The left turn signal
has been flashing since Charleston,
thirty-seven minutes ago.
It is conceivable she
really is turning
but is just very cautious.
Or perhaps she is a perfectly
sentient old woman
with a grim sense of humor.

My exit was fifteen minutes ago,
only now I must follow her
to see how long she can
keep it up.
This is more entertaining,
more poignant than anything
I was going to do.

There is something real
happening here,
something pure and natural,
and I must see it through
to its rightful end.

I have come to believe
that she will truly turn
one day.
And when she does
I will be there.
I will turn as well.
Only when I do, I will
not use my signal.
For we are now one
and she has signaled
for us both.

I can offer nothing more.

The morning haze wraps itself around me
like an old familiar blanket,
or a lover’s fevered embrace.
The impending day, pregnant with possibility,
tickles my senses
like the tang of
Cool Ranch Doritos
beside a swirling stream.

But slowly, inexorably
the sun creeps across the day,
burning through the haze,
shredding it like the patented
double mulching action of a Toro
Titan Zero-Turn mower.

Only then, as the day falls into evening
and the sky drifts from gold to purple,
I cannot help but be reminded of the full duplex
color scan picture on my
Samsung 6400-Series wide-screen television,
its 1080p resolution and 240 Hz frame rate
rendering your radiant smile
in true lifelike tones
mere reality cannot hope to equal.

But the rise of the amber moon.
The blink of a million jeweled stars.
Even your iridescent smile.
All these, alas, pale in comparison
to my new Nissan Maxima with
all-wheel drive, Torquemaster V8 engine,
and twelve-speaker four-hundred watt sound system.

So sleep easy, my love,
and I will do the same.
Rest in the knowledge
that my love for you is boundless and strong
as a thirty-gallon Extra-Strength Hefty trash bag
in the fifty-count space saver box.

But it is all so far away,
and he prays
please, God,
don’t let it come
to me.
Or, if it must,
if it is your will,
let it be so hard hit that
I have no chance.

And in that entreating moment
he pounds
one fist into his well-oiled
but scarce-used glove,
trying desperately to muster
whatever it is
the others seem to have
naturally.

But all he feels is
out of place,
miscast and adrift upon
the vast and verdant outfield.
The smell of the grass.
The distant shouts.
He is a fly in
a web,
entwined, no hope of escape.
And even now
his doom approaches
with the sound
of the crack and the
hideous inescapable visage,
of a slowly growing
dirty white sphere.

My ancient reel-to-reel tape player,
artifact of a day
when music moved
like the undulating waves
of an ocean storm.
Now it rests unused, ignored in a corner,
next to a box of records,
fellow soldiers, laid low
in that same bitter conflict.
The victor even now
taunts from the living room below,
tossing its cold unfeeling bits
about as though samples
could ever truly be
the thing itself.

As I turn to descend,
there comes a faint hiss
from within the box.
Reminder of imperfection
or parting gesture of insolence.
Either way, a memory
of how things once were.

that vertiginous spire

will demand of me

a piece

rarified and orotund.

Obscure

of content.

Obtuse

in structure.

Roiling with

references.

Seething with

sententiousness.

A normal poem,

first dissected

into its constituent

words.

Puréed

in a blender.

The whole slushy mess

Then flung out

onto the lawn

and run over

a few passes

with the mower.

The tattered remnants

piled together

and set alight,

the ashes drifting

upward on the breeze

Until the charred fragments

float down about me,

and I vacuum them up,

empty the dust bag

into an envelope

and mail it off.

The resulting poem

so damned good

it brings tears

to their eyes

and they spare

no expense

seeking me out,

if only to learn

what other-worldly muse

allowed such a thing

to descend from on high

and dwell among mere men.

April 19, 1955

OBITUARY

Dr. Albert Einstein Dies in Sleep at 76; World Mourns Loss of Great Scientist

By THE NEW YORK TIMES

Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, Wuerttemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. His boyhood was spent in Munich, where his father, who owned electro-technical works, had settled. The family migrated to Italy in 1894, and Albert was sent to a cantonal school at Aarau in Switzerland. He attended lectures while supporting himself by teaching mathematics and physics at the Polytechnic School at Zurich until 1900. Finally, after a year as tutor at Schaffthausen, he was appointed examiner of patents at the Patent Office at Bern where, having become a Swiss citizen, he remained until 1909…..

