Great Big Grass

We have done a lot of walking over the last few days.  MUCH more than I typically do, and it is starting to wear on me.  It has been too long since I lived in BKLYN, and I am not used to walking five or ten miles a day like I used to be.

Does not help that my body is not as young as once it was, I suppose.

But the walking is getting us to some pretty great places, and we are seeing some pretty incredible stuff.  Like bamboo forests.

As I like to tell my students, a tree is not so much a plant as it is a lifestyle for a plant.  There are lots of plant families that over the millenniæ have developed the characteristics that we think of as a "tree."  These plant families also have many members that do not have woody stems, which is why I say that being a tree is a lifestyle for plants, not a plant in itself.  Trees have been around for at least 200,000,000 years, which means that they are also a link between humans and dinosaurs, which I think is pretty cool as well.

One of the plant types that has developed a tree lifestyle is grass, and one of those lifestyles is bamboo, which is of course ubiquitous over here.  We have a lot of bamboo in the states as well, of course, but it is not embraced in teh same way, I think because there is no native bamboo in Europe, so when the settlers got here they did not really know what to do with it.  And there were so many other trees that there was no shortage of building materials available.

Here, though, it is used structurally and decoratively.  Paper is made from it, it is eaten, it is used to make implements.  Bamboo is everywhere.  It is quite pretty.

Yesterday we went to Arishiyama, where there is a bamboo grove with a path cut through it.  I had never been in a grove like this, it was captivating.  The linear quality of the stalks (or culms as dendrologists call them) against each other receding into the dimness was spooky, but good spooky.  Relentless multiples of anything feel spooky to me, and there was a relentless quality to the forest that I am really taken with.

Thousands of green stalks, each about four inches in diameter grew straight up and receded into the distance.  It was really quite a sight.  It made me wish I could be there without all the other tourists, so I could hear the hollow knocking of the stalks together and the swish of the leaves above.  It was really the first time I have been around bamboo as a living thing and really contemplated it in this way, and it was pretty profound.  This is going to be hard to articulate, but it helped me to understand something about how the Japanese think about traditional architecture.  There are similar qualities between the way that the bamboo grove looked and felt and the way that the architecture looks and feels.  Not sure how to put my finger on it, but it just sort of made sense.  I'll have to think more on that.

The top of the rhizome of a cut shoot.

Path through the forest.

Bamboo grove.

Geishas in a rickshaw.  The usual.

Saw this fabulous dude on the train.  I don't know his story but I bet it's awesome.

Laundry day for me.

Shigaharu-san

For centuries Kyoto was the capital of Japan, it is where the Imperial Palace still is.  As such, it was where all of the best craftspeople had their shops and homes, because so many people lived here and because the Imperial court supported them.  Even when the capital moved to Tokyo in the 19th century, Kyoto remained a center for traditional crafts in Japan, and to this day there are a lot of crafts people in and near Kyoto.

Which of course gets my juices going.

Japanese steel work is legendary in the world of tools and tool makers.  Their chisels and plane irons are exceptionally fine, and I already own a couple of Japanese chisels and a Japanese plane.  But of course acquiring a few more was high on my list while I am here.

Unfortunately, there are no chisel makers still working within Kyoto anymore.  So I can't go visit a blacksmith, which is something I was hoping to do.  I did some poking around, though, and found a genial if taciturn sixty-something man named Shigaharu-san.  He was not easy for someone from out of town to find.  Though his store is on one of the big north-south thoroughfares here in town (think 6th Ave in NYC), he has no website or web presence of any kind.  He does not take credit cards and I do not think he even has a phone line.  I found out about him on a blog about kitchen knives, and I went to visit him.

A lot of the little owner-operated shops in town have only the one person in them and are small.  Some are barely fifteen feet deep and maybe twenty feet wide if that.  As I can not read kanji or kana it is not uncommon for me to poke my head into a shop and look around and have absolutely no idea what it is that they sell.   Figuring this out is complicated by the habit here of using the shop as a place to store things that the owner can't fit anywhere else.  So there might be a bike shoved over to the side, a couple of boxes stacked in the corner, maybe a paper shopping bag with clothes spilling out.  I am certain that this is a holdover from a time when the shop keepers lived behind or above their stores, so that using it as overflow storage made sense.  Actually, I am pretty sure that many of them still do.  It looks strange to Western eyes, we have different ideas about what a store should look like, but here it is pretty normal.

