Celebrations

This is our friend Dennis

when our second son was born this summer, a friend said to "there is a meadow on our land that we use for family occasions.  We have planted some trees there to commemorate various important dates, and if you would like to plant a tree up there for Charlie, we would love that."  Such a beautiful baby present, and of course we took him up on it.

It being only a couple of weeks after Charlie was born, Karen was not up to joining us, though she came to the house to introduce the baby.  My mother was in town, and Thomas came along.  Planting trees is such a joyous and hopeful thing, and it is always even more fun to do it with a group, so I was glad there were so many of us.  And we are trying to teach Thomas as many different creative acts as we can, so I was especially glad he would be there.

And this is our friend Jeannie

On the kind of summer day usually reserved for movies and greeting cards, we went all started up the side of the hill behind their house. The woods and the landscape up here remind me so palpably of the landscape where I grew up, it is like putting on a favorite shirt.  The woods we walked through had all been fields when our friends were young here, so this is a callow woods, lots of young, straight trees, reaching for the sun, the leaves a range of brilliant sap green where the sun hit them to the deep emerald of late summer.  Because this had been farmland we walked past some apple trees, long grown gnarly with their twisted trunks but still bearing fruit.

Setting out with Boy and trees

We don't spend as much time in woods as I would like, partly a function of living in a city and partly a function of how tightly my time is leveraged, and it was a pure joy to simply be surrounded by trees.  The air tastes different, the sun feels different on the skin.  On a sunny day in the woods there is something that makes me feel so safe, so tiny, and so hopeful, I miss it.

We walked out of the canopy of trees into the meadow, the bright sun suddenly brighter, and talked a little about things that had happened here over the years; a marriage, celebrations of different kinds.  We met the trees already there, a twenty-year-old maple planted for a niece when she was born, an oak tree planted as an acorn from the green at Yale University when my friend was a student there.  Maples grow so fast, it was so much taller and broader than the oak at the same age, these memories and markers in time manifesting differently depending on how we choose to commemorate them.


I had brought two saplings, both seedlings that took root from the big silver maple in our backyard.  One was from last spring and the other from this spring, one for each boy.  I liked that they came from our home, and that there would be a connection, as the boys grow and play in tree houses that we build in the tree or ride swings hung from the branches, these two young maples will be quietly growing on a meadow at the crown of a hill.  We have plans to visit them frequently, to say hello to help us stay mindful of different ways of celebrating new lives.

Thomas helped by putting dirt around the saplings after the holes were dug and by holding worms for us.  Compared to planting trees in our backyard, which has seen a lot of use and is pretty tightly packed, the loose, lovely loam of the meadow offered little resistance to the shovels, eager to accept the new life of the trees.

The markers that I made to be with each tree will decay in time, as the trees themselves grow larger and stronger, and in a year or two they won't be needed at all, and the trees will have their own identities, as our two sons are starting to do already.

a new bench

The old bench, rotted at the bottom of the legs and dusty

when we moved into our house there was a room in the basement that had obviously been a workroom or shop for many years.  It is where I set up my studio as well, and for the first several months I piled stuff on top of an old workbench that had been left in the corner.  The basement is pretty wet, and the legs of this bench had been standing in water for decades, slowly rotting from the floor up.  The top, with its marks of saws and hammers, rings from paint cans and globs of long-dried glue, was a Dead Sea scroll of home owning and fixing, upgrading and making that had been happening at this bench likely since before I was born.

Various sizes of lumber, with huge screws

I have no idea who made this thing or when it was put together, but I am tied to that maker by geography, as it was obviously built in this room.  It is too big to fit out the door as it is, so I am pretty sure it was built in here and has been here since.  It was cobbled together out of pine, all construction-grade, all different sizes, and all obviously scavenged from some other original purpose.  There is a row of holes drilled across the back, storage for screwdrivers and chisels all now packed and moved to where ever the maker now lives, if he is still living.  There are the long straight lines incised into the top that tell me about many and many a saw cut with a handsaw, much like the saws that I use myself.  It was held together with huge #12 screws, most of which were rusted in place.  These screws were sunk into end grain and used in ways that let me know that this was not a woodworker, this was someone with a knack for making stuff and a need for a bench.  This was not a woodworkers bench, smooth and clean and level, with precise and strong vises, ready to hold a piece of material for delicate planing in preparation for a precise and tight-fitting joint.  This was a rough-and-ready mostly flat surface, built quickly to simply give a place to stand and work on a variety of projects from building a Boy Scout pinewood derby racer to rewiring a faulty light fixture.  Of course I fell in love.

