Hand crafted.

Three years ago I wrote about a couple of old men I had encountered through work when I was a young man. There was mailroom Joe, who hoped we could become friends like on TV, but he was fired from the job soon after. And there was Gabe, a doddering old man who duly showed up for work every day at the company he had founded maybe fifty years earlier, but they didn't let him do anything anymore. I thought it was interesting to remember those men, how each in his way tried to hold on to relevance in a world that really didn't care. 

There was a third man whom I wanted to write about, but I couldn't do it unless I found the present he gave me. And I'm very happy to say that I found it during our recent move.

So, what is it and how did it come into my possession? 

This is a small hand-carved monkey wrench, made from a single piece of wood. The dial on the handle opens and closes the grip. It is smooth as silk.

One summer in college I worked in a living museum kind of thing -- where you dress in Olde Tyme clothes and tell people about the place and what people did in the past. I was in the carpentry shed, with a bunch of tools and a foot-powered lathe and pants with a flap in front and suspenders and a collar with a necktie and a vest. Jolly old town carpenter, that was me! Fortunately I didn't actually have to make many things. Craftsmanship did not descend upon me with the title. 

But craftsmanship was certainly thriving in the old man -- whose name I have forgotten if he ever gave it -- who came to visit once in a while to discuss woodwork. I had no real knowledge, but he didn't mind. He liked to tell me the kinds of projects he was doing. And I liked to listen to him, but he did get in the way -- when people would come in, I had to do my history schtick. And he'd be there in his 20th century clothes, sometimes adding information that was not helpful and sometimes irrelevant. 

But if there was a visitor who did know about woodcraft, the kind of fellow who liked to play Stump the Docent ("What kind of wood are you using? Was that found in this area at the time? What sorts of household goods would be made here? What would the local carpenter charge for say, a table and eight chairs?"), then my elderly friend was exceptionally helpful as a distraction. 

I was a college kid! You couldn't expect me to know anything! 

Anyway, as the end of the summer season approached, my friend gave me that little monkey wrench. It's beautiful. The wheel is perfect and the hand-carved screw on the clamp still works as well as it did all those decades ago. It was very kind of him to part with this, and I have always enjoyed showing it to guests.  

I wish I knew the fellow's name -- gone now, I'm sure, but he was another example of the kind of man we often see. Retired, enjoying a hobby of small interest to most people, but capable of amazing flourishes of skill. Thanks for visiting, Woody, or whatever your name was, and thanks for the gift. I cherish it still. 

Trash talk and dead bodies.

I don't want to keep dwelling on things that are different in this alternate universe to which I have moved. But I will. The thing is, it's just close enough to the old life I had that it throws me off. 

Take the trash pickup. Longtime readers of this blog -- all good-looking and tasteful, with powerful intellects and enormous patience -- will recall that in New York, I complained a lot about the free-for-all that was our trash situation. People put everything short of dead humans out for pickup, and maybe they disguised a few of those. You could use any ol' trash receptacle you had handy. And the garbagemen came by on Tuesdays and Fridays, with a "recycling" pickup on Wednesday.

Here, the trash pickup is one day a week: Monday, You don't dare miss it because they won't be back. So people have their stuff out Sunday night, although I haven't seen a pickup here before noon Monday. It's one of those towns where you get two large trash cans when you move in, one for garbage and one for recycling garbage, and everything has to fit inside. The truck comes by and picks up the can and dumps it into the hopper. Another truck comes by later and gets the other can. It cuts manpower by two thirds, and it keeps people from trying to leave a sofa or a piano for pickup. 

Well, they wouldn't try it twice. 

My main problem is that I don't know what the hell day it is. I had tuesday-wednesday-friday tattooed on my consciousness. When a holiday would bump the week forward a day, that was bad enough. Here, around Wednesday I do not know immediately what day it is, because the trashman would not be back for days. I'm a rudderless boat on the sea of time now. 

And I'm scared of my sink.

This is the first time in my life I've lived somewhere with a garbage disposal. The InSinkErator came with the place. I am glad to be able to get rid of most food garbage instantly -- so I'm not stuck with it until next Monday! -- but man, it's scary and loud. 

All I ever heard of these things were what happened when you let utensils fall into them and what HORRIBLE things happened to YOU when you tried to get them out. 

Stone cold killer

I mean, the way this thing goes through a head of celery or a chunk of beef has to give you pause. I could easily see Steve Buscemi's leg sticking out of the sink in a remake of Fargo. 

Wish me luck with the InSinkErator, and that I do not forget what day of the week it is when Monday arrives. Last week the truck dude failed to completely empty my garbage can and it's got some bad juju going on right now. If I miss him tomorrow, I'm going to have to shove all the garbage into the disposal. And I think that may work no better than trying to get Steve Buscemi in there.  