Shigeharu-san's shop is different, though, and it was clear as soon as I walked in what he sold.  He asked me not to take photos inside, but there were two glass fronted display cases to the right, one filled with rows and rows of knives and the other with planes and chisels.  To the left was another case filled with knives and above that a full set of very fine knives in a frame hung on the wall.  The shop is a bit dim, and has the feeling of a place that was linoleumed and painted about thirty years ago and has not been updated since then.  There was no sign of anyone when I walked in, which is again typical.

So I looked around a little, and finally called through the curtained doorway "sumimasen," a word that means "excuse me," "sorry," "thank you," "welcome," and is used in just about every sentence.  It seems to be a verbal Swiss army knife, it indicates politeness and gratitude and a general willingness to be engaged with whomever you are talking to.  The waiters say it when you walk into a restaurant, a person who wants to ride their bike past you will call it out, and when you walk into a shop and there is no one there it is what you holler into the back.

Shigaharu-san came out, wearing a dust mask and taking off a pair of black-stained gloves.  He had been grinding knives in the back, you see.  I used the only other Japanese word that I know, "Nomi," which means "chisel."  He pointed me to the case full of them, and I poked around a little.  I asked if they were hand made, but he looked at me quizzically.  Then he went over to the cash register and picked up a much-thumbed phrasebook and handed it to me with the air of someone who regularly has to have conversations in a language he does not know.  I paged through to find "hand made" (tetzukuri) and then pointed at the chisels.

In pantomime and pidgin he explained that it was in fact handmade but down in Osaka, not here in Kyoto.  No one is making them in Kyoto anymore, he said.  I selected two of them, and then turned to the knives, indicating that the chisels were for me but that my wife is a great cook and would like a knife.  So I asked about the knives.  "Tetzukuri?"  He looked at me with a great deal of patience.  "Hai."  And then he pointed to himself.  He made the knives there, in that shop in the back.  He is, it turns out, the last person still making knives in the city of Kyoto.  In fact, that is what he had been busy doing, thank you very much, when I came in and started asking questions.  He turned the blade of one knife over and pointed and the engraving on the side and read it to me:  "Shiga-Haru," he said as he ran a finger black with steel dust along the back edge of the knife.  Then he pointed again at himself just to make sure this gaijin got the point.

I got the point.

I asked if I could photograph him and the shop, but he demurred, clearly wanting to get back to work and not feeling terribly much like humoring me in that regard.  I don't blame him.  Little bit of a weird questions, I guess.

So two chisels and a knife later I was back on the street.  It is a lovely knife, and when we use it in the kitchen I will think about Shigaharu-san, and hope that if he does have to deal with too many meddlesome tourists asking questions that at the very least they appreciate his knives enough to buy them and keep the last knife maker in Kyoto in business.

Some tools in the window of the shop.  That curved blade in the center is a predecessor to what became the hand plane.

The santoku I bought.

The top two characters say that it was made here, I think.  The bottom two are Shigaharu's name.

Shiorian Museum

One of our students in a yukata.

Yesterday we went to the Shiorian Museum.  The website is poorly translated from the Japanese, but the gist is that the Shiorian is a Kimono store.  It is important to note that we are not talking bathrobes here, we are talking bespoke yukata made from hand painted cotton.  Yukata are one layer summer garments that will set you back between $500 and $1000.  The staff very graciously dressed one of our students in one.  They even let us photograph it.  The multi-layer kimono are painted or embroidered silk and start in the $1000 range and go up from there.  They are really stunningly beautiful.  We were not there for the kimono, though.  We were there for the structure.

The structure is a text-book example of a machiya or wooden town house.  Beautiful structures, the kyomachiya (or Kyoto machiya) is considered the defining form of the city version of what are collectively referred to as minka, or traditional folk dwellings.  The other minka form is the noka, which is the farmhouse, and we will see some of those later in the trip.