Grandfather's bit brace

I could not use it as it was, and I had designated that corner of the shop as the place for the outfeed table for the chop saw, so the bench needed a new home.  And possibly a new identity.  I started to take it apart with the idea that I might make it into a new bench, someday.  Taking it apart was a journey in itself, as I could watch the maker trying to fit his scavenged lumber together in a way that would stand up.  Some of the pieces were too short and did not meet quite flush.  Some of them had huge nails augmenting the screws as they inevitably loosened over the years.  Removing these rusty screws is not something one can do casually.  It can not be done well with a power drill, no matter how careful one is.  The best tool remains a bit brace with a good, sharp screwdriver bit.  I used my grandfather's, and slowly and painfully removed the screws one by one.  The rust was mostly on the surface, and I can use those screws again, as you can see, and I saved them all against that.  They were remarkably well preserved down inside the ancient two-by-fours.

This resulting pile of dusty and rotting pine has been sitting in my shop now for over a year, waiting to be something one day.  Other projects became more important, and the wood, which had been waiting quietly for so long after all, was content to wait a little longer.  Then I read this post by my friend and colleague Niels about a little saw bench he had made.

The thing about a Western style workbench like the one in his shop and mine is that they are built to hold material while you plane it, at about 36" off the ground.  If you use a handsaw at this height, all the power comes from your arms, which are comparatively weak.  For longer-term sawing, and for greater precision, it is better to have the material below you, and use gravity to help you push the saw blade down.  Especially if you are rip sawing, or cutting along the grain a long board.  Shorter sawing benches like the one in his post help the maker take advantage of gravity and reduce fatigue.  In addition, you are pushing in to the bench and thus in to the floor, a very stable action, as opposed to laterally across a bench, in which operation your bench wants to tip or skid across the floor.  So I decided that I could use a sawing bench.  In addition, it would act as a workbench for my constant studio mate, who is only about 30" tall himself and can't reach my bench yet.

I preserved the old marks of use

I had thought that I might plane all of the boards down until they were clean and smooth, but I could not bear to do it.  It would be like erasing the names from the front of a family Bible, a negating of the service that lumber had done for decades.  So in the end I just surfaced it enough to give me the flat and smooth surface I need to do my work well, and left the scars and badges of honor, the old paint and the odd nail still embedded.  Even so, the lumber fought me:  It did not like being meddled with.  A hidden screw dulled my handsaw with a shriek.  The old lumber split several times as I was cutting joints and had to be glued back together before I could continue.  In the end though, we came to an understanding, the old lumber and I.  In the end we have a wary peace, and are willing to try working together this way for a little while.

I drilled some holes for a holdfast, and a handle, all while my son looked on.  He learned the word "holdfast" and what it does, he helped me file the edges on the handle.  Next time we are in the shop, he will hammer nails at this little saw bench, and the next time I am hand sawing I will have a sturdy piece of furniture to assist me.  And maybe I will make a second one out of the remaining lumber so that I have a pair.

tools and newness

i haven't corroborated this but I was told a while back that the most common surgery performed in the world is one that is typically performed (in the U S at least) by the least qualified person in the room.  Imagine this:  a room full of doctors, residents, nurses, nursing students, one patient and that patient's family member.  Now imagine that a surgical procedure needs to be performed and the job is carefully prepared and then handed off the the sleep-deprived, terrified family member of the patient.  Sounds a little silly, but that is what the cutting of the umbilical cord has been for the birth of both of my sons.

At first I objected to the whole process on a couple of grounds:  first, as I say, that maybe medical professionals should perform medical procedures, not furniture makers.  Second, that it seemed a little patriarchal and condescending to me that the birth partner who has not done very much of the biological and physiological heavy lifting should, as a final flourish,  perform this very theatrical act.  It felt old-fashioned and arrogant in a "I brought you into this world and I can take you out of it" sort of way. 

