In 1982, I went to work with my friend Dave hauling trash, using a 1950s International truck, a classic old 1-ton, open-bed pickup. Somehow Dave became our estimator, despite being A. legally blind and B. pathologically reluctant to wear his glasses. This made for some interesting if unremunerative estimates, and we often wound up working entire days or more for forty dollars.
One revolting job we took on involved cleaning out an old garage, into which perhaps forty or fifty years of stuff had been jammed, willy-nilly, accumulating dust and black widow webs. No one could have estimated the number of black widows in that building. The dust was black with them.
That job offered one lagniappe – a kitchen knife with a 6 1/2 inch serrated blade and a tortoiseshell plastic handle perfectly molded to a right hander’s grip. The owner of the garage had thrown it out, having replaced it with something New, Improved and probably Worse.
Forty-five years later, I’m still using that knife. Its blade was made with steel of its day’s standard quality, meaning steel meant to last the owner’s lifetime and hold an edge through eternity. Its “cheap” plastic handle has not fallen off or disintegrated, having been fastened to the tang with rivets, not glue. It remains an excellent tool for its multiple purposes around the kitchen, and I’m sure it will outlive me.
My other knife is a pocket knife that came down to me from my father – in fact, it was his Boy Scout knife, so it must be more than a hundred years old, made in the US, though the main blade is German steel. Dad swore by the capacity of German steel to “take an edge,” and this blade still does so admirably.
I’ve managed to hang on to a fair number of Dad’s tools, all of which were made to outlast their owners, and I’ve hung on, as well, to his values regarding them. He grew up in small-town poverty in the early part of the 20th Century, and he never lost the habits of saving, preserving, and never wasting that his family’s poverty instilled. Tools were to be taken care of – cleaned and oiled after every use, put away in the same properly protected locations when not in use. Cared for, in short, like anything you hope will last at least as long as you do.
Those values came from a different world, the pre-assembly-line world in which, for most people, material objects were precious, hard to come by, as was the money to buy the ones you couldn’t make yourself. The world I was born into had already come a good way into the new Consumer economy in which mass production mandated easy credit, endless consumption and so endless disposal of products increasingly designed to be thrown away after a few uses. The advertising industry grew up to support these new ways of living, endlessly enforcing the beliefs that “new” meant “better,” “old” meant “obsolete” and “contemptible.” Neither I nor my sister ever bought into these notions, not because we were unusually independent or virtuous, but because neither of our parents accepted them. We grew up in houses full of carefully preserved furniture, housewares, tools, books, records, and we both absorbed the subversive value of respect for the past and its products and habits of frugality, without either parent making conscious efforts to inculcate them.
My mother had kept the books she’d grown up loving, and I read many of them – forgotten “literary” best-sellers from the teens and ’20s, writers like Anatole France and James Branch Cabell and A.S.M. Hutchinson and Christopher Morley, whose novels about book sellers and their bookshops fostered my lifelong love for book collecting. She’d also kept her collection of 78 r.p.m. records, mostly classical, and she funded my purchases of jazz and blues 78s at church and private rummage sales, and kicked in five dollars (!) to buy an old Victrola hand-cranked player to play them on, providing that slightly tinny, woody sound that somehow made all the scratches and pops and hisses bearable. I’ve carried many of those books and records along with me from place to place because, as Bob Brookmeyer said in the liner notes to the wonderful album Traditionalism Revisited, “Just because a song and spirit have been around awhile doesn’t mean they have diminished in value.” The writers and musicians of the first third of the century produced much that, for me, has never diminished in value.
They created, for the most part, in fixed forms, subjected their verses to fixed rhyme schemes, allowing themselves no cheating half-rhymes, no “freedoms.” Since my first preceptor as a poet was Robert Frost, who once described free verse as “like tennis without the net,” I admired and respected such lyricists as Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Leon Rene, Andy Razaf, Jimmie Rogers, Merle Haggard, and many others who found not restriction but inspiration in pitting themselves against strict formal requirements. They found their “artistic freedom” not in denying form but in creating new ways to negotiate within form, just as the toolmakers of my dad’s day took pride in making slight improvements in already established designs, in expanding the vocabulary of manufacturing techniques, in selecting raw materials likely to outlast their generation.
When I started writing song lyrics, I tried to work in those composers’ league, even though their kind of songwriting was by then considered quaint and obsolete, when it was considered at all. Luckily, I found a partner who was willing to work at trying to sell my songs, and he spent many fruitless years trying to penetrate the Dracula’s Castle of the music business. I took a few stabs at selling them myself, before my brief years as a bar musician soured me permanently on mixing music with money. I came to the same conclusion that the great reed man Sidney Bechet had reached long ago:
“If you start taking what’s pure in a man, and you start putting it on a bill of sale, somehow you can’t help destroying it. In a way, all that business makes it so a man don’t have anything left to give.” I went on writing songs and playing them for the sake of nothing but the music and the words, and I hope I was a good enough workman to produce a few songs that will outlast me, like that kitchen knife.
My Dad, like almost all men of his generation, wasn’t much of a hand at talking about how he felt. A good Midwesterner just didn’t do that. I learned a similar reticence from him, so I never told him how much I loved and admired him when he was still around to hear it. Not until he died was I able to tell him those things in a song. I like to think about how the vibrations of music can just travel on forever into the universe, so that maybe he’ll get to hear that song one day.
Has the Dusting Been Done Up in Heaven?
Has the dusting been done up in heaven?
If it hasn’t, there’s one thing I know good and well:
You’re clipping the wings of those damn lazy angels
And telling them all about going to hell;
Do they run a tight ship up in heaven?
Do they keep to their word and not waste a move?
Do they throw things away they might need someday?
If they do, I know you will surely make them improve.
And how is the chow where you are now?
Do they give you your steak and potatoes?
Are there locks on the doors, can you eat off the floors,
Do they let you grow Big Boy tomatoes?
I know you’ve found work up in heaven,
Oiling the tools and sharpening them well,
And you’ll cut a straight line through the rest of all time.
So why don’t you set down and rest for a spell?
Don’t have to turn out the lights
You can let them burn all night.
So why don’t you set down and rest for a spell?