The Shiorian is a late Edo period machiya, beautifully preserved and accessible to the public.  It is a particularly complex one, with a built-in tearoom, two gardens, and a big store-house in the back.  The floor is all tatmi mats, woven grass over a frame that has a little give when you walk on it.  One of the things I am finding out about this practice of constantly removing your shoes when you enter buildings is that it really gives your feet a rest when you are out walking all day.  That change of context really helps rest one's feet, it is quite nice.

The interior is all wood and paper and grass, with very little paint, which has two effects that I really love:  One is that I find it restful to be completely surrounded by natural materials in their more-or-less natural state.  The other is that the spaces have a smell.  It smells like, well, like wood and grass.  Not like being in a forest, and not in a bad way, just that there is a perfume to the interiors that adds to the pleasure that I feel being in the spaces.

Traditional Japanese houses layer the views in a way that we don't tend to do in the West.  No matter where you sit in the house there are a series of planes that recede in front of you, and with the shoji open there is nowhere that you can sit that you can not see at least one of the gardens. 

And the gardens are amazing.

Little worlds in miniature, they have all of the small twisted trees and moss-covered rocks that you would expect to see.  Sitting still and contemplating the garden sounds boring, maybe, especially to a 21st century Westerner.  But I am here to tell you that I could do that all day.  The sun moving is the channel change, the breeze blowing the leaves reveals new content like opening a new window on your browser.  I was captivated for far longer than I would thought possible.  It was surprising and lovely to just sit and look at a beautifully composed garden.  The photographs can not possibly do it justice, you really have to be there, sitting on the tatmi and smelling the interior and watching the sun change on the trees.

A quick word about the shoji before I sign off:  They were amazing.  Having read so much about them and about how to make them, it was a real treat to have a chance to get up close and personal with them.  Knowing that each piece was cut and planed and installed by hand by some long-dead tategu-shi really knocked my socks off.  The bevel on each one was perfect, they all matched, the joint were tight, it really is a testament to what is possible when there is care and thoughtfulness and pride in one's work.  And they slide effortlessly in their tracks.  What a joy.

A really lovely column in the tea room.

Shoji.  Enough said.

The rear garden

What, you ask, is "FIRE GOLD?"  Ice coffee with milk and sugar in a can, obvs.  Brought to you by your friends at Kirin.  The Asahi brand of the same thing is called "BOSS."  Neither are particularly good, but if you have to choose, choose FIRE GOLD.

Kyomizu-dera

So when you are talking about visiting Japan and if you are going to be anywhere near Kyoto, you visit Kiyomizu-dera.  If you are in Japan and you are at all interested in wood and wooden structures, you make a point to go to Kyoto so you can see Kiyomizu-dera.

So we went yesterday to Kiyomizu-dera, obvs.

Built in the early 1600s, Kiyomizu-dera is a Buddhist temple built on the side of the incredibly steep mountains that surround Kyoto.  The temple is built around a waterfall ("Kiyomizu" means "clear water" in Japanese), and the washing of your hands and drinking the water from the waterfall is supposed to have wish-granting powers.  And maybe it does.

The approach to the temple is through some very old streets (and by old I mean old in a way that we don't have a context for in this country) small and winding and so picturesque that it kind of hurts.  Lots of beautiful wabi-sabi, lots of beautiful wood work, some pretty great stone work, and all impeccably clean.  So clean that it looks like a 1950's movie set, like we are somehow in a Japanese version of "Singin' in the Rain" but with the singing or the rain.  Or Gene Kelly.

So up the side of the mountain we trek, and the temple slowly reveals itself to us.  The first thing that you take in is the crowds.  Thousands of school children, mostly middle schoolers, each in their school uniform and all wearing matching bright yellow or red or blue hats, pushing and laughing and talking in the way that middle schoolers everywhere do.  Comforting to know that some things about being human are constant.  And they are all on field trips, apparently, to see the temple.  The nice thing about being in crowds of middle schoolers is that you can still see everything, because they are mostly still short, you know.  So there is this swirling tide of yellow and blue and red caps at about nipple height, but you can still see all the things you want to see.  Which is nice.

