Something Wonderful: How to Make An Heirloom
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WHEN in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary….
Welcome to the New American Digest: 2003-2020
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here or there does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
Gerard Van der Leun
When all Earth’s seas shall Levitate,
Dark shawled within the skies,
Upon our eyes will Starfish dance
Their waltz of Blind surprise.
The sun will Rise within wine Dark
As Argonauts imbibed,
Whose drunken arms embrace that sleep
Where Phaeton’s horses Stride.
Upon all of Earth’s wind-sanded shores,
As dolphins Learn to soar,
All we once were on the land
Shall be sealed behind the door
Of Ivory and Chastened Gold,
That the Mystery solved complete
Shall never til the seas’ Long fall
Wake mariners from their sleep.
— Van der Leun
IÂ CELEBRATEÂ myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
— The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
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When I was very young we lived with my grandparents. In their bathroom was a small stool my greatgrandfather had made for my mother when she was 3 or 4. I loved that little stool so when my oldest was four I made him a stool as close to a copy of my mother’s as I could remember. Over the next 15 years I had 3 more kids and each one got a stool like the original. My 7 year old grandson broke his Dad’s stool a week ago and just 5 minutes ago I finished the repair. My hope is that my greatgrand children will use those stools one day just as I did.
They HAVE a hammer. Oh, the JOY!
That was wonderful.
Dude’s got some bad sanders. That’s some hammering kids! Kids bothering you? Just hand them some nails and send them out to the porch. Next the craftsman needs to make them some real framing hammers 🙂
OMG! How dare adults let kids have such a dangerous implement! I’m shocked! (not really, every kid needs a hammer)
I must have mis-heard him when he said he was making a hammer for his grandson.
A repurposed hammer! What a nice gift for a 6 year old.
The gentleman in the video has an awesome shop and is incredibly talented.
The torch “heat tempers” the wood.
Didn’t show it but he probably wiped it down with 4-0 steel wool afterward to smooth it out and lessen the soot. Nice. Most people would have thrown it away. Now it’ll keep working another 100 years.
Hopefully the little girl learns to not leave tools out in the weather, it saves on re-furbing or replacing.