As a neogit I was just aft-scratching, trying to figure out why, say, even
common little creatures are spelled differently by folk on this porch --
"rabbet" for example -- when Karl (yes, the other one) gently offlistedly
reminded me that first time posters usually post a bio, which evidently
meant that the biobite I tried to sly in on 2 June was judged to be just a
cough and a mumble, as in now look the other way please, altho' it does
seem to be true that by the end of a long enough mumble they'll have
forgotten what was up there at the start of the sentence, let us pray.
I'm a psycholinguist. The easiest way to think of that is to remember
that Hitchcock film, and that'll take care of the first part.
Grew up in Michigan in a GM family where father was, and both brothers
are, engineers. And grew up believing that fathers normally are able to
make or fix or fashion anything. And that's the way it's always been like
deep ice on the lakes in winter. Father's father's hobby had been
woodworking as well, and my brothers have followed that grain.
There is, I think, something quite real in many of us, even if it's
supposedly abstract -- that likes and even yearns for the texture of
handtools, the look and the heft and the feel. I like the look and the
feel and, yes, the heft for example of those older screwdrivers where
pear-halves of wood sandwiched the forgings. Have a couple of
brass-headed hammers around that I supposedly made to use with clock
repair. But really just like the way the polished sunsetty brass looks
against the hardwood handle and the way it balances when, for instance, I
decide whether or not that little spider prancing across the bench should
be brassed back to his maker -- or might be just another neogit, trying to
work out why spelling -- "rabbet" for example -- has gone by the
boards.
That's the heart of it.
And even when, say, working summers as a heater in the drop-forge
at Buick, there was something about that working of the metal that
gave a glow at the core. Whwhwhhhh----Ooooomp! Course you got fire
and flames and sparks too, a daily Fourth of July at union rates. And
we could still smoke unfiltered Camels, and the summers were longer.
Lived in several states following the usual gradschool crawl, and in
New Mexico where we had a house in the valley from a ret'd military
couple who'd let us paint for rent, with a fireplace, and, uh, liberated
firewood from a student who worked on campus trimming -- hey -- trees,
and a Lab and two cats and a garden and an old Volvo (with red leather
seats) that two druggies had driven straight through from Maine, and
fishing whenever up in Durango (where I'd taught AmIndians) my wife, who'd
I first met when I was just 15, and she was 24 (that's not true, but you
have to check now and then to see if they're paying attention...) decided
he'd be happy to just stay there, and drink beer under the spreading
cottonwood tree, and damn, before I knew it she'd sold the furniture
and we including our 6-year-old son were in Germany and I was offered
tenure at the German university, and 30 years later, back in the US in
Arizona, on pre-retirement leave ("for good behavior"), in a local
hospital (the other hand from the one that had held the brass hammer),
and this older non-male receptionist, who looked like she'd been so angry
at the world so long that her brains had turned to hemorrhoids, asked me,
once again, who my "provider" was.
When I'd left we'd had doctors and nurses and medics. We didn't have
providers. I thought maybe it was, you know, a religious question.
So while I was aft-scratching, trying to figure it out, she turned and
asked our daughter (21), who knew, and after that, I was treated as if I
were a cocker spaniel at the vet's with my owner answering for me.
"And has he had his rabies shots?"
Oh yes, and he's really into older, brass on wooden-arbors in
wooden-plated pre-industrial Black Forest clocks. And restores
them and writes about them.
Regards,
Duck
[ie from the German pronunciation of 'Doug']
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