————————-

“Well, I was thanking Almighty God when that one was finally over with, I can tell you that. Couldn’t wait to get home and have a nice long shower. Almost nine damned years ago and it still gives me the creeps. I swear, if I have to explain relativity to one more person in one more system, I think I’ll probably just put a gun to my head.”

“Oh, come on now, Grant, it couldn’t have been all that bad. You should be getting rather good at it by now. What was that, your sixth time?”

“Doesn’t matter. Six times or sixty, nobody gets it. Hell, I barely understand it, and I’m the one stuck shepherding it around the bloody universe. And it doesn’t make me feel any better knowing that it’s wrong on top of everything else. It’s impenetrable and it’s wrong.”

“It’s not wrong, Grant. It’s merely… incomplete.”

“Incomplete? That’s one way of putting it, I suppose. Misleading, juvenile, borderline criminal—those would be other ways. So now, for the sixth time in as many centuries, I’ve got a civilization believing it’s impossible to travel faster than light.”

“A belief that will last them a good couple hundred years until they discover otherwise,” Hickok responds. “Oh, and lest we forget, if all goes well, it’s also a belief that will keep them from blowing up their feeble planet trying to do otherwise.”

“Yes, well, I pray they aren’t going to learn anything more from me. I mean, for God’s sake, we’re supposed to be advancing civilizations, not slowing them down. Tell you what, I’ve just about had it with this nonsense—every last bit of it. Actually I was thinking I might have a go at politics next time there’s an opening.”

“Best think twice on that one, mate. Talk to Billings sometime. He just got back from doing the Kennedy gig, and look what that got him. Brains everywhere.”

“And a damned fat bonus check, I’ll wager. Elected president, averts the Third World War, makes himself a martyr to boot. Some of these gigs, the best thing that can happen is a bullet through the head. Tears of a grieving nation, job well done, and you’re home thirty years ahead of schedule.”

I listened discreetly as Hickok and Grant bantered on at the next table about Grant’s last assignment on Earth. He sounded a good bit more disenchanted than he had following his prior assignments, but then, some are more taxing than others. Seems as though everyone gripes for a good while immediately following a field gig. Separated from your family for decades at a time, stuck eating earth food and dealing with earth logic and earth morality. But then a few years go by and they’re invariably ready for the next assignment. At least they’re out there—in the shit, as someone on earth used to say. Me, I’m stuck here at home—Trent Stephens, stalwart Senior Analyst in the Historical Archives Department, documenting for posterity all the interventions I wish I was out there doing for real, in person. I don’t mean to suggest that it’s all bad. I get to interview presidents, scientists, musicians, basically everyone who’s ever made a significant contribution to history on earth for the past three thousand years. This is, after all, what we do—grease the wheels of civilization whenever and wherever they get a little sticky, which is more often than not on a planet like Earth.

“But hey,” Hickok interjects. “You got a nice obituary out of it. Hell, you even won a Nobel Prize, right? There’s a nice little bit of recognition, eh?”

“Yeah, awesome,” Grant replies, feigning disgust. “That and a couple of bucks will get me a cup of coffee. Talk to Fleming about Nobel Prizes. He’s got four of them last I heard.”

“Four? Are you serious?”

“Yeah, and all physics. Remember, he was Curie, Bohr, Dirac, and Fermi.”

“Hmmm. Busy guy. Guess once you get good at something, you risk getting type-cast, huh?”

“Which is why if I’m going to make a move, it probably needs to be now.”

And on they went, comparing interventions, awards, what it was like living in different places on earth, the wives, the houses, everything. Our race operates pretty much like any company anywhere. There are your front-line guys like Grant and Hickok. They get field assignments and spend most of their lives on the road. Then there are support guys like me who hardly ever travel—research, recruiting, accounting, that sort of thing. No real chance of my getting into the field rotation. Best I can hope for is a position in Planning and Scheduling. They monitor each civilization’s progress against preplanned goals and objectives and dispatch field reps whenever a new discovery is called for, a cultural upheaval is needed, a war needs starting or stopping, the big things that keep progress progressing. Earth didn’t even get on our radar screen until about three thousand years ago, around the time they started writing and communicating with each other in a reasonably intelligent way. Heck, if it wasn’t for us, they’d still be living in caves and making arrowheads out of pieces of flint.

