Day 16: Carving Out a Future.

I woke up this morning at 3:30 and couldn't go back to sleep until 5. Then I got up for real at 7. I let the boys in and gave them food and had a nice breakfast of grapes, a banana, and an apple. Then I let George in for good before I left. Bodhi stays or not.

Val tells me the boys are fine at home. They both enjoy sitting on the sill. Every time I call and Val puts me on speaker phone or we Skype Andre hears my voice and comes over to say hello. He's a good boy.

We were both a bit quiet at breakfast, but once we got warmed up we talked about--you guessed it--love and life and time and its convolution and authors and poems. You know, breakfast talk.

Dwain told me to look up In Flanders Field by John McCrae, a Canadian physician and Colonel in their army.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow

      Between the crosses, row on row,

   That mark our place; and in the sky

   The larks, still bravely singing, fly

Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago

We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

   Loved and were loved, and now we lie

         In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

   The torch; be yours to hold it high.

   If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

         In Flanders fields.

The legend says that he wrote it and threw it away, and that some others retrieved it. Maybe he discarded it because of its romanticism towards war. McCrae was promoted and named Consulting Physician to the British Armies in France. By 1918 he was said to have been worn down by the war and died of meningitis while in France. 

He wrote this to his mom: "For seventeen days and seventeen nights none of us have had our clothes off, nor our boots even, except occasionally. In all that time while I was awake, gunfire and rifle fire never ceased for sixty seconds.... And behind it all was the constant background of the sights of the dead, the wounded, the maimed, and a terrible anxiety lest the line should give way."

I doubt they used these lines on any propaganda posters to get people to support war!

War sucks.

And then we went to work.

I did a two more book matched ends, and I prepared two more sets for Dwain to do tonight because he is going to be working late. He didn't like a couple of things on the Grand that he just varnished, so he took the varnish off of the top and is redoing that. The work that goes into these is amazing and inspiring.

Then I got to go into the secret room below! I'd seen the handle and mentioned it once, but Dwain was not forthcoming about the secrets that lived below. And the monster turned out to be a drum sander that Walt and his son built from a kit. Walt stopped building in the early 90s, so that tells you about how old it is. But it works like a charm.

There have been times where Dwain would use a tool and say that this is from Walt. We are only in week 3, and I don't want to rush through my life or push Dwain through his, but my little heart went a twitter thinking that someday I'll be doing the same thing.

Today I asked Dwain how he numbered each instrument. Aside here: he marks each piece of the instrument with its number. So Dwain told me that he started with 1001 because Walt stopped at 1000. That led us to talk about my system, and what was decided is that I will start with 1. And then when Dwain is done building I'll switch to whatever he stops at plus 1 because I'll keep the tradition going. A twitter my heart went again!

So I had to feed my stack of redwood through the beast. There is a process. I had to sand the least flat side of the wood through three times, and then I had to turn it over and sand the other side until the boards were at 1.00, or 1/100 of an inch. I had no more than a .10 variance on each board! WooHoo! So they are ready to be planed down further.

Once I finished that we had our watermelon break without any watermelon, though. Instead we had mango with cottage cheese and wheat crackers. I love all three of these things! And Dwain makes a great iced tea, where he cooks up the water and puts it in a pot with some tea to steep. Then he pours it all over a glass filled with ice and sprinkled with sugar. I don't have a picture of any of that because I was too excited!

Then I went back to work making enough scrapers to fin in my newly constructed scraper holder. I was having trouble shaping the flexible one, and Dwain spent some time helping me with that. I get the concept, but the practice was a bit tougher.

Okay, so it is always safe to take a picture with one hand while grinding metal on a grinding stone. Really. It's so safe.

Dwain has three orders at various stages of done. The Grand should be ready to finish putting together tomorrow, and he is just starting to carve the scroll head for another machine. This is really interesting and exciting for me because I've never done anything like this. Ever. I don't think I get to on my first machine, either, but I'll get to sooner rather than later!

Day 15: Researching Away.

I am an artist.

