Men in Tool Belts

My best friend in high school was a girl named Stephanie Wong. We met on the bus in sixth grade, and we were like yin and yang. You might have noticed that I like to talk. A lot. Stephanie preferred to listen, so it was a match made in heaven. Her mom owned a travel agency, and she gave me my first summer job (I got in trouble for reading the brochures instead of filing them).

Because her mom was a travel agent, Stephanie was quite the world traveller. Her favorite place in the world was London, and her locker was tastefully decorated with magazine clippings of Hugh Grant and Kenneth Branaugh. She just had a thing for Brits, and that locker was like a crystal ball. Fact: Stephanie has now been a Londoner for years and has even picked up her own clippy British accent and British boyfriend.

My locker? Well, it was a disaster, and there weren't any pictures in it because, to be honest, few of the men I found attractive were splashed across magazine covers. While everyone else was swooning over Brad Pitt's character in Legends of the Fall, I was thinking, "Well, sure, he's beautiful enough, but look what a mess he made. Are brooding eyes and a flawless complexion really worth that headache?" My fantasy guy was more like Bill Pullman in While You Were Sleeping--just a regular, nice, down-to-earth guy with a handsome face that you never get tired of. I guess even then I was thinking about what I really wanted in life. Or I was just an old lady trapped in the body of a 17 year old. I mean, Adonis is nice for fancy restaurants and days at the beach, but I just can't see him cruising along in the driver's seat of a Honda Odyssey or dragging three preschoolers and all their belongings through airport security...although, come to think of it, Brad Pitt has probably done both of those things now. Anyway, since I was no Venus, my usual function in relationships with Adonis-types was as the friend-girl-confidante reassuring them that, yes, the cheerleader/model/pageant girl would go out with them if they asked. Sometimes I wondered if these guys noticed that I was, indeed, a girl. A few years of that finally purged any incidental romantic longings for this type from my system.

Some girls like guys with huge muscles and glowing tans or rock stars or bad boys or rich guys, etc. Me? I like handy guys. If I were in high school today, I'd have a big picture of Tom Silva from This Old House or Norm Abram, the New Yankee Workshop guy, in my locker. Lucky for me, I snagged a guy who crawls under the house to fix the plumbing and looks awesome in a minivan.

I mentioned my affinity for guys in toolbelts--and Matt's many manly virtues--in a Sunday school discussion a few months ago, and a few of the guys in the class laughed out loud at the idea(admittedly, I set them up to do this by momentarily forgetting that the male mind is a sewer). Their view of manhood, it seems, is embodied by the big, beefy athlete or the type A aggressive man, or...I don't know...the guy with the most weapons and dead animal heads above the fireplace. They laughed, good-naturedly of course, at my glowing description of Matt the Manly Man because he's not all that big or aggressive and he isn't bothered in the least by acting uncool in public. In fact, he thrives on public displays of dorkiness. It's like crack to him. Our kids love it, but they'll hate it someday.

"But Matt was a cross-country runner", I said.
"What's that got to do with being manly?", they joked back.
"Well,in the most important areas of life, endurance bests brute strength every time," I replied pointedly.

And somehow nobody could argue with that.