“So when are you out again?” Grant asks from behind his menu.

“Looks like a couple months at the earliest. I’ve actually been out and back while you were off playing Einstein and winning Nobel Prizes.”

“Really? And still in Philosophy and Religion? What was the gig?”

“Seventeen years as Pope Pius XI, if you can believe that.”

“No kidding? That was you who founded Vatican City as a country?”

“Guilty as charged. Seemed like a good idea at the time. I guess we’ll see how it works out.”

A few basic things require explaining before we get much further. I said our race is run like a company, like an Earth company as it happens, though that almost makes it sound like we modeled ourselves on what Earth does, when, of course, it’s the other way around entirely, seeing as how we’ve been in this business for at least a hundred or so of their millennia. In fact, the reason Earth companies (and companies all over the galaxy, for that matter) operate like they do is that many of their founders were our field operatives who naturally brought our business structures and strategies along with them on their intervention assignments. But like any business, our field reps are measured against a set of performance goals that determine everything from compensation to future assignments. Of course, like any service company, the principal measure is utilization, the percentage of time they spend in the field serving in some leadership capacity, versus waiting at home for the next gig, being “on the beach” as the consultants like to say. Another key measure, one that Hickok alluded to in some of his earlier comments, is the natural to unnatural death ratio (UDR). As a general rule, unnatural deaths are frowned upon from a ratings and performance perspective, though some allowance is, of course, made for the higher risk positions such as Third-World rulers and military officers. And then there’s the new policy memo that was circulated just a couple of days ago.

“So, what’s the story with this new suicide policy I’m hearing about?” Grant asks, casting his eyes about the restaurant, increasingly frustrated at his inability to engage a waiter with eye contact. “I hear it’s got everybody all in a lather.”

“Especially the guys on the artistic side, wouldn’t you know. Folks upstairs got a little spooked, I think, over the Hemingway thing. Everybody felt as though Fitch unilaterally shaved twenty-odd years off his gig while still getting full marks for artistic contribution, etc, etc. That was followed by a spate of copycat suicides, mainly writers and musicians. They were leaping off bridges, sticking their heads in ovens, all sorts of unpleasantness. Finally management got fed up and decided to put the kibosh on the whole thing. Now you off yourself and you sacrifice your entire point allocation for the assignment, simple as that. They’ve had maybe six guys bolt from Music and Writing just this week over it.”

“Bolt and go where?” Grant replied. “What’s a career writer or musician going to do other than be a writer or musician?”

“Fair question, my friend, and one I have no good answer to. But I can certainly understand why they’re hacked over it. Who the hell could spend fifty years writing books or concertos, for God’s sake?! Hell, I’d throw myself in front of a bus too. All the brouhaha may, though, have an impact on you trying to get out of Physics and Chemistry anytime soon. Best you stay current on your math and science, I’m afraid.”

It would be easy to get the impression from all of this that humans are a hopeless collection of dolts incapable of innovating anything on their own without help from outside or that governing themselves without descending into civil war every ten years is beyond their ability. It’s not as though there aren’t some genuinely clever ones amongst them. It’s just that there are so damnably few and there’s so much to get done in such a short time if they’re going to advance at a reasonable pace. If we’d waited around for them to figure out gravity, thermodynamics, and cosmology on their own, they’d still be drawing on cave walls. As it is, we tend to mete out our field assignments based on an assessment of how well the race is handling things on its own. Sadly for humans, progress got off to a late start and hasn’t shown much sign of improvement since. And, like it isn’t difficult enough keeping things moving with our own staff of on-site interveners, we even have to step in and undo some of the biggest nonsense that the humans manage to think up on their own. Case in point, Clive Baxter goes out in the second half of earth’s sixteenth century and invests nearly fifty years getting Galileo on track, only to have a human-led Catholic Church do its level best to overturn nearly everything the poor guy did. We intervene with twenty-four consecutive popes, and then one human sneaks in and nearly sets everything back a century. Honestly, with humans, you can count all the genuinely notable achievements they’ve come up with on their own on one hand.

