Watch the Craftsman's Tools

The guitarist and guitar teacher Robert Fripp is known for his precision and attentiveness, as well as for his aphorisms, some of which have a Yoda-like enigmatic quality.  "We move forward by coming from," for instance, or "Make better mistakes."  But here's one that has stuck with me for years.

How we hold our pick is how we organise our life.

Watch a good worker attend to her tools.  The cue is assembled and cleaned with attention, protected both during and after use.  The drafting triangles are kept in a Tupperware box during the subway ride, not dumped into a backpack with books and lunch and the iPad.  The knife blades are sharp, and stored with the edge away from the seam of the sheath.

Part of this would be considered common sense.  If we want our tools to work well, we treat them well.  We cannot count on a true edge if we do not keep the edge true.  But another meaning of this, the meaning that Fripp refers to, is that a craft does not begin and end with its nominal performance.  A craft includes its practice, preparation, maintenance, and clean-up.  If we can treat all of those aspects with the same care and focus as the performance itself, the quality of our work improves, and we become better people because of it.

This is one of these lessons I try to teach myself over and over.  (Everything important I've ever learned, I've learned a thousand times.)  And I watch others, to see if I can discern new ways of acting with respect toward the totality of my work.

Sometimes, though, you get negative examples that are equally beneficial.  I mentioned yesterday that the two movers we'd hired for Thursday had been truly awful.  A glass table top broken, two mattresses scuffed and soiled, a chaise lounge cracked, always waiting to be told what to do, and a LOT of impromptu breaks from work while we and our friends continued full speed.  The fact is, if I'd been paying attention, I'd have known from 9:00 a.m. how bad it was going to be.  Their pickup had a crushed rear quarter panel, a broken taillight lens, and the front bumper was half-detached and about ten degrees off level.

This truck is their work tool.  This is what they rely upon to make their living.  And they've run it into trees and garage edges and other vehicles (and on Thursday, drove it over the side of the chaise lounge).  Their horrific performance could have been predicted by their horrific preparation and maintenance. 

So learn from our mistakes.  When you hire someone to do work that needs to be done well, when careful effort is required, have a look at their tools, and be willing to say "no, thanks" when you see a poorly maintained kit.

That Was The Week That Was

Monday:  Herb delivered a plenary talk at The College of New Jersey, and drove back to Middletown Springs.  We shared prosecco and year-old wedding cake at 11:30 p.m. on our first anniversary.

Tuesday:  We had breakfast at Panera, went to the wrong credit union branch, but ultimately closed on the purchase of our house at 11:00 a.m.  We celebrated by buying food for friends who would soon help us move, and buying a dozen kitchen towels.  Herb has a particular fetish for kitchen towels.

Wednesday:  We took three or four carloads of boxes and Tupperware cartons up to the new house while the departing owners were on their own moving mission into Rutland.  We made quite a lot of progress, with noticeable diminution of the garage boxes.

Thursday:  The big move.  The BIG move.  Emmett, Kerstin, Lois, Fred, Ursula, Linda, Marilyn, Nelson, and two worse-than-useless paid movers.  We actually paid them off and sent them away at 3:00 to keep them from breaking or tearing or driving over anything else.  If you're in the Rutland area, please feel free to call us to get a true cautionary tale before you make a similar mistake.  But we got nearly everything up the hill, most of it into the house, and... we slept in our own bed, in our own home.

Friday:  The finishing up day.  Amanda, Ellen, Dan, Howard, Judy, and the beginning of the long process of placing things rather than just having them at the correct address.  The new garage is filling like the old one did, but this time with empty cardboard boxes rather than full ones.  The cats have already found preferred resting spots.  And Nora is in the car on her way to New York, probably arriving there around midnight.

Quite a week.  Saturday will see the final cleaning of our former South Street house, and unknown news from Nora; and on Sunday, July First and the beginning of the second half of the year.  A momentous time on all counts.  Thanks for all of your love and support.

Witnesses

Usually H and I post  on different days, but today is not a usual day. Tonight, the man I married will arrive home. I expect to greet him with champagne. I expected to pull a few of the last bottles from the supply left from the wedding, but alas those are buried beneath boxes of paraphernalia in the garage. At least they will be on the top when everything above them is released to its new home. In the meantime, it seems reason enough to drive into the "big" town of Rutland to get a few more bottles to celebrate our anniversary, tomorrow's closing on the house, and the move at the end of the week.

