Above, beyond and brighter

Given his nature, Robert thinks everything should have been finished 13 weeks ago, bless his heart.

Of course things don't work that way, and he is adjusting to that fact bit by bit. But he is finding out a few other things, too -- like the reasons I treasure so many of the people I've been working with for the last 15 months.

Our electricians, Matt, Dennis and Steve, provided him with a living lesson on Saturday.

There they were -- on a Saturday, as they were carefully gracious to remind us -- hanging lights, installing switches and making sure that our house was so many steps closer to becoming a home.

Our chandelier, which had last added to the light of day so long ago and far away, in our Chicago apartment, was a particularly humbling case in point.

It lay disassembled in a box in our Tennessee attic until last summer, when Robert and some very patient friends put it together, identified and replaced missing crystals, and carefully repacked it for our dining room here.

"We'll have it together in an hour. I know how to do this," Robert told Matt last week, as Matt went through issues of weight, power supplies, chains, linkages and the cord cover we'd ordered up through the sewing shop here. Robert, meanwhile, pulled out surgical gloves for us to use, to avoid getting skin oils on the crystals.

Matt, remember, is the kind of guy who wires bus barns with 440-volt power supplies.

So there were the electricians bright and early Saturday, humoring us as we tried to put it all back together, while they were pulling wire, punching in our smart switches and doing their best to make sure we'd never get electrocuted by the pool light.

Dennis and Steve were getting our little rooms electrified while Matt got on the very tall ladder to offer us various heights, link by link, and he brought in the big stainless-steel snake to draw the chain he hand-wired through the Japanese fabric sleeve like a film played backward of a python shedding its skin.

"I can't tell you if it's pretty," Matt said. "I can only tell you if it's wired right."

He sells himself short, but what he means -- and you can take it to the bank -- is that no job he works on will ever endanger your life, which is pretty much the best you can ask from an electrician.

Of course that doesn't mean he isn't above giving Robert a ton of grief about the surgical gloves -- but he did use tissue paper to hold one of the arms after the breaker arced off a few dozen times when we were testing the circuit: After wiring the ten branches of the old Viennese piece by hand, he had to take it all apart to find the single light whose wires had somehow jiggled loose into a short circuit.

Six or seven hours later, Dennis and Steve were still juicing up our house room by room, and Matt was still dealing with chain, crystal, Robert and me.

Dennis and Steve left about 5, and Matt was still making sure our porch light glowed for our very first real guest -- for cocktails; remember, we still can't really live in the house.

And when our friend Gene, from Atlanta, showed up at 7:30, Matt was still on the job in the guest room upstairs, changing out a pesky switch.

Write whatever odes you will to the Rembrandts and Renoirs of the world. My vote goes to Matt, whose art guarantees that my house is less likely to kill me. He paints his canvases in copper wires and line loads, and does it smiling with wry grace on Saturdays.