In 2023, despite and to spite a traumatic brain injury, Karl completed school.

Suddenly, both David and Karl had the need and the freedom to do something entirely new.

It’s all very exciting, of course, but doing something entirely new, becoming something entirely new…well, it’s equally inviting and gulp-inducing, if we’re honest.

David spent his last decades using the analytic part of his brain, and while he’s super good at such honed skills, he’s much more than those honed skills.

Arguably, he’s mostly an adventurer and artist at heart.

Karl has spent his last decades being seen as a boy with a TBI, but in fact, he’s much more than his TBI and related disabilities.

Arguably, he is tangible joy and regular mischief. We affectionately call him “Norm,” because just like the character in Cheers, whenever he rolls into a room, people call out “Karl!” It’s especially adorable during Communion at church.

It is no easy thing to love Anna. She and her life? ‘Complicated’ starts to cover it.

But it is an easy thing to love Karl.

David, though, does more than love Karl; he loves Karl as a son, wholly embracing the All of Karl.

This is a gift he offers to Karl and Anna, one which is beyond measure.

Systems and people tend to pigeon hole folks, and sometimes it’s tempting to accept our assigned box, and reduce oneself to it.

For David, work always had been something that you do to earn a living, full stop.

While on many days he enjoyed what he did, whether he enjoyed it was to him—and perhaps to many of us—utterly beside the point.

Suddenly, though, retired, but not at all inspired to continue to do what he’d been doing, David had room to reconsider what work could be; something he could do for income, sure, but for pleasure, too.

Meanwhile, the systems in Karl’s world had assumed that, now that he was leaving school, he had to get a job, and because of the significance of his disabilities, his options were few and entirely uninspiring.

To the system, the idea that disabled people could have a vocation was both foreign and unwelcome.

Several years ago, that bias became apparent, but Karl’s mama Anna knew that Karl could do more, wanted to do more, should do more than earn a base wage doing a “mere work” job that was meaningless to him.

He and anyone with a disability—anyone at all, for that matter—ought to have access to a vocation, a calling, an occupation that represents and honors the best of who they are and could be for themselves and the broader world.

So Two Lugs and a Nut Workshop, and Karl’s Wheelhouse, represent the dovetailing of David’s and Karl’s opportunity to reimagine work and reimagine themselves.

Through the Workshop and the Wheelhouse, you’ll find David’s creativity, Karl’s capacity to make the world a better place, and their love for one another vibrantly alive and infused into everything they do.

There is a bit more to the story, though.

In 2020, David and Anna reconnected. Anna doesn’t recall that they knew each other in middle school. Apparently David had a crush on her, which is awkward for Anna—who, as you can see, was awkward in middle school—but she’s happily making up for her obliviousness and lost time.

You see, in 2004, Anna’s husband Bill died in the same accident which gave Karl his TBI, and David’s wife Jennifer died of breast cancer in 2017.

Both tragedies changed each other’s lives, and yet grief understood and shared is part of the bond that wraps Anna and David so closely together now.

In 2016, Anna had moved her amazing daughter Else and son Karl to Northern Minnesota, to a large beautiful acreage, where she was quite content, not least of all quite content to be alone.

In late 2020, David was washing dishes after Thanksgiving dinner, not so very content. So his adult daughter Abigail asked him, “Who’s the one who got away?”

Anna…of course. David had not forgotten Anna and had long regretted that he had never overcome his fear of speaking with her in middle school. Abigail found Anna’s Retreat Center, David wrote her an email, the unswoonable woman swooned, an email was sent back, many consequent emails were sent back and forth, two visits at each other’s homes took place, and, a year and a half later and decades late, David and Anna married.

Like Anna, David strives to make Karl’s day-to-day, and his future days, secure, safe, and filled with meaning and gladness.

One way that he makes this goal come about is via Two Lugs and a Nut Workshop, with a special focus on Karl’s Wheelhouse.

For some time before David (re)entered the picture, Anna and several amazing women with courage, tenacity, creativity, and open-mindedness (I’m looking at Jessica, Cindy, Dee, and Tina, such key people in his school district, along with his social worker Tiffany, for whom words fail even me) realized that in rural areas, there was a severe lack of vocational possibilities for people with disabilities.

When Anna perceived the breadth and depth of this lacuna, she asked whether, rather than settling for some job that had neither relevance to nor resonance with Karl, efforts could go toward creating a business for him instead.

Maybe a vocational idea for Karl, one that represented key pieces of who Karl is, and matched with both the needs and reality of his immediate community, could be called into being.

These marvelous women?

They said “Let’s give it a whirl.”

Along the brainstorm way, there were several iterations of this business (thanks, Covid).

Once David entered on the scene, though, eventually the possibility of Karl helping David make candles and etchings became the obvious choice.

With that, Two Lugs and a Nut Workshop was born.

The Workshop, then, is the umbrella business in which Two Lugs (aka David and Anna) can make all sorts of things with their Nut (aka Karl).

Karl’s work, however, will be featured especially in Karl’s Wheelhouse, the place where Karl has a particular role in making candles and etchings, packing them, labeling them, and (as the one extrovert of the family) delivering them to local businesses.

David, Karl, and Anna believe with all their being that regardless of ability or disability, age, income, race, country of origin, declared gender of origin, sexuality, or even if you are not a Minnesota Twins fan, everyone deserves the possibility of finding their vocation and then living it wildly on out.

Karl and David are doing just that.

We hope that they inspire you to find and live out yours, too.

And that they inspire you to buy their candles and etchings.

That’d be a bonus piece for sure.