fambly

like a lot of people, we spent the day yesterday in the kitchen preparing food and then some more time at a big table eating it. Delightful. Thanksgiving is really my favorite holiday. Mostly because it is about family and food and booze, which are my three favorite things. I like that there is a minimal "product" aspect to it as a holiday, there is no expectation that there will be presents, there are no television events except the Macy's parade, really. The only expectation is that we will all be in the kitchen, making things that smell good, and then we will move to the table, which will be laid with a little formality, and we will each intone the things for which we are thankful, and then we will tuck in.

I like to have a little formality, which will not surprise you. Makes it seem like an event, a Thing That is Important. And honestly, living as we do so far from some of our family, having them here is an event. And to be celebrating this very American holiday with them is a good thing, and special, and a little formality is appropriate.

Spending the whole day making with them is a rare and beauitiful thing. As I have said and written elsewhere, I believe there is no fundamental difference between different types of making. They are all attempts to communicate, they are all creative acts, whether it is a furniture object or a relationship, a crocheted hat or a meal, an essay on a blog or a song or anything else. All comes from the same place, the same wellspring. So we spent the day making and then eating what we made. Cosied up in a house filled with smells and tastes and stories and wine and beer. And a lot of the food was served in pottery that my mom made, so my family was here a little, too.

My contribution was the rolls. These are the rolls that my mom made every year, twice a year. Cresecent rools, "Butterhorns" the cookbook calls them. I am pretty comfortable making a lot of different things, but I get easily flustered when confronted with baking. It is such an exact science, baking, and shrouded in mystery so I have do concentrate a lot when I do it. Which is twice a year. But I love using my hands in ways to which they are unaccustomed, and there is something so very vital about making bread. Stuff of life. The physicality of kneading the dough, the waiting for it to rise, all of this is a calming process and so steeped in ritual that I can not help but love it.

When I was at my second college, the art school, and living alone in an apartment and generally expected to take care of myself, there was one summer that I made bread every Saturday. I would mix the ingredients and set it to rise, and then put on my straw hat and light a big cigar, and go for a walk for an hour and smoke and enjoy the summer afternoon. Then I would come back and have a little wine and punch down the dough and make it into loaves and set it to rise again and take a nap for a half an hour. When I woke up, I put the bread in and started supper, and that was my ritual for Saturdays. And at the end I had bread for a week and had had a nice contemplative cigar and life was good.

My rituals have changed a lot since I was twenty one. That is a good thing. But I was kneading the dough yesterday and my mind was cast back to those lazy afternoons, and to what I was thinking about then and I raised my glass to twenty-one-year-old Zeke. He was on to something, I think.

This year, I am thankful for family. I am thankful for friends. And I am thankful that past events have led me to here. It is a good place to be.

geography

a friend of mine sent me an email with the phrase "if geography allowed." It was such a nice turn of phrase that it got me to thinking about what I would do and where I would go if geography allowed.


Sequoia National Forest. Sometime soon I need to go and stand in the presence of trees that are five hundred years old. Trees that were saplings when Europeans first washed up on our shores. Trees that were already hundreds of years old when my grandfather was born. I think I need to stand among them for a little while and see what they have to say in person.

The "Floating Torii" gate at Itsukushima Shrine in Japan. And other Japanese temples, of course. It is such a different tradition of timber framing than the one that I know here. It must be magical to stand next to one of these massive structures. The woodworking tradition that goes into them resonates with me almost as much as the oone that I am heir to.

While in Japan, I would visit a Minka House. Again, a different style of timber framing, and the jointery is really amazing. I have been looking at this stuff in books for so long, but to be there in person, to smell the wood, that would be amazing.

Pisgah National Forest. After our walk in the woods recently, I am really itching to get back to my old stomping ground. The mountains up here are so similar (they are the same mountains after all) that it made me really homesick for the stretch of them that I used to walk in.

New Zealand. I hear it is just incredible. I always like to quote Douglas Adams, "The scenery in New Zealand makes one want to break into spontaneous applause." I happen to know someone who lived there for a while, and the reports are pretty good.