All of that said, I did cut both cords in the end and I am glad I did, though it is hard for me to articulate why I am glad about it.  As surgeries go, it is a pretty hard one to screw up, after all.  And it did sort of make me feel involved a little more directly.  But it was not the act of the cutting that I wanted to write about specifically here.  It was William H Ditmars, who I never met.

William H Ditmars was a country doctor in rural Michigan in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.  I don't know a lot about him which is more my failing as a student than anything else.  The person who does know a fair amount about him is his grandson, who is the family historian.  He is also my father.  It was from my father that I learned to be so sentimental about objects and to revere the stories that we layer on to objects and to do my best to pass those along.  My father is the current curator of the Museum of the Collection of Leonard Family Artifacts, a duty which he is in the process of disseminating to those of us in my generation in the family.

My father and I share (in addition to membership in the Museum, of course) a love of tools.  Not just wood working tools, though we both love those as well, but any tools.  I am fascinated by the human drive to affect the physical world and by the lengths we will go to as a species to give in to that drive.  Humans as tool makers have made such incredibly complex artifacts in our quest to give shape to our world and understand it, and it never ceases to amaze me.  I love any well-made tool, whether it is for cooking or carving or looking or listening or fixing people or objects or making stuff. 

It also interests me to look at the ways the tools that we use often evolve, or don't.  There are wood planes from ancient Rome that are nearly identical to the planes that I use, for example.  When we find a design that works it can stick around for millennia.  Then again, we are still so unsure how we feel about talking to someone that is not in the room with us that cell phones are not the same month to month.  The process of tinkering is innate in us as creatures, the need for constant refinement of our tools.

When I cut the umbilical cord on my first son, I was handed a standard pair of surgical snips.  Just sharp scissors with short blades, really.  The umbilical cord is rubbery and slick, and as I cut it sort of slid away from the blades, making for an awkward action that took longer than it needed to and scared me because I felt like I was holding things up and doing something wrong.

A few months ago, my father gave me these and asked what I thought they were.  Obviously they are surgical snips of some kind, of course, and they are obviously quite old, as they have certain visual qualities that place them æsthetically in the first part of the twentieth century.  They fit nicely on my fingers, and the curved blades still slide very satisfyingly past each other.  Not being a medical historian I had no idea what they were for specifically, of course.   My father said that they were umbilical cord snip and that they had belonged to his grandfather.  You see where this going.

These purpose-made little snips, with curved blades that capture the cord so it does not slide away as you cut, were designed for one thing and one thing only.  And I was going to be called upon to perform that act in the near future.  How could I not ask the doctor if it was ok?  His response was that there would be clamps on either side of the cut, and then another clamp at the baby's belly, so there was no risk of infection, so why not?  We have a very patient doctor who is pretty amused by us as a pair, I think, and this was just another weird question from us.  He is getting used to it.

Yesterday at about 10.20 in the morning, I used my great-grandfather's umbilical cord snips to cut my second son's cord.  I had carefully boiled them for a long time and kept them in a sealed ziplock bag in my pocket for three days, as you don't get an opportunity like this often and I did not want the moment to come and have them lying on the counter at home.  The moment came, I cut the cord, and they worked beautifully, performing the same action that they had been created to perform a hundred years ago.  It is so satisfying to use a well-designed tool.

success story

this is Alison.  She was a senior last year in the program in which I teach.  Like many of my students, she did not have a lot of experience fabricating, and like many interior designers (young and old) she had designed a lot of furniture on paper without a heck of a lot of understanding of what the lines she was drawing would translate into in real life.

As our world gets increasingly more fragmented (not just a doctor but a pediatric surgeon, not just a historian but a medieval European historian, not just a designer but an interior designer for office environments), the sheer amount of information we become responsible for often requires us to don blinders, to lose sight of larger contextual realities.  As designers, especially, it is our job to not just remove the blinders, but to replace them with special lenses that allow us a 360 degree view of the world.  Our job is to make connections, to examine relationships critically, to build bridges.  The way that I try to do this in my teaching life is by enabling design students to also fabricate the things and spaces they have designed, to add a dimension to their design work; that is, to add designing with their hands to the designing they are already doing in their heads.

