X-Mas Cheer

My presence was required at a Christmas fete.

I’d never go anywhere or do anything if people didn’t make me. But I can be treed, and rounded up, if you try hard enough. My wife went too of course, and we enjoy each other’s company more than any other. Funny that.

Everyone was in a great mood. That’s rarer than you might think at a party. People attend such things for a multitude of reasons, not all based on the enjoyment of the thing.

God, I remember the dreadful Christmas parties I attended when I was in the corporate setting. The Bataan Christmas March was more like it. I get to stay late at work and socialize with people I’d like to kill with my bare hands over something that happened last Tuesday? Great. I’d get to have employees marching up to me and wishing me Merry Christmas aloud and wishing I was being eaten by a band of cannibal elves under their breath, because they only got a seven percent raise, and knew in their heart of hearts they deserved seventy, because they only sleep at their desk one day out of five — not like those lazy people in the next cubicle. Then about twenty five percent of the attendees would whisper to each other the location of a local hellhole bar and we’d meet there and have a blast.

There was none of that last night. Everyone was there because they wanted to be there. And after the party, the host invited everybody over to his house and everybody went there too, and just kept going.

I started exhausted, and came home the same. But it was a different kind of exhaustion. I had exhausted all the possibilities of conviviality, and slept like a child on Christmas night.

Thanks for making me leave the house Steve.

Weary Is Not Tired

Firewood warms you twice. Once when you split it, and once when you burn it.

There is a tradition among the descendants of the flinty Yankees around here of hard physical exertion as a cure-all for any kind of neurosis.

They liked (like) seawater baths, and sleeping with the windows open in the winter, and eating chaff they’ve stored in the root cellar. They rubbed salt on kanker sores and took cod liver oil with a tablespoon. They wear wool and revel in the itch like a mendicant monk in a hair shirt.

I’ve seen their pictures, from when such behaviors were not affectations and symbolism alone. Grim, unsmiling miens looking through the camera lens like a wraith from the afterworld. They must have seemed as inexorable in their industriousness as any army — or swarm of locusts.

I remember reading about the neurotic mess John D. Rockefeller’s son became. His father had him chop wood for a whole season to try to wear the burden of no burdens out of him. The patricians’ children fool around with physical exertions still, and misguidedly think it’s work.

I have in my life slept the benificent sleep of the physically exhausted unworried child. It is gone from me, forever, I think. Physical exertion has never represented a pleasant diversion for me. It’s been my lot in life, for a good portion of it anyway.

By any metric, I’ve chosen that lot in life. If I wanted to get doughy at a desk, and think of nothing but diversions to occupy the rest of my time, that way was open to me. It was not to be. I chafed in the traces. I’m not fool enough to blame the tack shop.

But beware, you who exhaust themselves in such diversions, both mental and physical, and think you are tired like a man who’s lot in life is different. A summer job is not the same as looking out at horizonless effort. An aspiring starlet does not know what it’s like to work for a living because she malingered in employment in a coffee shop while waiting to become a sort of princess. She never knew what it was like to have no other hope than comfortable shoes, to the end of her days.

It is very different to go to bed and slumber because you are tired, than it is to wake up weary, and know no rest but the grave.

Economy Of Scale

My son is very smart.

I gave him some chores to do in my workshop. He was only nine or so, so as you can imagine, they didn’t involve heavy lifting or spinning blades. He’s not really very interested in what I’m doing. He does what he has to do with no enthusiasm for the thing itself; his enthusiasm is saved for the idea of doing what is required and finishing his appointed chores so he can get back to his amusements.

Who is to say whether his attitude is not superior to mine?

He is required to sweep the floor, which he does earnestly. It is gratifying to see him try to do a thorough job at a task so mundane. There is an old saying that when you don’t know what to do, sweep the floor. There is reason behind most such hackneyed sayings. The advice battles idleness. All workplaces are improved by cleaning them up. The subtle and beautiful motive in the whole idea, though, is that when you are sweeping the floor, you are free to think while you do it, as it doesn’t take concentration to sweep, and it leaves the mind free to consider whatever it is that has brought your progress to a standstill.

The jointer/planer is a machine for producing a finished edge on a board, or on the face of a board that is not too wide. It’s a great big cast iron thing. It has two razor sharp knives which rotate on a horizontal spindle. You push the stock through a guard, along a fence, over the cutters. It doesn’t abrade the wood, it slices it. It makes a pile of wood shaving which come out a chute on the side and collect in a heap on the floor.

My boy knows without being told to scoop these up with the dustpan and put them in a barrel to be taken outside later and made into mulch. You think you’re wealthy? The mulch in my yard is made from tiger maple shavings. Bill Gates probably can’t top that.

One day, my boy finished his appointed rounds, and all the vacuums were empty, and the floor was swept. And instead of placing the dustpan back on the shelf where it belonged, he placed it on the floor under the chute on the planer.