“Hell, Hickok, it’s so damned mindless. That’s what tears me up the most. Forty or fifty years at a go. Nothing but insufferably boring conferences, symposiums, papers, and spending your days with humans who think they’re so damned original. I can’t wait ‘til they reach that fateful traumatic day and discover that there are thousands of other races floating around in the ether who’ve discovered all the same shit they have, only lots more of it. Then we’ll see how original they are. Meanwhile, we’re the ones figuring all this stuff out and meting it out like so much cat food. It’s borderline humiliating, I tell you.”

“So you’d rather be back here doing the actual research, figuring out the genuine new stuff?”

“Good God, no. I never had the test scores for that. All my top marks were same as yours, same as all field reps—communications, negotiation. Hell, Hickok, we’re glorified salesmen, except the people we’re selling to don’t know they’re being sold to.” He finally attracts a waiter by the expedient of standing up and waving his arms.

Hickok smiles wryly as Grant retakes his seat. “All the knowledge of the universe, but we can’t figure out how to do decent service in a restaurant. Now there’s something the humans have figured out, some of them at any rate.”

Grant peers again at his menu as the waiter, clearly put out by Grant’s histrionics, approaches. Grant looks up at Hickok. “What’s good here? I haven’t been to this place in years.”

“Nothing’s changed. You should know that. Nothing ever changes. Last time they updated the menu here, Napoleon was still busy conquering Europe.”

The dialog seemed so trite, so banal, over dinner. Yet these men—not only Grant and Hickok, but all field operatives—possess one additional skill that Grant failed to mention in his manifest of intervener capabilities. It is the skill—innate ability is a more accurate descriptor—that enables interventions to take place at all. There is a word for it in our language, several words in fact, but none quite captures the true essence of this skill, this gift. Closest that would convey to a human is absorption. Field operatives, who turn out to be about fifteen percent of the population of our race—are born with the ability to separate mind from body for extended periods of time, leaving behind a body in stasis while their minds travel great distances. In addition, and even more to the point of intervention, they can insert their minds’ contents, their very consciousness, into the mind of another, in essence taking over the personality and thoughts of that individual until such time as the intervener chooses to depart. It is this ability, and the combined knowledge of our civilization, which has existed in this state for many hundreds of millennia, that has placed us in the position we now occupy in the galaxy, viz architects of development for the civilizations in our portfolio. It is a righteous calling, the very essence of civilized life itself, yet Grant and Hickok (and many others like them, for I have overheard many such conversations) make it sound like a drudge.

“Damn it, Hickok, anybody could do this job, anybody with the good luck to be born to the right set of parents and test appropriately once they reach a hundred years. You take the bloody test, you score in the ninetieth percentile, you pick a discipline, and you sit through a couple weeks of info download. My cat could just as well have done Einstein, for God’s sake. Toughest part would’ve been getting the data download probes to fit on his furry little head.”

Some of the field reps are more inclined than others to sprinkle their dialog with religious aphorisms. Religion itself is a useful bit of chicanery someone thought up a few millennia ago as a means of keeping developing races on a more easily controlled path of development than might otherwise have been the case. It’s a particularly delicate assignment when Planning and Scheduling determines that it’s time to create a new religion and/or a new pseudo-deity. It’s not terribly popular with the interveners either, since many of these gigs involve a good bit of persecution, both physical and mental, and many of them end in a painful martyrdom of one sort of another. All of which explains why the guys who’ve built their field careers around work on Earth tend to throw around ‘God’ this and ‘Jesus’ that in their everyday conversation. Last I heard, Bernard Higgins, the fellow who did the original Jesus assignment, had retired from field work and parlayed his borderline legendary status as progenitor of Christianity into an executive role, something in Finance I think. I never met him, but word among the other field reps was that he was a bit of a whiner and a sycophant, traits that may come in handy upstairs. Interesting historical side note—the field rep who was Buddha also drew the Muhammad assignment some years later. Same guy.

“It’s not as mindless as you make it out to be, Grant. You’re not giving yourself—or your fellow field reps I might add—nearly enough credit.”