Every student I have worked with here has really taken to the process.  Making is such an inherently hopeful and empowering act that it is hard to avoid getting caught up in the sheer joy and excitement of helping raw materials become an object through the use of your own hands and eyes and mind.  This was the case with Alison. 

Outside the faculty offices on the 6th floor of the Warehouse (the building in which the Design Department is housed) we needed a furniture object to give us a place to put pamphlets, to display new materials, and to collect student work and projects.  This is exactly the kind of real-world opportunity that we look for, of course.  Client-driven, a clear set of requirements (what we call a "program"), and a scale that is achievable in a semester.  I asked around in our senior class and Alison leapt at the chance.

Over the course of the semester Alison submitted different designs and we talked about materials.  Our department has a great interest in sustainable practices so she wanted to find a material that would fit within that thinking but of course "sustainable material" is a little hard to define.  Where it comes from is a factor, as is the way the material is harvested and the way it is processed, shipped, and sold.  Wading through all of this requires research and diligence, and eventually Alison found a local company that specialises in LEED certified materials.  They had three sheets of a product called Plyboo, which is made out of bamboo (a rapidly renewable resource) that had been water stained and had been refused by a client.  The company would not take the sheets back either, and they were sitting gathering dust in their storage.  This kind of "front end salvage" plays a large role in my studio work, of course, and we were excited to be able to rescue it from limbo.

The linear quality of the material itself drove the lines of the design, and we ended up with a clean, simple form that really showcases the material well.  Another former student (who is from Vermont where they have a lot of cows) serendipitously emailed me about a company called Vermont Natural Coatings that is making no-VOC furniture finish out of whey, a byproduct of the cheese-making process.  They were very nice over there and sent us some sample finish, and I can report that it is very easy to apply and that it looks really nice.

The cabinet was screwed together with stainless steel screws

End result:  A real-world student designed and fabricated object made with rapidly renewable material and finished with an experimental, renewable, no-VOC finish.  That's a good day.

maker's guilt

over the last few months I have started in on a side project making musical instruments, the beginnings of which I wrote about here.   I have started a side blog about this project, which I am calling "Salt City Found-Object Instrument Works" and which can be accessed at that link.  Syracuse got its start because of the salt flats here and so is informally known as Salt City, which I really like.  It is gritty, just like the town is, and utilitarian, just like the town is.  The new blog is really just a place for me to chronicle the instruments that I make, it is not too terribly deep an exploration into what they are conceptually, but that is okay, that is the kind of thing I reserve for this blog.

As I have been making more and more of these found object instruments out of tins and cans and sticks, I have been trying to approach the whole process by applying an absolute minimum of "woodworkeriness."  Whenever I pick up a hand plane I stop and try to come up with a different way to accomplish what I am doing.  Before I go to the table saw I ask if that is really necessary.  The idea is that I want to make these instruments as accessible as possible, right down to the manufacturing of them.  If I can really make a twenty dollar guitar using only the most rudimentary hand tools, then anyone can.  Which means (I hope) that the ability to make music could be at anyone's fingertips.  I have been working lately on a commission for a banjo, which I will write about over at the Instrument Works at some point, I think, that has turned into quite a wood working project, and I feel myself slipping away from the original roots of this endeavor.  The next one will be  more direct, I hope, and a little more basic.

The part of these that I have not tried to make yet is the tuning pegs.  There are friction-fit pegs in fiddles and dulcimers, of course, but I have not yet broached that, instead going to the local music store to buy tuners that actually I can get on line.  I have a couple of problems with this:  one, that I should probably just order these, since it would be cheaper and more convenient, and two, that I am just buying pre-packaged tuners and that feels like cheating.

I have been noticing this phenomenon occurring more and more in my life lately:  what I have started to call maker's guilt.  Whenever the subject of buying something comes up, I have started to instinctively recoil and think "but I could make that!"  It has started to seem counterintuitive to me to buy something that I could make myself.  This is a relatively new phenomenon in my life and it has not started suddenly.  Rather, it has been a slow washing in of a tide over several years as I learn the processes behind bringing objects in to being.  Not too many years ago I thought nothing at all of buying Ikea furniture, as I like the æsthetic and it was cheap.  Now the thought of doing that really gets under my skin, even though there is no way I could ever make it as cheaply or get it into our lives as quickly.  Knowing that I know how to do it and that it is only a lack of will or desire that stands in the way of me making everything in our house sits poorly with me.