As you pass the torii gate and go into the temple complex itself, you become aware of the timbers.

Well, I become aware of the timbers.  Because the thing about Kiyomizu-dera is that it is built with out nails.  It is all timber-framed joints, all fit so carefully that in general you can't slide a piece of paper into the joints.  And these are no 12" x12" timbers like one might see in the kind of timber-framed structures that I have been in, these are massive columns, 24" round.  It really is quite stunning to be in front of.  I have to work very hard to keep the sides of my mortices straight in a 2" thick table top, the kind of precision required to cut a tight mortice through a column of that size really gave me pause.

As soon as I walked inside I heard an inconsistent beautiful low gong being rung.  The practice in temples is that one makes an offering, then makes a prayer to the Buddha, then rings a bell.  I have been told that the idea is that the bell wakes up the god and reminds them to grant your prayer, but I don't know if that is true or not.  Maybe.  I kind of like the idea of the god snoozing away and being startled awake by the bell.  He rolls over, grumpily waves his hand to grant your prayer, and then drifts back off to sleep with a snort.  It's a nice image, and I like the way that ringing the bell punctuates the acts for the devotee.  Nice to have that kind of theatrical button on one's prayer-making.  Not sure I would want my prayer granted by someone who just woke up, though.  I tend to be grumpy and clumsy.  You might pray for a new car and get one because yours gets totaled with you in it, you know what I mean?  Clumsy prayer-granting.  And that may not even be the reason to ring the bell. 

But this bell, holy cow.  It is a massive bronze bowl, maybe 42"  in diameter at the rim, and it is struck with a rope-wrapped (say that five times fast.  Bet you can't) mallet.  And the sound is unbelievable.  Low and long, with lots of sustain.  I stood there for a while and just listened to it be rung and enjoyed the hell out of it myself.  I wanted very badly to ring it, but I did not feel right doing so.  I am sure thousands of non-Buddhists ring it every year, but it felt disrespectful.  So I stood and listened for a while and let the incense waft over me there in the mid-gloom of this five hundred-year-old wooden structure.  The sound of the middle schoolers outside swirled around me like the incense, more intense at time and less intense at times.  The bell gonged intermittently, and the growing heat of the day made the wood smell just amazing.  What a lovely place.  When it is quiet and free of people I can only imagine that it is serene in the extreme.

As amazing as the temple is, the real money is underneath.  The porch of the temple is about forty feet off of the ground because of the extreme slope of the hill, and there is a famous (well, famous to me, anyway) lattice work of beams and columns that hold it up.  All timber-framed, all hardware free.  It is unbelievable.  The amount of effort and time that it took to get those beams there and marked and cut and fitted beggars definition.  The hands and minds and work of a lot of woodworkers went into making that happen, and I was gobsmacked to be finally standing in the presence of all of that.  Talk about a holy place.  It is a monument to working with our hands, to what humans can do when they have a mind to.  We can accomplish pretty incredible things when we work together.

As I stood there with one of my students, he asked how old the temple was, which was hard to answer.  In the states, we have ideas about originality, and what identity means for objects that is different here.  The Shinto Ise Jingu shrine, for example, is rebuilt every 20 years as a testament to death and rebirth, and as a way to train temple builders.  But if you ask the priest how old the temple is, he will say it was built in 4 BCE.  It is rebuilt in exactly the same way every time, using the same methods and the same type of wood, so it is the same exact shrine, if you see what I mean.  Not a new one built on the same plot of land in the same way, but the same shrine.  Interesting way of looking at it.  Brings to mind all kinds of questions about "thingness," and what the identity of a thing is, and how we judge that.

So answering my student about the age of Kiyomizu-dera becomes tricky, you see.  On display there were some chunks of what were clearly old beams that had been replaced.  I could not read the signage, but it clearly said something like "This used to be a part of this temple and we replaced it."  So the actual beams may not be as old as the 1630's.  But then the Japanese will say unequivocally that yes, this temple was built in the 1630's, and who am I to say they are wrong?  After all, what matters here?  When it was built?  How it was built?  Why it was built?  Hard to say.  What really matters, I suppose, is that it was built, and that we can come here to see it and hear it and smell it and generally be given a moment to pause and reflect on the human condition and our role in the world and where we feel our energy would be best used.