Of course sailing on the Lettie. Every time I see photos of her latest exploits, it makes me jealous. She is tied up in New York right now, but there are so many times I wish I could jsut transport myself to wherever she is and sit on the cross trees and listen to her sails full of wind.

This is a short list. There are more. Perhaps this will be a running exercise. It is fun to take these little trips in my mind, trips that I would take if geography allowed.

a walk in the woods

we went for a nice walk in the Berkshires this weekend.It has been a while since we went walking around in the woods. Much too long, in fact, given how much we both enjoy it.

It was a cool, crisp morning full of sunshine, with that bite in the air that says that it is not winter, yet, but it sure will be soon. The shadows of the trees were etched in frost on the ground, and as the Earth turned and the shadows moved their ghosts were still on the grass in spiky white crystals that melted slowly in the morning sun.

We started up through a meadow and then were in the woods, following an old rusty barbed-wire fence that marked the edge of some long-gone farmer's property. By and by we came to some persimmon and crabapple trees along that fence. I imagined the farmer's family planted them as little saplings and nurtured until they grew fruit big enough to make into jellies and put up for the long winters. Now they continue to make fruit, though only the deer and birds and squirrels enjoy the harvest, these days. Huge old twisted apple trees like those always make me think of Prince Caspian, and how the apple trees at Cair Paravel must have looked when the children returned after all those generations.

Up the hill from the fruit trees we came on the Appalachian trail. I have walked very small parts of this same trail, hundreds and hundreds of miles to the south, and could not help feeling a southerly pull standing looking at that sign. So much more impressive (or maybe poignant) somehow than an interstate that plows through hill and dale traveling the same distance. Here is a quieter highway, one that was made by people working together across vast distances to make a free and open way to walk these mountains. Down in Georgia there are folk who were on the same trail that we walked yesterday, maybe when we were on it. And in North Carolina. and up in Maine. Nice to have that company for a little bit.

The hills and woods looked almost exactly like the woods that I grew up walking in. The calling cards of the local denizens littered the forest floor, announcing the presence of the same trees that I knew as a child: oak, maple, sycamore. The smell of the cycle of birth and death and rebirth assailed our noses, that utterly healthy smell of forests and outdoors and walking in the woods. We both miss it, and know we need to do it more.

There were a few trees still hanging on, still with vibrantly colored leaves, still living in the fall for a little longer. They greeted us with gently waving arms in the bright morning sunshine, and told us to come back soon, this summer if possible. We promised we would.

Often, I look at a tree and think about the lumber that is inside it, and whether it would be nice to work, or have some great figuring or strange grain pattern. This trip, though, I was happy to just be in the presence of these trees, who are so generous about letting us occupy their space. I did not think about them and how they could enter my world, I was happy just to be in theirs. It was so calming, that shift of view. It has been a long time since I looked at a tree and did not think about it slabbed up like a corpse on my workbench, but really and truly thought "that tree looks great right where it is, and I am glad that it is there and that I can see it there."

Different ways of thinking about wood. Always something to learn.

ewwwwwwwwwww. (age)

the scene: furniture woodshop. Two undergraduates are discussing faculty, starting with Professor Lothar Windels.

1: "I think he must be almost fifty, right?"

2: "Probably."

Overhearing, I stop and say

z: "I don't think he is at all. I don't think he is more than ten years older than me. Probably less. I bet about forty two or so."

1: "You're thirty two?"

z: "Thirty five."

2: "You're almost forty?!?!?! Eeeeewwwwwww!"

I almost said "Look you rotten goddamn kid, shut up!" but then thought that maybe railing against youth would not be the best approach. So I tried to explain as patiently and kindly as possible that actually, my thirties have been great so far, and that as hard as some times have been, I feel that my life gets better the longer I live it, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to be twenty again for anything in the world, so there.

They remain unnconvinced.

It is true, though. I don't think of myself as "almost forty" yet, but then that kind of designation is so relative. Maybe when I was twenty I would have thought that way. Probably would have. I vaguely remember being twenty and thinking that thirty was impossibly far off, that maybe I would never even be that old.