“Well it isn’t exactly brain surgery, my friend. Hell, I could take a quant jock from Finance or a damned research analyst down there, plug them in, and no one would be any the wiser. I’ll bet they’d do fine without even getting a data download first. Hell, to get out of grade school here you have to know more than anybody on earth will know for another thousand years.”

“True enough,” Hickok agreed, “but it’s not so much what you know as what you do with it.”

“Here’s a deal for you to think about. You get me a political assignment, and I will bet you dinner at the restaurant of your choice that I can take any entry-level Analyst you choose out with me, plug him into the role, and he’ll do no worse than the average full-time intervener.”

“Get the hell out of here. For starters, you’d never get it past Staffing. You take an Analyst out into the field and they’re only allowed to have a role that works directly for you. You’re responsible.”

“Fine. So we get to the job site, we swap places for a few years. What’s the worst that could happen? I take a functionary role working for him, so I can keep an eye on things.”

“My choice of restaurant and hapless Analyst? Sounds like money in the bank. But remember, if he starts a nuclear war, I had nothing to do with it.”

At which point, they, needless to say, have my full attention. The chance of a lifetime and all I need to do is be hapless? Steeling my nerve, I glance about the restaurant in one final moment of uncertainty. Checking that my distinctly blue Analyst badge is prominently displayed on my lapel, I rise from my seat, lift my glass of wine, and step toward Hickok and Grant’s table, where I feign a trip and deposit the wine unceremoniously into Grant’s lap. He leaps back, surprised and appalled, wiping feverishly at his shirt as Hickok grins.

“Aw shit, sir. I am SO sorry. Let me get that.” I snatch additional napkins from unoccupied tables.

“Just leave it….leave it,” he replies in disgust. Hickok notes my badge and I see a look of satisfaction come across his face.

“They overworking you in Research, son?” he asks.

“Yes, sir,” I stammer. “I’m pretty beat. I was … up most of last night finishing a report. I’m really sorry, sir.”

“Pull up a chair, Stephens. My colleague and I have an interesting idea we’d like to bounce off you.”

All of which is a long way of explaining how, three months later, I found myself on Earth, in the person of Richard Milhouse Nixon, thirty-seventh president of the United States, with my most trusted advisor, the man in whose lap I had poured an entire glass of cabernet, John Erlichman/Grant. It was an interesting and instructive few years, but when all was said and done I was happy to get back to the Research Department and Grant was even happier to return to Physics and Chemistry, despite having to buy an extremely expensive dinner for Hickok.

The ostensible purpose of shop class was to instruct adolescent boys in that most manly of life skills, the proper use of tools, both manual and powered. The degree to which the student already possessed any of these skills prior to reaching seventh grade was a function of what sort of father you had. If he was the handy sort, had a well-equipped basement or garage, and was a skilled enough negotiator to cajole your mother into allowing her twelve-year-old son to operate power tools, then you had an initial advantage over kids like me, whose closest encounter with tools prior to shop class was using a hammer to explode caps on a rock in the back yard. As things turned out, that admittedly limited experience did not serve me particularly well when the time finally arrived to cobble together my first birdhouse.

But while the purpose of shop class was, on paper at least, the safe and proper use of tools, it was, at its essence, far more than that. It was a young man’s introduction to that most fundamental of human endeavors, the creation of something from nothing, or if not nothing, then the rawest of raw materials. Thinking back on it now, it would have been a helpful and potentially inspiring introduction if the instructor had placed what we were about to undertake into its proper historical context. From the first troglodyte polishing a fragment of flint into an arrowhead to the nineteenth century industrial titans who forged steel into bridges and locomotives, the conversion of raw materials into useful objects is the very essence of what it means to be civilized. It would have been nice to hear something like that from Mister Whitaker before he started lecturing us about the differences between red oak and knotty pine.