Obviously this is unrealistic.  Obviously I can not make everything in our lives.  It would take the fervor of an extremist to try to do so, and even then, I would not make very good shoes, probably, or particularly flattering clothes.  Or a car that works.  Or a stove or a computer or a bike.  Or even guitar tuning pegs, really.  There are things that it has to be okay to have other people do, there are objects that it has to be okay for other people to make for me or do for me.  I have no trouble, for example, hiring electricians to do electrical work on the house, or plumbers either.  And doing so keeps money in the local economy and allows those people to help provide support for their families.  So it is not reprehensible, it might even be socially and economically necessary.

That knowledge does not change how I feel, though.  I have felt maker's guilt rising more and more strongly in me in the last few months, and I have had to be pretty thoughtful about quelling it.  It takes a real effort to let go, to not cringe when I buy something that I could make if I tried, even if I could not do it very well.

None of this is intended to be an apology for being a consumer.  I think it is more that I am trying to figure out where I sit relative to the things that I consume and more importantly how to talk to my sons about that.  They are coming in to a world on a precipice, and their generation will have to be so much more thoughtful about what and how they consume and about their responsibilities as denizens of an extremely rich country.  I hope that I can help them find a meaningful and less damaging way to negotiate their world by thinking about how I negotiate mine.

birth. day.

birthdays have always seemed more or less nominal to me.  They are a marker in time that often does not have a lot to do with accomplishment of deed or of a meaningful place-marker in one's life.  Twenty-one, for example, is supposed to be a big deal, but I turned twenty-one three days after starting a new job in a town where I knew no-one and spent the day completely uncelebrated.  That rankled me a lot at the time.  Now, eighteen years later to the day, it matters not at all.

That said, it is a useful way to take stock and to acknowledge that many ways I am fortunate.  I use that word - "fortunate" - advisedly (or as advisedly as possible).  I am not a fan of "lucky."  Luck is arbitrary, the face value of cards dealt you after a shuffle, and I have to say that I feel that life is structured in a more meaningful way.  Fortune, on the other hand, has more of a crafted implication, one makes one's own fortune, sometimes.  My facebook page today is a massive list of well-wishers, and each one makes me smile and reminds me of stories and of a particular time or times in my life, like counting back the rings of a tree and seeing years of plenty and years of drought, moments of joy or sadness or love.  Lots of love.  I believe it was true when that person said that we come into the world with nothing and we leave it the same and what makes our lives matter is the people we impact along the way.

Given that rubric, I am massively rich.  Today I have heard from people I knew twenty years ago and people I have met in the last month.  FaceBook is good like that.  I have had the good fortune to pass through the lives of a lot of people, and I am thankful for you all.  I am thankful for  your patience, your perseverance, your heavy-handedness when it was called for, your light touch when that was needed.  I am thankful for students that heard what I said and for teachers that said what I needed to hear.  I am thankful for musicians that played new chords and for singers that sang the words I knew.  I am thankful for family and friends and for the fact that I am able to say today that I am making a difference in the way that I live my life, even if that difference is small.

I spent today exhausted and joyful and still learning, and I ate well and drank a lot and had a surprise cake and finished the day with family and a kiss from my son and a kiss from my wife.  That is a good day.

I used to yearn for age and experience.  I spent a lot of time wishing that I was older and knew more and had the cache that experience and wisdom bring.  I know a lot of people that spend a lot of time and money trying to look or seem younger, thinner, sexier.  Tonight, I am ecstatic to be just exactly where I am, who I am, as old as I am.  If this is the beginning of 38, it is going to be a hell of a year.

in defense of a theater education (did I really just write that?)

i remember very little about the beginning of high school.  I am sure I was scared and I am sure that I tried to find my way in this new world.  What I do remember is that early on I got involved with the theater crowd.  In a high school that mostly served poor rural white kids and bussed in poor urban black kids, it is not much of a stretch to understand that drama was not a particularly high priority.  The drama classes and drama club then were run by a singular person named Maggie Griffen.  Maybe another time I will write about her, today I have been thinking about all that ensued.

