On the name The Jacques of All Trades

I did not choose the name The Jacques of All Trades because I thought I was a master of many things.

That would be the wrong read.

If anything, I mean it in the humbler sense.

A jack of all trades, master of none.

Not a specialist. Not a subject-matter expert. Not the person with the cleanest credential, the deepest technical mastery, or the most obvious right to speak.

Just someone willing to begin.

There is something in that phrase I have always liked, even before I knew exactly why. A Jack of all trades is not necessarily great at anything. He may not even be especially good. Six out of ten people may be able to do the thing better than he can.

But are the six available?

Will they start?

Will they care enough to try?

Will they do the simple useful thing that needs doing before the perfect person arrives?

That is where the virtue is.

Not in pretending to be the expert. Not in exaggerating your competence. Not in confusing enthusiasm for mastery. That kind of Jack is dangerous. He overshoots the home project and creates a larger problem than the one he set out to fix.

But there is another kind of Jack.

The humbler Jack.

The one who knows he is not the master carpenter, not the master mechanic, not the master writer, not the master historian, not the master planner, not the master of anything. So he starts smaller. He does the repairable thing. The honest thing. The thing that blends in. The thing that leaves room for someone better to improve it later.

There is a kind of usefulness in that.

A willingness to try is not expertise. But it is not nothing.

A willingness to start over is not mastery. But it is not nothing.

A willingness to look like an amateur in public, to learn the old way, to pick up the tool, to ask the dumb question, to study the place, to make the first rough version of something that did not exist before — that is not nothing.

Maybe that is the domain.

Not expertise.

Willingness.

And the word Jack matters here.

Jack is not only a name. It is an old name for the ordinary man. The useful fellow. The hand. The laborer. The man around the house, the man around the shop, the man around town. The person who might not own the institution, but knows how parts of it work because he has had to touch them.

Jack is John Smith.

Jack is 123 Main Street.

Jack is Any Town, USA.

I remember those old stationery catalogs that used to come in the mail. The sample address labels always seemed to say something like:

Mr. and Mrs. John Smith
123 Main Street
Anytown, USA

Sometimes, in my memory at least, there was a middle initial.

John M. Smith.

The most ordinary name possible. The placeholder American. The man used to represent everyone because he represented no one in particular.

Except John M. Smith is no ordinary placeholder man to me.

He is my grandfather.

John Matthew Smith.

My namesake.

And everyone still calls him Jack.

So the ordinary man was not theoretical for me.

That is the part I cannot turn into a clever brand line without losing something.

It is too plain for that.

Too real.

But the name was already there.

Jack.

John Smith.

The ordinary man.

A useful man.

The man whose name sounds like a sample label from the middle of the American century.

Then there is the other side of the name.

Jacques.

My family name. My father’s name. His father’s name.

My grandfather on that side was already 48 when my father was born. He had enlisted in the U.S. Army at thirty, served in the Pacific, and finished his service on Christmas Day 1945. He could not read or write. Both of his parents died before he reached high school age, and he never went.

After the war, he came back to Elizabeth, New Jersey. He worked in a textile mill, met my grandmother, asked her to marry him on their third date, raised four children, worked overnights as a custodian at the county courthouse, and loved his family.

So Jacques is not just the name I inherited.

It is the name carried before me, back through French Canada and further still, toward Picardy and the older world before this one.

So The Jacques of All Trades is a pun, yes.

But not only a pun.

It is Jack and Jacques.

The ordinary man and the inherited name.

The common name and the family name.

The man on the address label and the line of fathers behind me.

That is where the whole thing begins to make sense.

I write about roads, towns, public work, institutions, memory, language, local government, family, faith, history, and the built things people leave behind. At first glance, that may look scattered. Maybe it is. But I do not think the subjects are disconnected.

They are trades.

Not trades in the narrow sense only. Not just plumbing, carpentry, masonry, and repair, though I respect those more the older I get. I mean trades as forms of useful knowledge. Ways human beings keep the world from falling apart.

Budgeting is a trade.

Public administration is a trade.

Road building is a trade.

Local memory is a trade.

Writing clearly is a trade.

Keeping records is a trade.

Running a meeting is a trade.

Making a place intelligible to itself is a trade.

None of these belongs entirely to experts, even though all of them require expertise when done at the highest level. They also require citizens, clerks, fathers, mothers, neighbors, workers, volunteers, officials, amateurs, and ordinary people willing to take responsibility for what is in front of them.

That is the spirit I am trying to recover.

Not the cult of the expert.

Not the cult of the amateur either.

Something older and more modest than both.

The belief that useful work matters.

The belief that places deserve attention.

The belief that inherited things should be understood before they are discarded.

The belief that ordinary people can still learn enough to repair, explain, preserve, improve, and pass something on.

That is what this project is.

Not a claim that I have mastered all trades.

A confession that I have mastered none.

A name borrowed from ordinary usefulness and inherited from a line of fathers.

And still, I am willing to begin.