One wonders, with the benefit of many years’ hindsight and reflection, what the job description for a shop teacher must read like. This was, after all, not like being a sports coach, in which case you were, at least at our school, obliged to teach one or more actual academic classes in addition to fulfilling your coaching duties[1]. Shop teachers were full-time shop teachers. It went, one presumed, without saying that the candidate required copious experience with the complete panoply of tools available in your standard wood and metal shops, the very best indication of said experience being the absence of one, or at most two, minor appendages. This was, though, I suspect, a bit of a balancing act. Given that an important element of any shop teacher’s repertoire was the ability to wax trenchantly and more or less constantly about safety, the ability to dramatically wave about one’s four-fingered hand served the dual purpose of impressing the safety message into the psyche of your charges while also engaging their attention in a manner uniquely consistent with the gruesome proclivities of that age and gender. On the other hand, as it were, too many missing digits might seem to suggest to the educational powers-that-be a level of practical incompetence inappropriate to the position being sought.

It was also critical to the success of any shop teacher that he have at his command a robust arsenal of grisly accident stories with which to reinforce the safety message. It didn’t particularly matter whether these stories were true or apocryphal, so long as they conveyed one or more important lessons about why, for example, it was a bad idea to interrupt someone who was working at a table saw, or the sorts of grim things that could happen to the boy who carelessly left his shirt tail or gold chain hanging out while working around a piece of rapidly-spinning, sharply-bladed machinery. In this sense at least, shop class was a close rival to Driver’s Ed for its potential gross-out factor, the latter being notable primarily for the day you got to watch that old fifties film with all the bloody car wrecks.

And finally, not to belabor the whole safety thing too much, the shop teacher needed to convey an excellent command of discipline and respect. After all, dealing effectively with two kids passing notes in the back of English Comp class is a rather different ballgame from managing a roomful of pubescent boys with power tools. All of which goes some way to explaining why the stereotypical shop teacher had the look of a retired Marine Corp drill sergeant and the demeanor to match.

As a quasi-academic pursuit, shop was altogether different from everything else you did in school. There were no exams, no studying, no homework. You were there to master hands-on skills and, in the end, to produce a physical object of practical utility, artistic merit, or, rarely but ideally, both. The ephemeral test scores and rote fact regurgitation that comprised the raison detre of trigonometry, social studies, and history bore no resemblance—physical or psychological—to the visceral satisfaction that attended the unveiling of your first birdhouse or cutting board. And while the parents who were dreaming of Harvard Law School for their progeny might have taken small satisfaction in this necessary adolescent ritual, there was no denying the gut-level feeling of raw accomplishment.[2]

For me it was a tumultuous experience. I grew up one of those geeky bespectacled kids who built plastic model airplanes, so the general concept of working with my hands and producing something physical and concrete was not a new thing. But the transition from tweezers and glue to circular saws and drill presses was nothing less than life altering. To this day, I can calm whatever stress the world throws my way through the simple expedient of sanding by hand a fine piece of maple or drilling holes with a well sharpened Forstner bit. My affinity for tools—particularly antique hand tools—is so ingrained in my psyche that if the day ever comes when pecuniary hardship obliges me to sell my tools to buy food, I will be a hungry fellow indeed.

It’s easy to imagine that the strong connection between men and their tools can be traced directly back to that first semester of junior high shop class. Or it may be that the class served only as a vehicle to draw forth from certain boys a latent attraction there since birth, something that’s hard-wired into the male DNA. If so, I hope that somewhere there are biologists striving to identify the gene that draws men to the tool section at Home Depot, for I have this gene in spades and would take pleasure in knowing its name.

Setting aside for a moment the purely physical gratification of building things, there was, as well, a strong metaphysical aspect to shop class that is often overlooked. Virtually every lesson, trick, or technique bestowed upon students by the instructor had a profound philosophical real-world analog that applied to everyone, whether or not you happened to be handy with router and joiner. Perhaps the greatest of these life lessons is “measure twice, cut once,” an aphorism bestowed with such power and breadth that, while it now borders on being hackneyed, it is, nevertheless, as applicable to the campaigns of Napoleon or the speeches of Lincoln as it is to the humblest birdhouse fabricator. Similarly, an action as seemingly banal as sanding a piece of wood along its grain (i.e., “going with the grain”) rather than orthogonal to it contains an ineluctable truth that requires little if any elucidation. The neophyte learns, as well, that hardwood, while more challenging to work with and less forgiving of error, produces, in the end, a vastly more long-lasting and satisfying product. Choosing pine is the easy way out. Selecting maple demonstrates fortitude and perspicacity, possibly even wisdom.