Middle Schoolers doing what they do best on a field trip:  Making noise and running around.

This used to be a part of the temple.  You can see the chisel marks on the bottom of that mortice.  Humbling.

This is the sign above that old chunk of beam.  I think it says something like "This beam used to be a part of the temple but we replaced it."

A holy sight worthy of a pilgrimage.

Little roofs on the beams protect them from weather.

The support lattice from below.  There used to be a superstition that if you jumped and survived your wish would be granted.  Wikipedia notes laconically "Two hundred thirty-four jumps were recorded in the Edo period and, of those, 85.4% survived.  The practice is now prohibited."

The clear water waterfall that gives the temple its name.  Tastes pretty good.  And wish was already granted, because I am here.  So the wish-granting thing works, obviously.

On keeping your eyes open

It is clearly going to be impossible for me to write about every thing that I see and think about here.  In the course of one day yesterday we did so much just in our walking around that there is not a prayer that I can report on all of it.  Here are some things I am not going to write about:

-The Manga Museum in Kyoto.  Holy crap there is a lot of manga in there.  And a lot of people reading it.  Pretty beautiful to have a museum in which the exhibits are expected to be picked up and read and touched.  Great idea.

-Propping up trees.  Though I may write about that in a later post.  Those of you that know me know I am going to love any country that loves trees enough to prop up endangered branches with wood supports and lash the branches on them to make sure they are secure.  More about that later, probably.

-Paper stores.  More about this later too, probably. Lordy they are beautiful, though.  Holy cow.  Oh, okay, just two photos of a paper store a few blocks from here, mostly for my mom and for Eck Follen, because I thought of you both immediately when I walked in.

Each box contains a different type of paper.  Made me think of Ollivander's in Harry Potter.  Except with paper.  This is less than half of the boxes, I could not get a good photo.

Just a bunch of handmade paper folded up on a table.

What I want to write about is accidentally finding  Hitomi Kensetsu, a timber-frame building company, and meeting the president Hitomi Akira, an incredibly gracious man of sixty or so, bald with a fringe of hair and the kind of creased brow that I see on a lot of small business owners.

As we were walking the city, I noticed this saw in the window of a store front.  It is a lumbering saw, the kind used to cut boards out of a tree, and is not something one runs into much outside of Japan, except in a museum.  We went in and asked about it, and quickly found out that no one in the office had very much English at all.  Luckily my colleague has a bit of Japanese, and we were able to explain ourselves, and through pantomime were able to have a pretty exciting conversation about woodworking.

He was clearly excited to be talking to people that were excited about what he did and how he did it, and we had a high old time in the front of his store.  Then we noticed the jointery samples.

If you are geeky about wood and making things with it, you are familiar with Hideo Sato's "The Complete Japanese Jointery."  It is a lovely book, and has beautiful images of incredibly complicated and mind-blowing joints that are used in traditional Japanese wooden structures.  Every different combination of beams and columns in a traditional structure has a different type of joint, and many of them are named in ways that indicate that this particular joint is the only appropriate one for this particular application.  Further, it is only appropriate in that application and would be used nowhere else.  So the soe ita tsugi or "double shear end joint of kobari beam,"would never be used for the dosashi beam.  Obviously, that has its own joint that is made differently based on the forces that are applied to it.

This all seems pretty esoteric to those of us raised in a culture defined by pioneers who were trying to get log cabins built fast enough that their families would survive the winter.

This is not to say that there is not shoddy construction all over the world.  And David Pye reminds us that the definition of "workmanship" is contextual.  It would not have been appropriate for Thomas Lincoln to have spent two days making a single joint for the rafter of the log cabin he built.  If he had, his son would have perished of cold and we would not have had a 16th president.

But this book of joints is real wood porn for those of us so inclined, and it is a book you see on the shelf of a lot of people who work with wood in some capacity.  And Hitomi Kensetsu works with a lot of wood. 