Now, I have a lot of good friends that are forty or damn near. Suits me fine.

Among the things that I like about getting older is the fact that I am mellowing a little. Maybe it is the yoga. Certainly it is the woodworking. I am learning to slow down, to be present. Yoda said about Luke at one point "Never his mind on where he was. What he was doing." I am trying to take a pointer from the Jedi master and be here. I am trying to be aware. Rather than looking always to the future, and comparing my work and life to other's, I am trying to be better about seeing and enjoying what is right here, just now, where I am.

It is not always easy. But it is almost always a good idea.

Just like in yoga, when we stop, close our eyes, and concetrate on our breathing, and on all of the little parts of the body, and what they are doing, I feel like sometimes it is good to do that in life. I have been trying to stop and think "what is happening, right now?"

This is something I certainly was not doing ever at 20. It concerns me, sometimes, the cult of youth. Which I guess is something that humans have been doing forever, it is nothing new. I just think it is especially irrelevant now, when the average life expectancy is in the neighboorhood of seventy years, and getting longer all the time. Sure am glad that the next fifty years of my life won't be spent pining for the first twenty.

"You're almost forty?" Yep I am. If the current trend continues, forty is going to be better than thirty, and fifty better than that. I am excited about the journey.



Rotten goddamn kids.

lessons

"this is a bandsaw," I said over the roar of the dust-collector. "It has a flexible blade that runs down into the bed here, and then around this wheel..."

The sophomores are learning about their first power tools in the woodshop at RISD. This is a sacred part of a yearly ritual, the training in of the uninitiated, the welcoming of a new crop of makers into our midst. Pretty exciting stuff. It fell to me to introduce them to the first power saw that they will learn to use. The teacher asked me to be in charge of this station, and I jumped at the chance. It has been months since I have been able to teach anything in a formal setting, and boy, do I miss it.

"This is a bandsaw." My students at NYU used to laugh at me because I introduced every new tool and process in the same way. One of them joked that when I die my tombstone will read "This is a tombstone. Are you working right now?" But I think naming things can be an important part of understanding them. Often students come to me with no making background, and have no frame of reference or vocabulary to describe their work or their surroundings. Part of my job is to contextualise these surroundings for them, to introduce them to the vocabulary, to empower them to avail themselves of the tools, to learn to be comfortable around them which makes them more comfortable makers.

"This is a bandsaw." I walked them through how to turn it on and off. We looked at the parts, and we did some test cuts. As the teacher, I kept my eyes on their hands, for the most part. The hands and the eyes. I like to know where they are looking, and what they are aware of. But I also want to make sure they are using their hands safely. So many of them are so trepidatious that they are not looking at the blade, or they are looking at the blade and it paralyses them. So I now have had the opportunity to closely examine thirty pairs of hands and thirty pairs of eyes. Lacquered nails and chewed nails and long nails and short ones. Dirty and clean. The smooth, tight skin of an eighteen year old hand is so interesting, especially when I look at mine, scarred, with callouses and mangled nails and think that mine used to look like that, and at one time I was just as scared to approach a big machine like that, myself. Green eyes and brown and hazel and blue, looking at the blade and trying to figure out how to integrate this new thing into their lives.

But they all did it. Every one. Even the ones who were so scared, or who apologised for messing up their test cut. Or who kept looking over at me to make sure they were not doing anything wrong. It made me proud. It is especially great to see the look on the face of a student who is particularly scared of the tool at first, but then finally, triumphantly, makes a test cut or two and realises, hey, yes, I can do this, it isn't really so scary after all!

"This is a bandsaw." It is the next step into a huge new way of thinking, one in which we can work, with hands and hearts and minds, to make a better world. We can, through the application of our labor and our intellect, have a positive impact. And if we pool our creative abilities, there is nothing we can not achieve. I firmly believe that is true.