That said, I nevertheless chose white pine (in the spirit of walking before one runs) for my very first project, a humble nightstand. Nothing fancy—two sides, a top and bottom, and one shelf. I spent an entire semester lovingly cutting, shaving, sanding, assembling, and finishing a piece that today I could easily knock out in a couple of hours. But at that time it wasn’t about speed or efficiency or even the achievement of perfection in the finished product. It was about transformation—in my case, a small stack of plain knotty pine boards into a usable nightstand—a nightstand that endures to this day, by the way, while much of the historical minutia and mathematical formulae of those years has vanished from my life like the proverbial straw in a cyclone. It was the journey that mattered, a journey of discovery and learning. But what, really, can a twelve-year-old learn from building his first nightstand?

For starters, of course, you learn not to saw your fingers off or let your jewelry get caught in a fast-spinning lathe or drill press.[3] But, at a more enduring, if slightly less existential, level, you learn the real-world importance of angles—not in the abstract, formulaic, Euclidian sense, but in the tactile, this-object-cannot-perform-its-intended-function-unless-the-angles-are-correct sense. You learn that the faster you sand a piece of wood, the deeper the splinter slides under your fingernail[4], another life lesson having something vaguely to do with trade-offs. You learn why three-legged pieces of furniture cannot rock[5] whereas four-legged ones invariably do, regardless of how many times you shave off a tiny bit from one leg. And, perhaps most importantly, and notwithstanding a semester’s worth of fervent exhortations from your teacher, you learn that any project worth doing is worth bleeding on[6].

In some cases, you also learn a thing or two about achievement, and, potentially, disappointment. At our junior high, shop class was broken into two semesters, the first of which was wood shop, the second the somewhat incompletely named metal shop—incomplete in the sense that the available construction media comprised essentially anything you could come up with that wasn’t wood. Both classes—wood and metal—took place in the same large room, and, as it happened, there were a few large and somewhat daunting tools toward the rear of the room whose purpose was unclear to first semester students, but which, anyone brave enough to ask was informed, were for the metal shop students’ use. These included assorted bending presses and specialized jigs and saws. Also included in this collection of arcane devices, many of which looked as though they’d been lifted straight out of a Spanish Inquisition torture chamber, was a small crucible and high-temperature furnace with which the truly brave could endeavor to actually cast something. In objectively assessing my finished nightstand from the first-semester wood class, I had concluded, perhaps a bit too harshly, that I had not stretched myself as far as I might have, a decision I meant to compensate for in the second half of the class. Which is how I came to cast my own chess set out of aluminum.

It was a wonderfully complex and audacious undertaking, so much so that the instructor took rather a personal stake in helping me see it through to completion. It was, in effect, two separate projects, the first phase of which required that I design and fabricate a master of each piece from wood. The challenge was to come up with a design that not only conveyed the essence of  the piece being created (queen, rook, etc.) but which was also axially symmetrical, i.e., formed in such a way that I could slice it cleanly in two for the purpose of placing each identical half on either side of our primitive sand-casting mold system. Having created the six original master pieces, I then used each repeatedly to render all thirty-two of the final aluminum castings, an exercise that consumed not only the entire semester’s worth of class time, but more than a few late evenings as well. It was pure tedium aligning the master halves for each individual pouring, but great fun and more than a little daunting melting scrap aluminum fragments in the small crucible, tenuously manipulating the ponderous vessel with long tongs, and pouring the molten metal into small holes at the top of the mold, hoping all the while that the inside shape held up, i.e., the sand did not collapse, a frequent occurrence which, in the end, resulted in something like twice as many individual castings as the eventual number of usable pieces.

I mentioned disappointment earlier, but it wasn’t the work itself or the outcome of the endeavor, imperfect as it was, that engendered any such feelings. Each year, the Stanley Tool Company sponsored an award at our school for the best Industrial Arts project, one each for metal and wood shop. Somewhere along the line, as I inevitably compared my efforts to those of my companions in metal shop, I managed to convince myself that I was a viable contender for that year’s edition of the Stanley Golden Hammer award. When it was finally announced during an all-hands assembly at the close of the school year, I was awarded the runner-up certificate, losing to a dark horse candidate who had cobbled together a table lamp out of colored pieces of Plexiglas, an effort I felt to be of dubious artistic merit and one that certainly had required but a fraction of the effort that had gone into my chess set. Like any poor loser, I convinced myself that it was all politics and moved on with my life. I still have the chess set, though, and will occasionally take it out and admire the sheen of the metal and the heft of each piece whenever I feel like waxing nostalgic.

