There was that time you were sitting at a wooden bar, talking to a friend who has a thirteen year old daughter. It’s a strange planet you live on, that one where one minute you are thirteen and the next you are a grown-up talking to another grown-up and the next generation of kidlets is thirteen. And you, well, you are not. Not even in dog-years.

Well, the girl wants a round loveseat. And you knew a girl who, at thirteen, thought life would be perfect if (a) she were a cheerleader and (b) she had a day bed.

Thirteen is a very, very special time, I think we can agree.

So, one second you were thinking about daybeds and megaphones and perfectly long, tan, magazine-caliber legs and then you were thinking about slumber parties, and then, before you knew it, you were catching Wendy when she passed out in Industrial Arts.

One minute she (Wendy) was standing there, sanding things (Industrial Arts class was nothing if not an hour spent sanding things), the next she was falling like laundry released from a line. [1]

And, in one of your moments of serendipity (we’ll not say heroism), you caught her before her head hit anything. And the floor was cement, the table was butcher block and the number of metal clamps on it were, well, dangerous. Or at least dangerous if your head was en route to one of the many.

Sidebar: There might have been two times you have caught falling humans: one was a toddler whose fragile neck and highly-mobile body was not being well-guarded by the parent on whose lap the toddler sat…on a moving train. (I know, right? The grown-up in me doesn’t understand, to this day how that happened.) So you caught the little toddler as she fell off her parent’s lap, head-first, on the moving train (and you still remember the mother being exceptionally weird about it, like why are you sitting there, catching falling babies, you freak). [2] And you caught Wendy, when you were thirteen. Wang Chung [3] was playing softly in the background, or maybe it was the lunchtime spiel on pop FM radio [4], but Wendy passed out cold in Industrial Arts and you never really knew why.

And you got to thinking, because you were at a wooden bar and you were reminded of slumber parties and being thirteen, about Industrial Arts.

Why is it that for half a year you were asked to make two things: a ring toy that involved the shape of a man with a really long nose and a tragically, comically, ridiculously crooked clock? What kind of premium did the teacher place on time that in five months all he asked us kids to do was to (a) make two things, (b) stand sanding every day for 45 minutes while pop radio played softly in the background and he told the boys to put the sharp things down, [5] and (c) occasionally sit at our desks while he showed us slide projections of ball-peen hammers and hacksaws?

Thirteen year olds are stupid, but they’re not that stupid.

At least, when you were fifteen and required to take Industrial Arts (um, again?), you spent your five months with a razor, balsa wood, and pictures of suspension bridges. Sure, you didn’t jigsaw anything but, hey, you built a suspension bridge out of balsa wood. [6] Which is probably an improvement over boring wooden toy that is a big-nosed face with ring, but still, maybe not the most productive use of five months.

Still and all, Industrial Arts beat the pants off Home Economics: [7] how many eggs can be protected for how many weeks? (No one really thinks egg-guardianship mimics parenthood. Do they still do that now? I bet not.)[8] And if Industrial Arts required daily prayers to Our Lady of Sandpaper and C-clamps, Home Ec required daily admonishments to Comet [9] the sink and identify pictures of tripe.

You almost have to think that you and other children of the last century [10] wasted an awful lot of time.

But still, to this day, you can identify a ball-peen hammer in a line-up of mimeographed [11] tools. To this day, you can say (not that you admit it to too many people) that the scent of wood dust and the warmth that hits the skin while sanding is vaguely comforting (so comforting it makes you want to write notes to all your friends, folding them up carefully, and passing them out in the hallway between classes).

Well, and you did catch Wendy’s head before it hit the floor. So, in your advanced years, looking back, Industrial Arts can also be that time you saved a girl’s life.

Just add sandpaper and it might almost be true.

Footnotes. Because of course there are:

1. Or folding like a hand of bad cards, collapsing like an economy or a house of cards, crumpling like a fender in an accident, buckling like a belt. Choose your own simile.

2. Not that it matters but I’m not the world’s biggest fan of that mother.

3. Or similar. Robbie Nevil? Lisa Lisa and Cult Jam?

4. Z-93, technically Z92.5FM, if you’re curious. And we bet you’re not.

5.The boys, in general, did not cotton to the boredom of endlessly sanding wood (please, sir, may I have a finer grit?) in the same way as the girls. They did, however, very much enjoy, say, awls.

6. Which, come to find out, there are several competitions for now: sponsored by the American Society of Civil Engineers and universities and such. I’m just going to say, though, the bridges we were building used Elmer’s glue and balsa wood we had to pay for out of pocket (!) at the local Ben Franklin. There were no competitions (and none of us would have won), no strength tests, and…we were surrounded by equipment and I swear the only thing we did for an entire semester was “build” a bridge from balsa wood. I don’t want to judge here but I think the teacher may have been phoning it in.

7. Domestic Science; Family and Consumer Sciences. A required class in middle school (an elective in high school) that filled the semester you weren’t sanding things.

8. Egg-sitting was/is a project in Health classes and “Home Ec” style classes where you “baby-sit” an egg for a week, carrying it with you everywhere, and protecting it from breaking. This was supposed to mimic caring for the “fragility” of a human baby. The egg, thankfully, never cried. Or needed a diaper change.

9. Use Comet, a brand of mildly abrasive cleansing powder, to scour the sink.

10. Just threw up in my mouth a little. And (old person voice) where’s my jetpack?

11. We all called it a “mimeograph,” but if it had the special-smelling purple ink, it was actually a “spirit duplicator” or “ditto machine.” (Oh, the things you can google!)