And it took a carpenter I never met, speaking through his granddaughter in a hospital room, to teach me that I had misunderstood my own trade my entire career.

I had thought the work was the structure — the steel, the glass, the impressive permanent thing you could point to and say, I made that.

But the old carpenter knew better.

The structure is the easy part.

Any competent, driven, ambitious man can raise a grand building; I had raised dozens.

The hard part, the part that actually measures a man, is not the building at all.

It is the staying.