More lessons.

As we continue to get things set up in our new home in Dixie -- the area, not the cup -- I have continued to reflect on some lessons learned in the process. 

1) It's different when it doesn't snow a lot.

Back in New York, the potholes from last winter are still being fixed. Where you don't get a lot of snow, the roads don't get nearly the same damage. People have been telling me how they got a shocking SIX INCHES OF SNOW in one storm last winter, but there were precious few plows and I guess no salt trucks, so people had to wait until it melted. Which I suppose took a one or two days. Meanwhile, I have seen zero potholes. 

Roads weakened by salt and other chemicals and damaged by the expanse of freezing water give way in spots. Not seeing much evidence of that here. 

You see this brick structure leading out to the street? In New York, a plow would have busted the end of it years ago. Many times have I seen these kinds of things built, and many bricks have gone flying by March. Snow plows aren't invulnerable to ice and snow either -- and snow plowers are only human.

2) People really are friendlier down here.

New Yorkers always make the case that, while they act like jerks on the outside, they have a heart o' gold on the inside. And I think that's mostly true. But in this part of the south, at least, they act friendly on the outside, which is nice. And it's institutionalized: in Publix, the big supermarket chain, I've found that you not only don't you have to bag your own groceries*, you really can't -- the way the counter register line is set up, you can't reach them. Besides, there's a clerk already doing it. Customer service means something here, apparently. 

*Self-checkouts do not apply; you gotta bag your stuff there.

Maybe the biggest, most general life lesson I had drilled into me was:

3) Sometimes "I did my best" doesn't matter. 

We really hit the wall hard when moving day came. The last few days we were literally throwing things into boxes and hoping for the best. We should have been working harder to get things prepared before the big day, but it seemed like it would never come, and when it did, it happened faster than expected. So in the end, we just had to gut it out. Which meant that there was no "That's enough for today," no "I'm wiped out," no "I did my best." 

Most jobs that are not in emergency services are specifically set up to make sure things can be done by reasonable staff in reasonable time, so you never run into this kind of panic. When I was in the magazine business, deadlines meant working late, because those presses would roll when scheduled. But even then, everyone was prepared and it didn't usually become a big problem.** 

It had been a long time since I'd been caught in a situation where I could not quit until the job was done, however late, however exhausted, and it was humbling. And I lost some pants along the way, as I've detailed on this blog. The whole thing was a fuster cluck of massive proportions, and we're still digging out.

But at least we don't expect to be digging a lot of snow.  

As the man says, everything in life is a blessin' or a lesson. I hope I've had enough lessons for a little while. 

**A beloved colleague in the magazine game went to work for a celebrity rag for a while, and found herself working all night long to get the stupid magazine out the door on time. While it was a sort of news magazine, there was no need for that kind of panic and mania and drama; it was just poorly run.

And one married a Wilson!

 

9/11 at 25.

I've shared my thoughts on Patriot Day over the years in this blog. Basically, at this point it's obvious we did not dispatch enough of the sons of bitches in Afghanistan, going by the chaotic withdrawal from that blighted country under President Biden. As Kurt Schlichter wrote yesterday, "If there is one overriding failure in the war on terror, it is that we did not kill enough of the terrorists."

And that's my main thought at this late date. 

I asked a friend of mine, retired now from the New York City Fire Department, if he had any thoughts he would share. He said no; "I just try to forget it." He avoids anything on television that might show the World Trade Center on that day. I told him I understood. I do not know what to do with my anger when I go down that path. 

I saw a question raised online about why Hollywood has not done more by way of movies regarding the War on Terror and the September 11 attacks. I actually don't blame Hollywood for this. In World War II, war movies were popular, because we knew we were fighting nation states, and we would fight them until they suffered complete defeat. We can't do that with multinational death-cult adherents of a 1400-year-old religion. So our frustration and fury are unresolvable. Any film or TV show that takes on these topics will face a huge stumbling block right there. That's why I think the films we have had about the attacks and the war have not been successful. 

It's not because America does not love her heroes. You'd better believe we do.

We are now engaged in a war that began when our country and the West backstabbed the Shah of Iran and Jimmy Carter told France to let the Ayatollah go back to Iran (after the Ayatollah lied about how he had no beef against the USA). The birdies were always going to come home to roost, and they were either going to be vultures carrying nukes or eagles with lesser but highly effective arms. That's where we are in September 2026.

If you know anyone in the American armed forces, please make sure to tell them that we really do care, and we really do appreciate them. And if any more sons of bitches need killing, we trust them to do the job. 

God bless the United States of America.