I will pick up a few more packing boxes while there. I need some odd shapes like boxes for lamps and the parts of the loom. I will wait to pack the plants from the garden into old cat litter buckets, and will do that with help from Lois, Winsome and Judy who are my master gardener friends. They dug and planted here before the wedding.  Hopefully they will also help guide me in learning to know the perennials that Karen has planted.

I was moving the (heavy!) guts of my grandmother's Atwater Kent console model radio yesterday when my friend Coreen came by to invite me to join her at Strawberry Festival on the green in town.  Most of the town was there and I thanked dozens of people for their well-wishes on the house. Many of them know how long I have been looking, and all of them know how wonderful the house we are buying is. I expect some people will come to hep us move, just to see the inside of the house!  Actually, Bobby volunteered the use of his truck, though he will have to be at work on Thursday. "Just take it if you need it," he said.  And Dan and Ellen volunteered to help as well; he is a talented builder of post and beam houses with two new knees to offer up for the cause. And Barby Carr who paints the signs around here and has done some beautiful etchings of the progenitor of the Morgan horse, "Justin Morgan"  may help. And Kimberly our librarian and one of my first friends here. And Patty will come by after work at her bookstore. And Ursula and Linda. And Lois. And Fred. And Emmett. And maybe Patrick and Joey T. And Nan and Judy and Howard will come the next day. And Grazyna and Howard are coming up from NY on the first of July. And I expect I am leaving some people out.  But that's what this town is like. I think back to Herb's move in MA, with only paid movers and me to help. And I realize again, why this town matters so much to us.

I bumped into Karen G at the Strawberry Festival and asked her about raising guinea hens. She will be my guide. And if we get goats instead of a lawnmower, she will help with that too. And Marilyn's son-in-law may help with transporting the remaining fire wood. And Marilyn will be here if she can.

So that's part of the coming week.  I won't discuss the insanity of financing a house purchase and the need to do EVERYTHING at the last minute....We are closing tomorrow, and are just getting the needed dox for review at 2 p.m. today.

But all that is about tomorrow, and today is today. The weather has changed to thundershowers.  I understand (from our lawyer!) that it is raining torrentially (is that an adverb?) in Rutland where I was going for champagne and boxes.  Maybe I will wait. But the rain feels like a good omen to me; the sound of rain on the metal parts of the roof....those are Herb's sounds. And he is in the car on his way "home". I will defrost the remainders of wedding cake. And I will think about a year that came and went in the blink of an eye. There were an enormous number of crises and challenges, but  we have much to celebrate: Mom is here to see the year's anniversary AND the home-coming. We are celebrating the 4th anniversary of Simon's arrival in our lives and of Ed's acquisition of a ferocious and loving little brother. And we are celebrating a year "in-community". When we married, we asked everyone to sign a "witness document" that included a quote from Susan Sarandon.

“We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness'.”

H and I thank you for every note played, letter written, hug (or as mom would say "embrace"), every offer of a truck, prosthetic knee, mini-van, shasta daisy, lesson on chicken coops, and your witness to a beloved year.

Anniversary Road Trip!!

We're planning a road trip for our anniversary today.  But only one of us will be on it.

I've spent the last two years helping to plan the national conference of my main professional organization.  I was on the planning committees for the 2008 and 2010 conferences.  At the end of the 2010 meeting, standing at a lunch barbecue at Weber State University in Utah, the then-president of the organization asked me if I would co-chair the 2012 planning committee.

So I signed up to help run this conference, and THEN proposed to Nora, and THEN we set the date for the wedding.  And you know, when you're having a nice romantic conversation about the day you'll be wed, and about all your friends who'll be there, thoughts of your national conference are not in the forefront of your considerations.

But here it is, June 25th, and rather than be with Nora in Middletown Springs, I'm in a college dorm room in Ewing Township, New Jersey at 6:06 AM.  I'm giving one of the main conference talks this afternoon, and then getting into the car and driving north 278 miles to home so that we can have a little bit of our anniversary late tonight.