For so many years I flailed around grabbing and using so many media that I never found my place. This is really funny because when I was in grad school I told one of my professors that I wanted to make folk art. But at the time I was so mad because of from where I came that I couldn't be true to myself. My work became esoteric, an abstraction of my truth. My thesis, "A simple treatise on the origins of Cracker Kung fu," should have been a clear indicator to me about where my roots lie. Silly me to have taken all of the time between then and now to realize that I was where I was supposed to be and doing the folkish art that I was. Well I get it now, thank you Universe.

So I'll be making folk art that can be played with. There will be all sorts of objects, like wooden puzzles or simple machines. And I can see myself building more complicated machines. And, of course, I'll be making dulcimers. I don't know if I'll ever not make objects other than dulcimers because I do like the other stuff. But I can see that there would be a time where I mainly focus on music machines.


So today--everyday for the last three years, really--I did some research. I'm still reading about the history of the dulcimer--which is pretty obscure considering it is one of the few instruments born in the USA. Its history can be reasonably tracked from European instruments and the travels of those people who brought them here. But considering the short amount of time our nation has been here it is amazing to me that the evidence of the mountain dulcimer's birth is long-buried in the Appalachian Mountains. Here is rundown of what I'm saying from Mel Bay.
But the research I'm doing today is on those who are building dulcimers. In a way, these persons are my competition--or will be. But that is not really what I'm doing. I'm looking at aesthetics. Not that I'm looking to copy a style of machine; I'm wedded and committed to the Sunhearth/Bear Meadow tradition. And these instruments are just pretty.

Bear Meadow instrument with Pegheds.

So I want to see how others are stretching the boundaries of the traditional dulcimer. Since the dulcimer is a folk instrument it only makes sense that "traditional dulcimer" has shifted over the years. And while I'm not looking to reproduce a Thomas of ole, I do want to embrace an older aesthetic. For example, my machines will not have any tuners other than traditional wood pegs or Pegheds. And mine will always be horizontal when the machine is laying on its back. I've come to this because of all of the research I'm doing while not in the shop working.

Of course I had to do something physical today. I do everyday. I don't know if I've always been this way, having to do something physical, but it seems to me I have. And the army certainly helped with this, as I had to do physical training (PT) everyday.

I remember when I got to my first and only permanent duty station, Ft. Lewis, WA. I was assigned to the processing company until I reached the 542nd Maintenance Company. We ran every day in the processing company, but they were just short jaunts. Once I reached the 542nd, though, the runs became long and more than I wanted.

As a welcome to the company my squad got me really drunk the first night. And on the second morning we were running in formation--for a long time--and I said fuck it, and I dropped out. I hid behind these bushes so that the rest of my company wouldn't see me (I was in the middle of the formation when we were running). I learned a couple of days later that I hid behind the bushes at the post commander's house. Oops.

But don't get me started with my fuck-ups from my service with the 5th Combat Engineers in Iraq. Oh boy.

Okay, get me started. So I was with the 5th in Iraq, and I went back to the 542nd after my deployment. I was done with the army by then, and I was waiting to get out--even though I had about a year left. We had a dress greens inspection, which means that you are supposed to be spit-and-polished ready. But I knew that it was a butter-bar lieutenant, the lowest ranking officer in the army, that was inspecting us. So I was disheveled, frumpy you might say. So this butter-bar gets to me and I see that he has only a service ribbon, which means he is brand new. And he sees that I have three rows of ribbons, including a SW Asia Campaign Ribbon with two Bronze Stars--which doesn't mean much to me, I assure you. So he sees where I've been and what I've done by my ribbons, and he sees how messed up my uniform is. And I see that he sees. But he's got to play the officer, and he starts to ask me questions, military questions that I should know. But for each question I answer with Sir, I don't know the answer to that question, Sir. Finally he gets fed up and says that I should fall the fuck out and find some answers. And I left the formation. The army was as done with me as I was with it.

Anyway, I think that I've always been physical. I remember running through the woods as a child, mostly naked and all of the way ferrel. I have no idea how I made it through childhood without losing a limb!