And it is my job to be a part of this. Like a Johnny Appleseed of tool training, I get to plant this information, to water it a little and then let it take its own course. How many people will each of these nineteen year olds influence? What great things will they cause to happen? The few minutes I spend here in this loud, dusty shop can have unimaginable effects as the lessons learned here from me and others ripple out and out and out. Just like the wisdom and knowledge that my teachers imparted to me are rippling out and out. I see and hear my teachers from years ago, some still with us and others gone, encouraging me, showing me, instilling in me the confidence that I am trying to instill in these thirty sophomores.

I wrote a little while back about how important I thought it was for me to make some kind of difference. This is the difference I can make.

"This is a bandsaw."

maine

took a quick trip up to maine this weekend. I was delivering the conference table that I have been working on, the long-leaf pine one. Portfolio shots will be on the website soon, but here is one that I took while I was working on the dry fit.

I am very pleased with how it came out. Sometimes, after I finish a piece, I step back and look at it, and think, "well, yes, that will be fine." This was one of those pieces. You can't hit a home run every time, but when you do get one, it just feels good.

So on Friday I loaded it into a rentaed minivan and drove up to Deer Isle, which let me tell you is pretty far from anywhere, and that is no lie. Out on the coast of Maine, and just gorgeous. By the time I got up there, it was late afternoon, and the autumn sunlight was low and amber and cutting through the trees. Wherver it hit one that was gold or orange or red it looked like a forest fire, the color just exploding off of the leaves and almost making a sound. I see why people drive around to look at the autumn leaves, though that always seemed odd to me as a pastime. I understand it now.

There were many trees that had already lost most of their leaves. They lay on the emerald grass in a perfect circle around the base of the trunk which called to mind (I forget whose image this is. C S Lewis, maybe) slender pale women who have stepped out of their beautiful multi-colored evening dresses to prepare for the bath of winter. Made me think about trees, and how much I like them, and how much I want them to stay right where they are. Really affirmed for me the need to cut down as few as possible.

The dining hall at Haystack Mountain School of Craft, which is where I was taking the table, has a south-facing window that looks out over the bay. The building is about 200 feet up the side of a very steep hill, and the effect is one of hanging in the air, just at that moment of rest in a jump before you start hurtling back down. Looking out into the bay, there are a handful of small rocky islands with trees on them, evergreens, mostly, that look to me like a bunch of punk rock kids standing in a pool with only the tops of their heads sticking out of the water. I want to tell them to go on and get out, because the water is not going to get any warmer, but with their ears under water, they can't hear me.

So I stood and looked out at the bay as the last rays of sun set the sky on fire off to the west, the reds and pinks blurring into that velvety violet that one can only see when one is far from civilisation. Deer Isle is remote enough that there is actually starlight, which is always something that I find jarring to remember. I have not lived anywhere that there was starlight in a long while. Sure is pretty.

Remote, and cold cold cold, and beautiful. A good home for a rustic table.

Requiscat In Pace

I only met U Utah Phillips once, and that was pretty recent. Didn't know how to tell him that I had known him a long damn time. He convinced me to play music again, to take an interest in how we live our lives, to be a pacifist, to memorise stories and poems, to unearth a copy of the Hobo's Hornbook and start to cram all of that wisdom into my brain. He reminded me that I love this country, that I have a voice, that I have a responsibility to think and to act and to bring about change.

I am not that important, in the scheme of things. But I am a better person for what Utah inspired me to do.

He talked about heroes, on one album I have. Well, he is one of mine. Up there with Twain and Lincoln, a person who had compassion, but not at the expense of being cantankerous. Wisdom, but not at the expense of drollery. I mourn his passing, but I know that he is up there caterwauling away, and that pretty soon all the angels will have a Wobbly card.

He died the day after my 35th birthday. I wish I had known. I do not know what I would have done, but I would have done something. He didn't sing his songs so much as he slung them at you, and you didn't have the chance to get out of the way, so you got them all over you, and they were sticky and dirty and full of unpleasant things like truth, so you couldn't help but listen, and take them in, and be changed by them.

I guess the best that I can hope for, in my life, is that I can have the same energy to attack anything that I do, and that I can be as true to what I believe as he was.

Go over easy, Utah. See you on the other side.