This was one of those moments that happen occasionally in my life, when an abstract idea suddenly and forcefully takes corporeal form.  It would be a little like shaking hands not with Harrison Ford, but with Indiana Jones.  Because sitting there on the table in Hitomi-san's office were joint samples of these very real joints.

Holy shit.

As I tried to figure out how to respectfully ask if I could play with his toys, he lifted one and took it apart to show us.  It was an incredibly clever joint that only comes apart one way, meaning that as the building puts stress on it in any other direction it only gets tighter and more strong.  He lifted up sample after sample, and we took them apart.  With pantomime he showed us how they went together and how as the weight of the building sat on the different members of the joints they did their job.

The joints were so carefully cut, with crisp, straight edges and dead flat sides and bottoms, that they slotted together perfectly and came apart smoothly when the pins were removed.  It really was stunning.  And all hand-cut, if you looked closely enough you could see the chisel marks as the mortices were chopped, and there was the occasional remaining mark from a marking gauge.  Hitomi-san had clearly never had anyone that he was not building a structure for care at all about the beauty of the work his company did, at least not like this.  He thought we were a little weird, I think, but he delighted in showing us all of his stuff.

My colleague had enough Japanese to ask if we could bring our students to show them, and he graciously agreed.  I am excited to go back, and excited to show the students.  This is a glimpse into the building trades that flat out would not be possible in the US.  And it is actually a chance to have an important discussion, not just about engineering (though that is clearly part of the discussion), but about attention to detail and the æsthetics of function.

We have all heard "form follows function," and I don't disagree with that, of course. But I really think that they are more intertwined than that, and that in an ideal world function is form, that beauty is one with functionality, rather than one following the other.  Frank Lloyd Wright thought that, and he got it form studying Japanese architecture. 

Here are some seriously geeky photos of wood joints:

This...

Looks like this when it is disassembled.

This is a joint for attaching a horizontal beam to a column.  Beautiful.

An innocent abroad.

It is 6.23 on a beautiful clear sunny morning in Kyoto.  Outside my open window at the edge of the parking lot that is my view the delicate leaves of a Japanese maple reach up toward the sun.  Birds and trucks echo off the buildings outside, tea is steeping.  I am in Japan.

Holy shit.

If you know me, and I think everyone who reads this blog does, you know that I have wanted to be right here for about a decade.  Through a slightly tortuous series of events I am here, and I can still barely believe it.

I am returning to this blog after a year hiatus as a way to document and store images on this trip, and it is my intention to write every day or every other day, so check back every once in a while.  Tomorrow we are walking up to Kyomizu-dera, which I am sure will generate several thousand photos.  This morning I think I will just write quickly about our journey, and share a couple of funny images.

When I built furniture, my shop used to be not far from New Bedford Mass, which was the whaling capital of the US in its day.  Whaling ships set out from there bound for the Pacific, chasing the whale oil that made the Industrial Revolution possible.  A guy named Herman Melville shipped out of New Bedford on the Acushnet for a three year voyage and wrote a book about it that we all tried to avoid reading in high school:  Moby Dick.  If you have'nt read it, do so.  It is a great book.  Especially if you read it as a grown up who loves boats and history.  Which, upon reflection you may not be. 

Herman Melville did not go to Japan on that trip.

But as I sat on the plane at 32,000 feet crashing through the air at about 550 miles per hour I could not help thinking about all of the sailors and soldiers and adventurers who set out on journeys that have covered as much or more distance.  My colleague and I (I am co-teaching a study abroad class here, that is why I am here) chatted about long plane trips and the need to get up and move around a bit and my mind kept going back to the whalers, the sailors, the folk who traveled thousands of miles before me, but did it by sail, over the course of sometimes two or three years. 

Comparatively, fourteen hours does not seem like a lot.

Some of them cast lines and sailed off, returning to find that they had toddlers running around that they had never met.  Others returned to find family members dead or houses or towns burned down.  And they had no real way of communicating with home:  The best they could do was write letters and if they happened to pas a home-bound ship they could hand them off.  And if that ship did not sink, and if it actually reached its home port, and if the captain remembered to get the letter to someone who was going to the sailor's home town and if that person actually took the letter and delivered it, well, then the sailor's family knew where he had been about a month or so ago.  Slightly less precise than email and Skype.