The bundles waiting for the trash man.

Gretchen has a lot of foliage in her yard, and some of it needs to go away. So today I bundled up a bunch of it--it has to be bundled in order for the trash man to take it. I got six stacks of stuff to go. There is more, but that will be for another day.

I had a great dinner after that. Barbecued chicken, cole slaw, macaroni and cheese, and a pickle with some peppers. It was delicious, and I ate too much.

Then I sat out on the porch as it rained and did more research. I'm having a lot of fun learning what is possible, and I'm enjoying my time researching on the porch.

Day 14: Cracker with a Rope.

Today was a great day. I started off with tea for breakfast. I intended on running, so I didn't want to have anything in my stomach. I also planned on going to the farmers market later on. But Gretchen told me that it would be better to go to the market before I run because it starts to end early in the afternoon. So I took her advice, and I walked to the market. It is just over a mile from here, so it was no big deal.

You should have seen me with my Vera Bradley bag strolling along. A group of three persons, two thirty-something girls and a teenage boy, walked past me, and one of the girls said aren't you cute with your bag and your beard. I think she knew I am a dandy and appreciated the compliment.

The market is a really nice one. It is a bit o' flea market and farmers market. There is definitely more farmer than flea, though.

There were lots of fruits and vegetables, which is good because I needed some fruits. So I bought apples, bananas, and grapes. And then there was this guy selling pickles--hot pickles. So you know I got some of those. There was a variety of flavors, and I said give me the spicy ones. He asked how hot do you want it. I said I like it hot but don't want to burn my beard off. Some woman behind me laughed, and he gave me pickles at just the right hot.

I walked through the entire market, and I'm glad because there was so much to see. There was every kind of fruit and vegetable imaginable. Plus there were things like chicken eggs and whole chickens. The guy promised in a loud voice that they were organic. And they probably were because he raised them in his yard.

I came upon a police officer on a horse. They were both pretty friendly. The horse was smallish and white, and the cop was bald and pudgy. This is not how I experienced a police horse before.

In 2005 I was in Washington D.C. I went there alone. I was going to go see Jackass George to tell him how poorly he was doing as president because he was wasting so many lives and so much money on an unnecessary war in Iraq. Hell, I'd served there. I had some knowledge to drop on him.


So I get to D.C. and there are a bunch of other persons who felt as I did. There was this group called , and I fell in with them. So a group of war vets, myself included, marched to the White House and demanded to see the idiot. Of course he didn't want sane and experienced advice; he just wanted war. So we sat down in front of the White House gate and impeded any traffic, and they called down the S.W.A.T. on us. There was also a company of police on horses that joined the S.W.A.T. The leader of the S.W.A.T. team was a lieutenant (LT), and he came over to us to ask our intentions. By this time though, they had ridden down on us with the horses. There were huge and brown, menacing beasts. But we wouldn't budge. I was so scared that I'd be trampled, but I refused to move--we all did.
Veterans for Peace

So the LT asks if we were going to get violent, and we assured him we were not. I don't blame him because we were a group of war vets, and most of them are nuts in some way. He told us he'd have to arrest us, and asked that we go quietly. We said that arresting us was the only way to get us to leave, but we assured him we would not resist. So to jail we went.

I've been outspoken against war since then. And even though I stopped getting arrested after three times, I'm not afraid to speak the truth--that war solves nothing. And these ill-begotten wars that we keep entering into only serve to drag our country down. I am more of a patriot by speaking out against war than flag waving idiots who blindly support it. I cannot, for the life of me, believe that the same idiot politicians who were so wrong about Iraq before are speaking out for military intervention again. Do they know how tyrannical the current Iraqi regime is? Do they know how much the Iraqi people are currently suffering under these tyrants? Go die Dick Cheney.

But I'm not as angry as I was. Really. But fuck those politicians for the death of my friends and the destruction that we caused in Iraq for them. "Mission Accomplished!" that idiot said. Why don't you go paint something meaningful, like a house in Iraq. Really, I'm not as angry.