I think there's still some wedding cake in the freezer.

The metaphor is obvious, though.  During this past year, we've both been pulled in every direction — living in multiple states, working on behalf of multiple organizations, dealing with family health and friends' health and our own whooping cough, dealing with lawyers and mortgage brokers and surveyors and building inspectors.  And although the stress and anxiousness has swirled around us, we both know that we have a strong center.

It's been a wild year, and a terrific year.  And you've been part of it, too.  Whether you live in Middletown, Milwaukee, Manhattan or Medford; whether you live in Malaysia, Malta, Macedonia, Mexico,  Moldova, or Morocco; you have helped to carry us throughout this first year and into the second.  Stick with us; there's a lot more to come.

Holding the now

It is late, and I am in a funk. There's no good reason for it, except that my days have been broken up  with phone calls and boxes and coughing that lingers from the whooping cough episode. And of course, as H wrote, there are all these countdowns. Five days til our anniversary. Six days til our closing. Eight days til we move. And as I keep counting down, I am losing touch with what is. Now.

I have lived my life imagining that someday I would have a home. And yes, a husband. Some time or other, I decided that neither would happen. I have written about that before. And then H arrived in my life. And 359 days ago, he read some loving words to me in front of a group of gregarious friends, and Nelson said some important words, and we escaped a rain storm, and now, almost a year later, we are married.

We are married.
 
We have been looking to the anniversary, and looking to the move, and I think we -- maybe I -- have lost track of the now. The days have been filled with the "to do" list. And here's what that "to do" list looks like (thanks Emmett!)....

It is a record of my professional life, measured in papers I will never unpack. It is a record of meals made with friends, measured in an extra large soup pot and stainless steel bowls. It is a record of decades of turning fleece and fiber into fabric, and a decade of turning seeds into food, and a lifetime of turning stories into home.

But right now, Herb is sleeping (I hope), in the bedroom in MA by the fan. And I am sitting under the desk lamp in a room in VT that is nearly empty. The fan is on here as well.  It is supposed to be 20 degrees hotter tonight than it was during the day. I took two dressers from the bedroom and put them in the garage today. The only things left are the bed, a clothes tree that my mother rather dramatically calls a "costumer", a table and another small dresser at the top of the stairs. I also moved the bookcase to the garage, with the last of the three ring binders that hold my professional writing.  The office from which I write still holds some file cabinets, one more folding bookcase and a butcher block table, and the cardboard boxes that the cats like to sleep in.  But as the house is stripped of the books and papers, the dressers with clothes, the art, the rugs, the sounds I make seem to echo.

The day that Herb and I agreed with the sellers on a price, we spent several hours over lunch writing down what we wouldn't miss when we left here, and what we look forward to. Herb looks forward to being able to stand up straight when he gets out of bed without  hitting his head on the ceiling. I look forward to a towel rack in the bathroom rather than the plastic coated wire thing that hangs on the back of the bathroom door. We both look forward to drinking water from the tap, instead of hefting water bottles filled at a friend's spring-fed tap,to avoid the sulfur-infused water that characterizes the houses in this part of town.

But we didn't spend any time talking about what we will miss. And as I sit in the empty house, I realize that there are things that I need to record; things about the now that matter. Things about the now that will eventually be history. Our friend Emmet sent us a photo he took yesterday of our cat, Ed, at the slider door. This is a place that has brought our cats safety and joy. They have spent hours watching chipmunk ping pong; they have tasted grass and rolled in the gravel driveway, and contemplated (and once accomplished) escape to the neighbor's porch.

For something short of a decade, we have been a few yards from the post office and could see who was working and who was checking their mail, by walking to the front door. Sometimes, those who have been across the street at the post office, have stopped in to say hello. 

As one of our friends would say, we have had quiet neighbors, sited as we are, next door to the old cemetery.

The garden has been bountiful - tomatoes and basil for pesto, potatoes, corn, beans and peas, Mexican sunflowers and herbs, and a host of perennials gifted by our friends before the wedding. I will miss sitting in the midst of the corn stalks where no one knew I was there.

I will miss the robin's nest that has been rebuilt in the window of Mom's room for the second time. I have gotten to know these three babies quite well - from egg to near-fledging. I hope to see them go before we move.