So there we are, in an air-conditioned capsule far above the ocean drinking Heineken and talking about our respective levels of comfort, and it struck me that I need to have no attitude other than extreme thankfulness that I am who I am when I am where I am.  Here are some images from the flight and our arrival:

First in-flight meal:  Barbecued chicken.  So they said.

Last meal:  Noodles, they claimed.  With potato chips and raspberry filled shortbread cookies, natch.

 

 

Look how far we have come in just 200 years:  An individual screen for everyone with movies and tv in several languages tens of thousands of feet in the air.  Not sure if it is good or bad, but it sure is funny looking.

Sun setting over Kansai Airport.  I never had the night of May 12, you know.  We flew all into the sun all the way.

My "Western Style" room at the hotel, which is built in the machiya (townhouse) style.  I have three separate sets of slippers:  One for the room, one for the lobby, and one for the bathroom.  Thank goodness, you wouldn't want to wear the room slippers in the bathroom!

And this is how I finished out my day:  Sashimi and beer.  Holy jeebers.

shifting landscapes

one of my first memories is of my father using a handsaw to cut a piece of wood for a project he was working on.  I asked him to make me something to play with, and he said “I just made you that big pile of sawdust!”  I don’t recall what my reaction to that was, it is one of those memories that I can see only through a haze, that fades in like they do in the movies, with the sound of the saw cutting and that fades out again just as it comes in to focus.

When I was young my father made a lot of things.  My mother, too.  Looking back I realize now what a gift it was to have making be a part of my everyday life, and what a gift it continues to be.

When I was young I thought my father knew pretty much everything.  He knew how to make bookshelves, yes, but he also made me sand boxes and tree houses.  When I was about 5 he made me a plywood rocket ship with two seats in it.  It was spray painted silver and the controls in the front seat were made from milk-bottle caps and baby-food lids.  He made things for us to sit on, he made the table we ate at, he made the bed I slept in.  He did this because my parents did not have a lot of money for that kind of thing, yes, but he also did it because he and my mom loved to make things.  She did a lot of sanding and painting on a lot of the projects, but she also stitched curtains and baked and threw pots.  As I got older I helped a little here and there, a living example of what Shel Silverstein meant when he wrote “some kinds of help are the kinds of help we all can do without.”

These days when my family visits me we do it around a home improvement project.  It gives us all a common goal, something to work towards, and it gives us a focus for conversation, for planning out the days, for staying busy.  None of us are “sitting in the sun on the beach for a week” types.  I have noticed that my view of the landscape has shifted though; now when we work together my parents look to me for guidance.  At this point I have more training in furniture making and woodworking than my father, and I have different expectations about level of finish and about methods and materials than he does.

Over the holiday weekend my mother and father were both staying with us and we started work on renovating our porch.  My role these days is to plan the work for each day and to divide the work into tasks.  Some of how I do this I learned from my parents when I was younger, other parts I have learned over the last couple of decades of working with and for people on large projects.  The design of the finished project is in my head the whole time of course, and the methods for getting there also tend to be mine.  My parents have ideas about all of that, and there are discussions in which they bring to bear their considerable experience, but in general I am the in-charge person, the project foreman.

In addition, I now also have a small child running around who is playing in the sawdust and taking my hammer when I am not looking.  He does this not because he thinks the hammer is a toy, he simply knows we are using hammers and wants to work along side of us.  I am responsible not only for the project at hand, but also for his safety and his training just like my parents were when I occupied his role.

This weekend I lived in three times at once.  I was keenly aware of how recently I was the small child running around, getting in the way as I “helped.”  I was also the elder, watching with pride as my child led the way and swung a hammer with precision right alongside me.  And in the middle I was me.  Just me still, the one who was trying to keep tabs on everyone else, who was working out in my head what all of the steps might be, and who was trying to find the way ahead with all of the support that was around me.

I am used to the idea that “time is an enormous, long river” as Utah Phillips reminds us.  I like the idea and I try to celebrate it with the things I make and the way I make them. To be so viscerally reminded about my place as a person standing in that river was both poignant and lovely.