So I walked through the entire market, and the people watching was so much fun. There was a teenage with her ukelele making a basket full of money. And there was a guy rocking out with his guitar and amp--and there were people dancing to his tunes. There was every kind of person there. I fell in behind this girl, and she was just a little hot with her tattoo and her swagger.

So I decided to get out of there before someone saw me watching someone else.

I walked my bounty home, and I had some grapes and a banana because I hadn't eaten anything for the day. And I hydrated for my run.

I plotted out a four mile course, and it was pretty easy to stick to. It was just after 1pm, and it was hot and sunny. Although the heat is not as intense as it is in FL, it is still really hot. I ran my run, up and down the hills, and I finished in about 40 minutes. But I don't have my watch, so it is just an estimation. But I know how I run.

Day 13: Always at War and Always at Peace.

This morning was absolutely beautiful. The weather was nice and the ride to Dwain's was peaceful. I did come to the conclusion that my legs will be so strong when I leave here!

We had a nice breakfast of cereal and stuff--just like yesterday. We were both in good moods, but both a bit tired. It is Friday. So our talk was of inanities.

And then Dwain cracked the whip.

I did a couple of more black walnut book matched boards today. Yesterdays came out fine. We worked pretty late today, so I got to break apart the rig. Both boards had good seams, but one of the boards was "V" shaped, just slightly. I could not figure out how I did that, so I called Dwain to look. He was stumped too! I've decided it was magic.

Then it was back on my scrapers. Why make scrapers? you ask. Why are you not building dulcimers? you ask. Remember, I'm learning the art of making dulcimers, and that requires knowing how to make specialized tools. Making a dulcimer is easy. Making a dulcimer that is of superb beauty, projection, voice and action is trickier. And to make it all of that and pretty, well that is just work.

So I spent the day making the scrapers.

We had a watermelon break, and Dwain bought me some garlic! I have been sitting outside on the porch for two hours and the mosquitoes are flying around me. But the clove of garlic I ate is keeping them away! The trick to repelling mosquitoes is to meditate and visualize that your skin is tree bark--I think of oak. And eat a clove of garlic a day.

Then I wanted to make a house for my scrapers because it seemed silly for me to spend three days making tools and then just throw them around in a box. It takes a lot to get a scraping edge on the steel. So Dwain gave me a mints box, and I figured out a jig to get the little boards straight. Then I glued the little boards on a piece of card stock. I weighted the whole thing for about a half an hour, and va-voom! My scrapers have a house.

This was a nice lesson, and it really helped reacquaint me with shop stuff. I've used many of the tools in the shop, like the table saw. But the last time that I used one was in graduate school. So this is definitely good.

Then we had dinner, which was great because I was fading, and fast. We had veggie burgers and asparagus. I had a double-stacked burger with buffalo wing cheddar cheese on it. Jeez Laweez it was good!

And then we went out for ice cream. It is a great shop right on the Erie Canal. The weather was great and we got to talk more about love and life. It is fun to share with Dwain and hear what he as to say about many things.

He has started another instrument, and it has been really cool watching him go from the wood that we cut to the beginnings of a machine. And while he is doing this he is also finishing up the Grand that he has been working on. It looks gorgeous!

And the sunset was as beautiful as the start of the day. Today was long and I'm tired. But I am also so fulfilled. I'm learning much, and practicing what I'm being taught. I'm almost at peace.

I am always at war with myself, and I am also always at peace. The balance has shifted more to the peace. Or, I should really say harmony. I don't really know what peace is. Or I'm not ready for it. But I'm in a harmonious place with me--finally.

Just being with Dwain and talking about love and life and dulcimers has caused me to reflect. And I'm glad that it is in Dwain's company that this gets to happen because I can see myself growing into him in so many ways. Oh, he is much more polished than I'll ever be, but I love my bumpkin bourgeoisie. Dwain just sent me this lovely note:

Thanks, Mark. It has been very good working with you, and hanging out with you. Really enjoy your company, your sense of absurdity and humor, wit, the way you cloak a vast intelligence.

Dwain

This is how I want to be known.