Suffice it to say that she welcomed me and (along with the other drama club folks) nurtured me and brought me along.  Eventually I started volunteering at the local community theater (beginning a relationship that lasted until I finally got out of the entertainment biz entirely almost twenty years later), where I was taken under the wing of the technical staff and trained in what would later become my vocation.  This training was not, at first, a classroom training, but rather an apprenticeship of sorts.  We worked in the shop two nights a week, and when we got closer to show time we worked more and more until we were basically there whenever we were not at work or at school.  Then the show would come down and we would start the process all over again.

It was a magic time.

My jobs within that community started out as menial jobs, and as I learned more by watching and by doing and by being shepherded by very patient people I was given increasingly complicated tasks.  These culminated in being in charge of whole groups of people and large projects by the time I was a senior.  A senior in high school.  I had apprenticed and learned on the job management skills, carpentry, electrician work, plumbing, upholstery, painting, rigging, all manner of jobs.  I had learned these skills by doing, by using my hands alongside the hands of people who had been doing this since before I was born, by watching as much as by being told.

I went on to college, first at a state university and then at the recently re-named University of North Carolina School of the Arts (many of my peers are as unimpressed by the name change as I am, but there it is.  Times change).  At these schools I honed my skills, learning the "why" behind the "what."  I grew up a little, I learned a little more respect (not enough, but it is a slow process for a 20 year old boy).  Then on to New York to work in the field; cocky like a lot of young people, narrow minded like a lot of young people, self-absorbed like a lot of young people.  Though it would be some years before I started to hone in on what was missing (a socially active component, and ecologically sound component), a lot of how I move through the world was already in place:  a desire to work and work a lot, a need to use my hands, a passion for working with a group of people, the inability to sit in an office alone.

This all came to a head yesterday morning when I came in to the shop.  A colleague had asked me to make something for him.  A small project, very easy for me, just not as possible for him as he has a different skill set and does not have the equipment that we do.  So first thing in the morning I started in on this little job.  It was only after I was done an hour later that I realised that I had just reaped the benefits of my theater education:  I had worked quickly but precisely, thinking on the fly and planning as I went  - not in a haphazard way, in a very considered way but also very rapidly - I had moved material through the shop and executed the project at as high a level of craft as I could (which is certainly good enough for this project) and had, in an hour, finished and could move on to the next project.

This was only possible because of my theater training, and it was very satisfying.  It made me grateful for my early apprenticeship and for my later formal education, for my journeyman phase in the City, for all of the teachers and mentors along the way.  So I started to make a list of what I learned in the late eighties and early nineties in the course of all of this, the beginning of which is below.  This is an incomplete list, but pretty impressive:

Manual Skills:  carpentry, welding/brazing/soldering, upholstery, plumbing, electrics, tile work, furniture construction, painting, faux finishes, stitching, patterning, embroidery, rigging, leather work

Managerial skills:  group dynamics, time management, interpersonal communication, budgeting (okay, I don't use this a lot, but I know how to do it if forced as I have been over the years occasionally), adherence to a deadline.

Life Skills:  basic physics, basic geometry, problem solving, teaching, work ethic, finding joy and pride in my craft, respect for others, respect for and a love of history

There is more to the list, but that is a good start.  This post has turned self-congratulatory, which is a little grating to read, I know.  But this is meant to be less about me personally and more about the education itself.  There is a lot wrong with the entertainment industry, as there is with just about every industry, but the education has a lot about it that is right, too.  I have a zero desire to return to that field, but if either of my sons said to me that they wanted to pursue a theatrical education I would encourage that completely.  And as they grow and develop, I think it will be important to me that making and using their hands constantly will continue to be central to their learning.  

There is a bit of misdirection involved in this kind of education.  The focus is often on completing the task at hand, the skills that are being learned may not be acknowledged or even obvious.  But the deeper learning that comes from, for example, using a saw to cut twenty platform legs all to the same length does not leave one, even decades later.  I am very fortunate for the education I have received.  I am fortunate that I had the legions of caring and dedicated and patient teachers.  And I am profoundly thankful for all of it.