Shop class was easily the most memorable experience of my junior high school years[7]. I learned to understand and love tools that year. I learned that bad things—painful things—can happen if you’re not extremely careful with those tools, and that those bad things can happen very fast if you’re not particularly careful with power tools. I learned the rudiments of planning a project, determining what it will cost and how long it will take to complete. I learned how (and how not) to treat a piece of wood and I learned how to safely handle a crucible of molten metal without burning down my school or maiming myself. I learned to recognize when I had not aimed sufficiently high and how to accept defeat graciously[8] when I overreached. I learned that what you get out of something is more or less in proportion to what you put in. I learned that creating useful things from wood and metal can reveal excellent lessons for the challenges I would encounter later in life. And I learned that building something with your own two hands, while it almost certainly won’t make you wealthy, can go quite a long way to making you happy, especially if, once you’ve poured all of yourself into it and finally gotten it just right, you then give what you’ve made to someone you care for.

[2] Similar to that hard-to-describe feeling certain men get from mowing a lawn, a task which, for all its banality, leaves one with a genuine if ephemeral feeling of accomplishment.

[3] Kids occasionally learned these valuable life lessons the hard way, though I never witnessed it myself, much to my adolescent disappointment.

[4] On a related note, you learn, as well, that extracting that splinter is vastly more painful than getting it in there in the first place.

[5] Though they most certainly can lean.

[6] Related to this, you also learn quickly that blood is a powerful staining agent and is damned tough to sand off unprotected wood.

[7] With the possible exception of sitting three seats back from Denise Adelman in Earth Science class, but that’s an entirely different story.

[8] Or at least to convey graciousness even if I didn’t feel it.

It was sheer dumb luck
brought that tree limb down
directly on top
of the air conditioner,
and on the hottest damned day
of the hottest year
in living memory.
Cicadas have given up
their incessant kazoo playing.
Even the mosquitoes,
so tumultuous this time of year,
have packed it in.
But here stands Terry,
awash in sweat
from the effort of climbing
the ladder and cutting
the offending branch,
whose only crime had been
an occasional scritch scritch
on the upstairs bedroom window,
but whose sharp stout freshly cut end
sits now firmly lodged in the
compressor fan blade assembly,
the motor nonetheless
still attempting to turn,
said effort apparent
from the loud electrical buzz
that now replaces the normal
blast of hot air
drawn from within the house.
Terry, having already rendered up
the requisite vituperation
called for by the situation,
can think of little else to do
but walk into the house,
whose temperature and humidity
have already risen noticeably,
pick up the phone and call
Richard’s Heating and Cooling,
hoping against all realistic hope
that they aren’t already
so inundated with calls
that they won’t
be able to make it out
this very day,
which hope seems
indeed unlikely
given the oppressive heat.
Terry’s already low expectations
are promptly reinforced
by the phone recording indicating
a minimum wait of thirty minutes
before the call can
even be answered,
the final bit of this unnerving message
being rendered rather less
than intelligible due to
the sudden onset of noise
from the refrigerator
motor, a device marginal and persnickety
on a good day,
which, seemingly taking a cue
from the wounded and noisome
air conditioner outside,
has chosen this inauspicious moment
to itself finally give up the ghost
with one final gasp
and the pungent odor
of fried electrical wiring.

The slate waving
curtain of rain
that hangs beneath,
so faint,
so far,
is enough
to keep him
standing there,
waiting,
lest he miss it.

It’s not about
the corn anymore.
That’s history.
He just wants to
feel the rain.
Too taste it
on his tongue.
To remember
what it’s like
to have a chance.

Yeah, it’s
worth the wait,
even if it’s just a tear
or two,
before the cloud slides
away
forever,
off to some
other parched
and wishful place.