I found this workshop on an old farm we were visiting. I love workshops, I see them as male sanctuaries, and they remind me that I’ve never really figured out how to be a man in the conventional sense. I like talking about emotions, relate very easily to many women, dislike football, cannot bear to talk about politics and most sports and cannot imagine sitting out in the woods for 12 hours with a rifle waiting for a deer to shoot. I don’t disapprove of these things, they work for a lot of people, but not for me.

My neighbor told me that he loves hunting season because he gets to bond with his Dad.

Nice, I said, where do the two of you hunt?

Oh, my Dad hunts in Vermont, he said, but I hunt in New York State. But we do it on the same day, so we can do it together. And then we meet with the family at night for dinner.

Oh, I said, thinking that that this says a lot about men. And women. I think most women would rather be together, if they hunted on the same day.

I’ve never had a workshop, but they all seem love evocative peaceful retreats to me, a place where a man can be off by himself, enter his own private space, navigate a world people like me can never begin to grasp. Men with workshops like this understand how the world works in a way that I cannot. I spoke at a book club last week, and I was shocked to see the group split evenly between men and women. They were hopelessly deadlocked on which book to read and they named themselves the Transgender Book Club. That says a lot, too. I have rarely seem a man at a book club.

I admit to being envious of men who have quiet and remote sanctuaries. There is a private quality to them, a sense that visitors are not welcome and intruders ought to stay out. I will never have a workshop and if I did, I would have no idea what tools to buy or what to do with them. My workshop has an IMac and a printer and a satellite modem.

I told Maria I doubted that many women have workshops. I think they don’t really want or need to escape their lives and go off into private and silent spaces. I think women sew or make things in the house, she said.

In the rain, took a video in the barn. Come and see.