I will miss the late night quiets, and the sound of the church bells on Sunday, and the black caps along the school road. I will miss the woodstove; mom wants me to leave a note for the next tenant to tell them how wonderful it is. I will miss the raspberries and the asparagus and the crocuses planted by someone before. H has said, that this house taught him once again, to hear the sound of rain on a metal roof.

My mother is struggling with the effects of her cancer. She is understandably seeking the life lessons that come with this. When we sit together, usually late at night, talking in the ways that mothers and daughters are supposed to at a time like this, I tell her to focus on the now. When she struggles with the physical immobility and the difficulties clearing her head, I tell her to focus on the people who surround her, who move heaven and earth to be with her, to make a meal, to watch tv or a movie, just to read while she sleeps. "Focus on the fact that you are at home. Look out the window at the sunrise and the sunset. Think about the fact that others are alone. Focus on the fact that you are surrounded by people who love you."  Easier said than done.

Before the wedding, H made a sign and hung it at the slider door. The sign read: "Nora's Happy Place."  And so it has been. It has not been an easy place; but today, five days from our anniversary, six days from being the owners of a historic house in a town we love, eight days from knowing what it is to stand up straight out of bed, and to take a towel from the rack, this is our now. And I am grateful--for this house and the man I married.

Countdowns

About this time last year, we were on the countdown clock.

Twelve days to go!  Have we got all the food and the prosecco?  Who else needs a reminder to RSVP?  We have to revise the seating plan at the reception again!  Someone else needs a local room — what's the status of the B&Bs?  Is it too soon for Glen to mow the lawn?  Is it too late to start the garden over again from scratch?

It's good to remember how hectic those countdown days were, and to remember that everything turned out better than we'd even imagined possible.  We're on countdown days again.

The mortgage broker needs our 2011 tax form again!  The surveyor hasn't filed the drawings yet!  Can you call the insurance agent back and change those coverage limits?  Do we have the wire transfer instructions?  Don't put that painting into that box, put it in this box over here!  Take another trip to the dump with all that paper!  Boxes for the office get green stickers!  Does Vicky have any more cartons at the store?

We did the countdown once before, and we can do it again.  Although it's a little tense, we're ahead of the game in a lot of ways; we've got some cushion time if anything goes awry. [Editor's note: And it will.]

One difference this year, though, is that there are multiple simultaneous countdowns.

I'm managing a national conference with about 600 attendees; I've been on the planning committee twice before, so a lot of it is familiar, but this time I'm a co-chair, and the organization hasn't had an executive director on staff for half a year, so I've been much closer to the decision stream this time around.

What are we going to call this new award?  Someone just found out they can't present on Tuesday; can we swap her talk with someone else?  It's two days past due for this guy's PowerPoint; I have to call him again and see if I can get him on track!  Can I reschedule my meeting in order to make this new conference call?

The conference is at The College of New Jersey (yes, a capitalized T, like The Ohio State University), in Trenton.  The Board meeting is Wednesday mid-day through Thursday night; the Business Meeting is Friday morning through Saturday noon; the conference proper is Saturday evening through Tuesday noon.

I also have some countdowns at work.  Since I'll be gone for three weeks between the conference and the move, I have a couple of significant projects that need to be finished before I leave.

No, I need that student-loan data today, not next week!  Which parts of the report have you got so far?  Which lookup table has the faculty data in it?  What do you mean I have to re-write your grant proposal that goes out tomorrow?  I didn't even know you were working on a grant proposal!  If it's my job to help you write a good proposal, I need more than four hours to know that the thing exists!  Yes, I can revise your curricula on the master list for you; would you like a shoeshine to go with it, while I'm in the office anyway?  No, that section got revised, it's 2.10 now and not 2.9!

Breathe deeply.  Equanimity and poise.  Find your inner basement, Woodchuck.

Last year, we had one countdown, and it was momentous.  This year, more — two of which I merely hope come out well, and others which will change our lives.

[Editor's note:  Makes the latter half of 2012 seem like it's going to be a walk in the park.... Something tells me, we'll find something to do with our time.]

Hard to imagine...

Fourteen days to go...'til our first anniversary....Hard to imagine.

