Maker

    I got my start as a maker, when I was about four years old. I would sit out in the back field by the chicken wire fence, and I would bend the wires back and forth, back and forth, until they broke. Then I would twist them back together, into different patterns. By the time I was five, I had graduated to pliers (obtained with consent from the basement workbench), some old nails, and a hammer. My workshop was in the low crotch of a tree, where I would bang in the nails, and use the pliers to twist the wires around and across them.

     My particular friend from kindergarten came over one time, and I asked him if he was interested to see my workshop. He said he was, so we climbed the tree and I showed him the various nails sticking here and there, and the twisted pieces of wire connecting them. I had a story and an explanation for each part of the work in progress. For instance, this particular nail here, was intended to be banged in deeper, but it had bent over, so I had been obliged to put in this other nail next to it. My friend listened to my explanations very attentively. After I had shown him everything, I felt grateful: to have such a friend, who took my work as seriously as I did.

    Today at 72, I've come a certain way from that first pliers and hammer, but the important things aren't really that different.

 

Jeeves's Prank

     I have a GPS that has never sent me wrong, except one time at 1:00am in the really wrong part of Cleveland. We found ourselves driving through blocks and blocks of dark dilapidated buildings; gaping windows with no glass, many boarded up. There were no cars at all on the street; here and there we could see a dim light in a 3rd story window.

    Then, as we were proceeding slowly through this, err... sketchy neighborhood, trying to get our bearings, suddenly without any warning we were almost lucky enough to be involved in a pretty good deal. A sharply dressed man with a cell phone to his ear ran out into the road in front of us, flagging us down and calling, "Yo! Yo!" (We were the white guys in the loaded down van with a bicycle on the roof; not exactly a usual sight, just there.)     

    "Ha, ha!" we waved; "Yo, yo, yourself, dude. Take care, now, we gotta bounce!"     

    I know it was rude of us, but we zoomed off. Our GPS, Jeeves, was still sounding absurdly confident:    "Recalculating..."

Grubby

    In my younger days, I traveled around the country in a van with my girlfriend, for a year and a half. We worked odd jobs; painting fences, washing dishes, just making enough money for food and road expenses, and then we would move on. We saw a lot of interesting things, except one thing which was the wrong kind of interesting.
    Somewhere out in the Midwest, we woke up one morning to see a number of small grubs crawling on the walls of the van, and hanging from silk threads above our faces. We jumped out of our bedroll, and began sweeping the wriggling critters off the walls into a pan, and throwing them outside. We spent a fair part of the morning doing a thorough cleaning of the van, the bedding, and all our things.
    The next morning, the grubs were back, and they were far more numerous; there were hundreds of them. They were hanging in the air all around us, all over the walls and all over us. Being the fastidious hippies that we were, we were naturally horrified. Once again we jumped out of bed in great agitation, and began a very thorough cleaning of our living quarters. We shook out the bedding, spread it outside, and took everything out of the van that was movable, going through it all. Then we gave the inside of the van a very good scrubbing from top to bottom. We didn't find anything, which made me uneasy.
    The next morning, the grubs were back, worse than ever. They were slowly undulating in their multitudes across every surface, and hanging on strands from the ceiling. We didn't quite freak out, but we liked to almost did. That morning we went to a hardware store, and bought sulfur candles to fumigate the van. Once again, we took everything out, checking and cleaning each thing; then with all the windows closed we lit the sulfur candles. We had to stay out of the van for several hours during the fumigation process, and afterwards there was a hideous acrid smell clinging to everything inside. We aired out the van, put everything back together, and that night we went to sleep in some uneasiness, what with the lingering sulfurous odors, and wondering what we might wake up to in the morning.
    Next morning, we did find one or two crawling grubs, but only a few, and they seemed dispirited. However, on the morning following that, they had reappeared; not in their previous numbers, but it was enough. This time we did freak out.
    We began to systematically strip the van of everything that could be removed or unscrewed, including the wooden wall panels. In the back of the van, behind one of these panels, we found a small bundle of cattails that one of us had collected from a marsh, a few months previously. The bundle of cattails had slipped down behind a wall panel in the back corner of the van, and there had been forgotten. The whole mass was festooned with webs, and feebly-wriggling grubs. Most of them were dead, having been much reduced during the fumigation ordeal, but an obstinate number of them clung to life. So there it was.
    We took that bundle of infested cattails outside, and pitched it far out into the woods, giving it such a heave that I think it probably sailed halfway to China.

Old Unfaithful

    This morning, coming sleepily down to the kitchen in my pajamas, anticipating nothing but my first cuppa coffee, I turned on the hot water in the sink, only to have the faucet handle shear completely off in my hand, blasting a steaming geyser of water onto the ceiling and beyond. It was a beautiful living replica of the famous Old Faithful.
    Surprise! is a pale way to describe my reaction; I instantly dashed down to the basement to shut off the house water, coming back up to a dripping steaming mess. Then I poured myself a cuppa hot coffee (thoughtfully provided by Lauren before she left), and I contemplated my next move. I won't get to practice music this morning apparently, but on the bright side, it had actually been quite a lovely sight; like suddenly being transported on vacation to Yellowstone Park.
    Aren’t I glad that I was home when it happened? Yeah, it would have been a shame to miss it.