced a Kenney, Ill., man ‘to indefinite incarceration’ until he came up with $300 toward a lumber yard debt.”15

Few records exist to establish a definitive date as to when the first ships were built in the Piscataqua region. Fishing vessels were probably constructed as early as 1623, when the first fishermen settled in the area. Many undoubtedly boasted a skilled shipwright who taught the fishermen how to build “great shallops”as well as lesser craft. In 1631 a man named Edward Godfrie directed the fisheries at Pannaway. His operation included six large shallops, five fishing boats, and thirteen skiffs, the shallops essentially open boats that included several pairs of oars, a mast, and lug sail, and which later sported enclosed decks.5 Records do survive of the very first ship built by English settlers in the New World. In 1607, at the mouth of the Kennebec River in Maine, the Plymouth Company erected a short-lived fishing settlement. A London shipwright named Digby organized some settlers to construct a small vessel with which to return them home to England, as they were homesick and disenchanted with the New England winters. The small craft was named, characteristically, the Virginia. She was evidently a two-master and weighed about thirty tons, and she transported furs, salted cod, and tobacco for twenty years between various ports along the Maine coast, Plymouth, Jamestown, and England. She is believed to have wrecked somewhere along the coast of Ireland.6 By the middle of the seventeenth century, shipbuilding was firmly established as an independent industry in New England. Maine, with its long coastline and abundant forests, eventually overtook even Massachusetts as the shipbuilding capital of North America. Its most western town, Kittery, hovered above the Piscataqua. For many years the towns of Kittery and Portsmouth, and upriver enclaves like Exeter, Newmarket, Durham, Dover, and South Berwick, rivaled Bath and Brunswick, Maine, as shipbuilding centers, with numerous shipyards, blacksmith shops, sawmills, and wharves. Portsmouth's deep harbor, proximity to upriver lumber, scarcity of fog, and seven feet of tide made it an ideal location for building large vessels. During colonial times, the master carpenters of England were so concerned about competition they eventually petitioned Parliament to discourage shipbuilding in Portsmouth.7 One of the early Piscataqua shipwrights was Robert Cutts, who used African American slaves to build fishing smacks at Crooked Lane in Kittery in the 1650s. Another was William Pepperell, who moved from the Isle of Shoals to Kittery in 1680, where he amassed a fortune in the shipbuilding, fishing, and lumber trades. John Bray built ships in front of the Pepperell mansion as early as 1660, and Samuel Winkley owned a yard that lasted for three generations.8 In 1690, the first warship in America was launched from a small island in the Piscataqua River, situated halfway between Kittery and Portsmouth. The island's name was Rising Castle, and it was the launching pad for a 637-ton frigate called the Falkland. The Falkland bore fifty-four guns, and she sailed until 1768 as a regular line-of-battle ship. The selection of Piscataqua as the site of English naval ship construction may have been instigated by the Earl of Bellomont, who wrote that the harbor would grow wealthy if it supplemented its export of ship masts with “the building of great ships for H.M. Navy.”9 The earl's words underscore the fact that, prior to the American Revolution, Piscataqua's largest source of maritime revenue came from the masts and spars it supplied to Her Majesty's ships. The white oak and white pine used for these building blocks grew to heights of two hundred feet and weighed upward of twenty tons. England depended on this lumber during the Dutch Wars of the

We began building in the spring of 1948. I was sixteen. Two or three days a week, I walked after school to his market, picked up a list of supplies he had prepared, drove his red GMC half-ton truck to the O’Neil Lumber Yard, and loaded up. Then I drove across town to our home and picked up my mother, who would have a picnic supper prepared. My ten-year-old sister and four-year-old brother completed the work crew. Then back to the market to get my father and drive the fourteen miles to our building site. When it became too dark to work, we would build a fire on the lakeshore and eat. By October the cabin was built, complete with an outhouse. My father boasted to his friends that we even had running water: “Eugene runs down to the lake with a bucket, and runs back up the hill with the water.” My mother named it Koinonia House.

The Christian's calling, in part, is to proclaim God's dominion in every corner of the world—in every corner of our hearts, too. It isn't that we're fighting a battle in which we must win ground from the forces of evil; the ground is already won. Satan is just an outlaw. And we have the pleasure of declaring God's Kingdom with love, service, and peace in our homes and communities. When you pray, dedicate your home, your yard, your bonus room and dishwasher and bicycle and garden to the King. As surely as you dedicate your heart to him, dedicate your front porch. Daily pledge every atom of every tool at your disposal to his good pleasure. It's all sacred anyway if old Wendell is right (and I think he is). I wonder if the Holy Spirit is rambling around in the temple of my heart, scribbling promises on every exposed bit of lumber, declaring my sacredness so that I will remember that I belong to him.