I questioned him closely on this matter.
Why is that there?
-When I begin again next time, the dustpan will have already caught the chips.
Why is that desirable?
-It will save a little trouble, but cost none.
What if it’s in the way?
-It can’t be in the way there. Something goes there, so nothing can be placed there anyway.
I tried to think of another question, and he offered:
-The spot on the shelf where the dustpan used to go is open now. We can put something else there.
What made you think of that?
-I thought of it while I swept the floor.
Go and play.

I wanted to sweep the floor just then, but it didn’t need it.

A Fresh Crop Of Rocks

(Editor’s Note: Blogger absolutely refuses to upload the picture that accompanies this. I’m a quarter of an inch from switching to another host, or going back to hosting my own blog on my furniture website, like I did before Blogger tempted me with their claims of easy uploads and straightforward WYSIWYG)

{Editor’s Note, updated: Hey look. The picture appeared}

[Author’s Note: There is no editor]

-Do you miss the farm, Mr. Perkins?
~Are you daft? Another year and a fresh crop of rocks.
-Crop of rocks?
~Have you never been where the trolley don’t go? Do you think we pile those rocks along the plotlines to be picturesque for tourists?
-I take your meaning, but it would seem that a fresh crop is out of the question.
~They grow right out of the ground every spring.
-Now you’re having me on.
~You get frostbite standing in front of the icebox with the door open, don’t you? Have you ever been on a farm?
-A pig farm.
~They’re all pig farms. except on most, the farmer is the pig.
-I still don’t get the fresh rocks.
~Nature provides, I tell you. But it never provides what you want when you want it. Above all, it provides rocks.
-How do they taste?
~Like sweat. Every thing on a farm tastes like sweat.
-What about the rocks?
~Look, the ground freezes hard here. Rock hard.
-I’m praying for a stony silence, now, myself.
~You asked. The glaciers came through here a long time ago. Back before locusts and Republicans. And it spread rocks around. The devil’s rocks. Smooth as cannonballs, and hard enough to turn a plowshare into, well, not a sword, but not a plowshare anymore, either. It turns it into the raw materials a plow used to be made from.
-I get that part. But once they’re stacked on the corners, and the plow salesman is retired on your money, that’s about it, isn’t it?
~You’d think so. You’d think wrong. A farmer never thinks wrong. Because a farmer never thinks his troubles are over. A farmer knows when he’s eating a turkey with one hand and holding hands with a pretty girl with the other, that things are going to go downhill soon. He feels about the same way when his hands are empty and the girl is ugly.
-My hands were always empty, and the girls were always ugly.
~That’s the difference, see? At least the farmer’s wife starts out pretty. The farm fixes that too.
-What about the rocks?
~I told you, the ground freezes harder than a banker’s heart every winter. Everything expands when it freezes. Except the rocks. They’re held there, in the ground, and a little space opens up around them. In the spring, during mud season…
-Mud season?
~It’s right after black fly time.
-Oh.
~Anyway, that sun gets to working, and the water trickles down into the earth with the heat, and fills in that tiny gap under that rock with the slurry and gurry. Imperceptible. Like a raise in the army.
After many a year, that rock shows up, like a bald head, and you’ve got to pry it out of there before you lose another harrow.
-I get you. A fresh crop of rocks. Why are the walls so low, then? Should be Egyptian sized, by now.
~By the time you’re at waist level with those devil’s marbles, your greatgrandson has moved to Nebraska to farm in peace.
-Speaking of slurry and gurry, let’s go get some coffee at my house. There’s no farming there.

Noh

It snowed a little on Sunday night.

My little three year old was quite taken with it. He stood at the foot of the stairs for a good long while, his nose pressed in the pane of the sidelight, and watched the last fat flakes float by. He turned as his big brother walked by, and said: Mioose! Noh! He said it as if he was giving his brother the combination to a safe filled with gold bars.

Snow divvies up the world according to taste and need. My neighbor will work sanding the road, an his wife will be slightly more happy then usual with the money it brings in. Like farmers who get rain after a long dry spell. He’ll be sleepy. My older boy will stand at the foot of the drive, waiting for the bus in a precise spot, sheltered by the tall pines. It’s the only time I can see him without fail from window of my office when he’s out there, because he doesn’t move around. I avoid listening to the radio on such mornings because everybody acts as if it’s lava or dead monster souls falling from the sky, barking out information with an undertone of panic. I’ve heard radio broadcasts recorded during the Blitz in London circa WWII where the announcers sound calmer than weathermen in New England, all over a half-inch of snow. People still hoard bread and milk every time it snows. What are we? Pioneers? Calm down.

I used to drive a lot, and fly often, and I was attuned to the weather as closely as any subsistence farmer ever was. Now I’m close to home almost always, and the inconveniences of snow are diminished. I never buy wood when it’s snowing if I can avoid it, as the water is never good for the boards. That’s about it. It’s pleasant to remember that I’m warm and dry when I’m working and there’s snow on the ground. This was not always the case. It’s hard to build things outdoors in the winter. I don’t miss it.

The little one shoveled the back porch with his mother, sliding the big shovel across the length of it and shouting: Bye Bye noh! each time as the little bit of snow fell off the edge. I can’t recall how long it’s been since I’ve shared his delight in seeing something come and see it go too, as he does.

Let it come. It will go.