Fifteen days 'til we close on the house we have dreamed of. Hard to imagine.

Seventeen days 'til we begin the move. It will probably take two days to get everything moved from one garage to another garage, another day to clean up the house on South St., and many days 'til everything is ensconced in its appointed place.  Finding the appointed places may be the biggest challenge of all. Blending our households in physical space will be far different than blending our lives, and we have had the "luxury" of keeping two places that remained more or less distinct...That will be changing, albeit not all at once. Hard to imagine  that too.


I walked the boundaries of the southern section of the land today with the surveyor. Nice guy down from Bristol, Vermont. We will soon own the land abutting two official, and one unofficial, rights of way.

I know the least about the one on the same side of the street as "our" house. That right of way gives road access  to two houses on the northern corner of "our" land.  One is a hunting cabin and the other is a house owned by a couple that used to teach in Romania during the winter. They are now here full time, but I don't know them well. I once talked with them about renting their house, but I didn't want to have to move out in the summer. For the foreseeable future, I won't have to rent anyone else's house again. Hard to imagine.

The right of way on the southeast is mostly on our neighbors', the Blooms, land, but the corner where it reaches the road is ours. In the 19th century, it allowed the two Gray brothers who owned abutting property, to reach each others' fields. I know that, because Donald, our surveyor, was doing research in the town records, where Laura, the town clerk, opened up the office just for him. That's the kind of town we live in. Can you imagine that in a city? On the day when the employees have off, they open the office just because someone needs to review the records? Hard to imagine.

There are remnant sections of stone walls, and one very long one that still marks those lines. I may walk the long stone wall some day soon, crossing from our land to the neighbors', and I will walk back through the "Vail Meadow" that has been farmed for 200 years, though it is now also owned by the Blooms who live away.

When I pass through the line of brush that separates the Vail Farm from another meadow (also owned by the Blooms),  I will be on the unofficial right of way that connects the two meadows across a line of brush that used to mark the border between the two separate parcels. But that unofficial right of way departs from the remnant stone wall, and the Blooms may be surprised to know that we actually own that section of the meadow that they are having hayed. No worries. We don't expect to  reclaim it, though it might be nice to set a bench at the corner to access a particularly pretty view. And there is a large maple tree that could be tapped next Spring, though carrying the sap buckets up hill would qualify as extreme aerobics. Donald, the surveyor, suggested that we might plant berry bushes where there is now some scrub along that remnant stone wall. Good idea.

There is something important about the idea that we have land that includes "rights-of-way".  It is an odd notion in an era of ownership and property lines and gated communities. It says something about honoring shared needs for access. It says something about believing that your neighbor will use the right of way respectfully. It says something about believing that even though the properties will change hands over the years to come, you believe that the new owners will also behave respectfully.

Donald, the surveyor was in the town office doing his research for us, when a family came in to do some research on another right of way. There are many parcels in this town that can only be accessed through the willingness of one landowner to allow another one to reach the road across her land.

 Sounds like a marker of community to me.

When Herb and I married 339 days ago, on the hillside above the town, Emmett cleaned up the sides of the road that cut through a neighbor's land, improving it  for us and for the use of our friends. There were people who had lived their whole lives in this town, who had never seen that view, but thanks to him, they could see the beauty of this place we live, in a whole new way....a kind of community.

The dairy farmer whose son was manuring that unofficial right of way and the Vail Meadow, and our strip of land later that day, tilled and fertilized the garden here as a wedding present last year, and Nan and Lois and Judy brought flowering plants, perennials, as a gift, but also as a way of helping our friends to see this land in a different way. Those perennials, the johnny-jump-ups, rudbeckia, flags and pulmonaria will be shaping the way people see this place for many years to come, whether they rent, as I have, or own the place they grow. A kind of community.

I am the ostensible President of a long-quiescent organization called the Taconic Trails Club.  Founded by a group of local friends, its mandate is to provide public access to private land for hiking, cross-country skiing and bird watching. The press of other responsibilities and the departure of most of the Board members has left the organization in limbo. Perhaps it is time, now that the President has three rights-of-way on her soon-to-be land, to see if there is any interest in resurrection.  Hard to imagine, but perhaps.