The Common Framework of Reference

When I was a young boy a DIY project around the house was not an uncommon practice. So common was it that at the weekend we’d be fixing shelves to the walls or installing a new sink that I was shocked to learn upon visiting friends’ houses that their homes were not in a similar disarrayed and homemade fashion as our own.

It was a point of contention for a while, everyone I knew had a pristine and fashionable home that looked like it belonged in a brochure, even the messier ones. For a while I was resentful that I’d have to be fixing a four-inch sewer pipe to the outer wall whilst my friends would be playing Xbox. It was gruelling to come home every day after school and demolish our old kitchen and help shift cement and spend the next three hours cleaning up.

I was particularly antagonised by the way my old man would talk to us in his teacherly fashion as though we were still in school. There’d be no room for debate. He referred to it often as a “common framework of reference” which as a teenager I saw as a get out of jail free card, a way of saying “I’m the adult you’ll do what I say” but in recent years I’ve come to appreciate what my teenage self couldn’t.

Sure, I didn’t play as much Xbox as I could’ve, instead I learned how to correctly install a doorframe. Sure, I didn’t get to go out after school and doss about the village, but I did learn how to plane a joist, so it sits flush.

The old mans “common framework of reference” would often be followed up with “I know everything about the subject, and you know nothing”

While I didn’t get to have all the free time and freedom from responsibility I craved, nor the model house, I realise now what I did have. While our house might resemble more a builder’s yard than a model home it is for all intents and purposes bomb proof. Every piece of furniture, every wall, floor and fixture was designed and fitted by a Moylan to survive a Moylan. As much as I griped about working on projects with my old man at the time I come to realise, particularly since moving out, I have been given a great gift. Skills, patience and knowledge which when applied to any field of learning open up streams of avenues.

The most important lesson I took away was the “common framework of reference” the “I know everything, and you know nothing” My old man is fast approaching 60 and has mellowed out and become much softer in his semi-retirement. Often when I go home, he’ll ask for help with odd jobs around the house but strangely I’ll be the one doing the heavy lifting, the designer of the plans and the one giving instructions. I am the holder of the “common framework of reference” and I realise that I don’t know everything. I realise that the old man too didn’t know everything. But in using the knowledge he did have he pushed me to learn, at first, I was learning so I could hold the mantle and not be beholden to his instructions any longer, now I know it’s not about attaining knowledge and holding it over someone who has less.

His lesson to me was mistranslated. “I know everything, and you know nothing” his lesson was instead “I know more but I will teach you. One day you will know more, and you will teach others.” As Liam Neeson famously quoted “There’s always a bigger fish”

Like the Karate Kid washing those damned cars and painting that damned fence I realise my old man had prepared me for living and learning.

This is Moylan Seniors legacy.