Skip to main content

Reprise

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

 You can forgive me, if you want to, for repeating that line from an earlier entry, but ever since he asked, I have been thinking about Jao's question.  He is not yet four years old, but he is getting there as quickly as he can.  I have been thinking about his question because I have so seldom been asked just that.

 "How did you do that?"

 I am one of those old geezers who has collected old tools and bins of nuts and bolts.  I bought a Delta table saw from someone's back yard in Waterloo, Iowa about forty years ago.  I finally had to let it go on our last move back to Tucson, so I took it to an auction firm in Decorah, Iowa.  The saw had moved with us, at least once--perhaps twice--to Tucson and back to Iowa, but finally, as was true also for a sleigh from Norway and a long ladder given to me by a neighbor moving to Texas, I had to leave a lot of tools behind:  no space, no place.  
I have been shambling about, ever since, wondering where my tools are.  I finally bought a replacement shop vac, not long before some garage reorganization revealed where the earlier one had been stacked, still in its moving box.  Today I almost bought a small, portable table saw.  Last week it was almost an air compressor.  

 Every packrat like me, every old codger like me who has enjoyed building things, finally has to recognize that none of the kids, none of the neighbors, wants either the tools, or the hard-gained secrets about how to make things.  Jao might have been the first of any of the succeeding generations who, unprompted and unexpectedly asked, "How did you do that?"  

"How," he might have said, had he been four or five or six, "did you make sixteen rafters meet in the middle, up in the air?"  

 By the time he is four or five or six, he might not care, any longer, because there will be other kinds of things to fascinate him.  Not many of the kids want to learn how to cut a rafter, or to build a table or a Hoosier side cabinet.  He will wonder about computers, because he already knows more about how to manipulate digital data than I do.  But just for a moment, a few days ago, he asked his (grand)papa how to make something.  Something arcane.  Something they do not often teach in school.  

 I almost told him.  I had to think quickly because he talks fast, so I just said he should bug off.  

Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 7, 2016 at 2:47 PM

    I do not get to your writings every day--but on those days I do--you make me think about how I travel on my journey--and I most often find your writing peaceful. And there are not many things going around in my life that I classify as peaceful. Thank you

    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

AT YEAR'S END, 2014

Ah!  There you are!  And so are we! After more than thirty years, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising it is that we have found each other.  It often happens when we have decided that neither one of us wants to go adventuring: you know, to the grocery, or to a movie; or least of all, to a party designed to disguise gravity, deny arthritis, and display bottomless good humor. At the same time, sometimes Mari and I look at each other and say how surprising is everything that has happened to us.  The world we grew up in has gone, and now there is another, and that we are still here, as we were, and altogether new. It is Jao we are thinking of. This year, more than any other in our lives, has been the year when a grandchild has occupied a significant portion of our ordinary lives.  We have, in our various ways, come to have several grandchildren, but this time one of them has lived so nearby that we could walk to where he...
3 comments
Read more