Skip to main content

Mumblety Peg

After half a week away, Jao walked with me up to "his house" in our back yard.  He always hopes that I will have left a ladder standing somewhere, and maybe a hammer.

He looked up.

"Papa", he said--Papa is his name for a grandfather--"how'd ja do that?"

I did not expect a three-year-old to ask:  "How'd ja do that?"  How do you explain a conical roofline to a three-year-old, or a 22.5 degree pitch?  Would a birdsmouth confuse him?

I am used to, "Whatcha doin'?" and "Papa, c'mere!"

But I rose to the occasion.  I mumbled.  Nosy little beggar!

Comments

  1. AnonymousJanuary 22, 2016 at 5:28 PM

    Conrad, you are such an interesting fellow! I am the dictionary entry for "unhandy". Your structures amaze me. It seems to me you built a functional deck and then just kept seeing new possibilities. Or did you have a master plan? Just wondering.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Conrad RøyksundJanuary 22, 2016 at 7:11 PM

    What a probing question! I have never had a master plan. A tree blew over. My brother, who owns the property we lease, decided to expand the fenced-in yard space on this one-acre lot. What really happens is that I go to bed, hoping for a snore, and my head wakes me up because it has happened upon something. And because the college I taught for was not famous for over-paying its loyal critics, I had to hone carpentry inclinations to earn extra--or necessary--income during the summers. Anyway, it is satisfying to do something that shows visible results. And--and!--since I am making tracks in the dust, anyway, it is nice to hope that off to the side, here and there, there may be something interesting to remember.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more