Looking Ahead

keepwaddling1 photo courtesy Flickr

Yesterday I asked an acquaintance about his holiday plans. His face lit up when he described the regular New Year gathering he shares with a group of old friends: “We report on what we did this year and talk about what we hope to accomplish the next year.”

That’s the best alternative to getting drunk I have ever heard, and I’m very happy to have learned it from a man who runs his company from a bicycle and a laptop.

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Deliberate

phil photo courtesy Flickr

Multi-tasking and the instant pace of contemporary reaction have obscured a quality that is the foundation of craft skill: the deliberate, considered exercise of a knowing hand. Speed has nothing to do with this quality, although it can operate faster than the eye can see.

Recently, I read the liner notes on Taj Mahal’s “Kulanjan”, and they mention the traditional hunting music of Mali, a rare reservoir of ancient culture. The notes also mention that the music is played much faster these days than it was originally.

As a pre-schooler, I used to hang out in my grandfather’s basement shop. He worked standing, at one with whatever project was at hand, moving from task to task with the conscious footwork of a veteran outdoorsman and a man who could walk to work. His musicianship turned the exercise into a grounded, silent dance like those found in Dalmatia. In the early years of the twentieth century, he lived off the land for months at a time in the area that became Olympic National Park, carrying nothing more than a rifle, ammunition, salt, flour, and matches.

As a young adult, another shop of hand tools claimed my attention: the one at the rear of a beach cabin set in hundreds of acres of a tree farm in second growth. There was no electricity on the property. The shop had been designed by a physician, and it was as orderly and convenient as one would wish a surgery to be. The bench was placed under a generous north window. The designer’s daughter told me that her father always carried a pocket knife. It was something, she said, that gentlemen always did.

My granddad pulled out his knife, always sharp, when it was time to build a fire. He shaved curls of tinder off a piece of cedar to get the blaze going, never polluting the smoke with newsprint and never wavering in his concentration. Watching him start a fire was the beginning of my art education.

It grieves me that homeland security considerations have turned the pocket knife into a problem rather than a solution. Should you need a cutting tool on the road, pack a length of adhesive tape in your kit, break a glass bottle, and tape all but the business end for safety. Glass breaks into a monomolecular edge. It’s brittle, but nothing is sharper.

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Clearing the Decks

Alcatraz surrounded by sailboats. Hysterical Bertha photo courtesy Flickr

Our first house was 650 square feet, a little smaller than our first apartment. Tidiness is not much of an issue when ten extra steps will retrieve something that’s out of place, although solving an unexpected puzzle can be a maddening extra in a busy day.

We are in more generous quarters, now, and the layout is vertical, so vertical that I hired a mountain climber to stow inventory in an upper room when we moved in. In a crunch, finding a missing Thing can cost half an hour and badly needed energy.

Preferring to concentrate on matters at hand, I learned the first couple of weeks here to close out a room before shutting the door behind me. It’s a relief to know that petty chores are finished and that I’ll be able to find something where I expect to. A photographer friend once referred to this process as “scraping the house”. I think of it as maintaining the place so that when it’s time to clean, all I have to do is clean.

I suppose it is obvious from the previous paragraph that there are no children here anymore.

Since I started carrying a messenger bag, I seldom have to backtrack. With a water bottle, cell phone, and organizer at hand, I can exit on a moment’s notice.

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The Christmas Tree

Brenda Anderson photo courtesy Flickr

As a freshman student of art history, I learned that originally, people observed Christmas by digging up a living tree and bringing it into the house to celebrate. Afterwards, the tree was returned to the ground.

The tree one sees in nineteenth-century engravings is a Norwegian fir-that’s the one with discrete rows of branches that radiate from a series of points on the trunk. It’s a very orderly little tree, and is usually depicted on the square parlor table that ordinarily held a reading lamp, the family Bible and a photo album. That was the media center.

Decorating a living tree with traditional strings of cranberries and popcorn and small polished apples turns a Thirteenth Night housekeeping chore into the small matter of putting a bird feeder out into the yard. One year I seriously considered adding balls of birdseed to the tree.

A friend who had been an exchange student in Berlin the year before the Wall went up brought home the idea of using real candles. I ran across candle holders in a Northern European boutique when I was a newlywed, and for a couple of years tried the real thing. Real candles are the best argument for a living tree that I can muster. I can’t muster any argument in favor of real candles, unless the tree is outdoors and it is raining.

The combination of real candles, a living tree, and vegetable ornaments is very lovely, though. High-tech lighting escalates decorations. I responded to white twinkle lights on a living tree by adding jalapeno peppers, kumquats, and whole macadamia nuts with hot-glued hangers.

-30- More after the jump.