"One night I was in bed and deeply down in my sleep, I heard electricity. Like when you take an electric wire and touch it. It shot through both my legs. Ooohhh, it shocked so hard that I woke up. When I woke up, I felt it three times. The next morning I could raise this leg up. I was surprised.
"The next night I felt the same thing. The third night I felt the same thing. So I got up and went to the bathroom. I went back to the doctor and he said, "That"s surprising." Ooohhh, I can"t believe it. There is a miracle. This is very shocking."
What do you think cured you?
"G.o.d."
Did Oral Roberts help?
"Yes."
How?
"By prayin" sincere from his heart.
"I was a nurse before, but I wasn"t devoted. I saw how they treated people when I was there. Oh, it was pitiful. I couldn"t stand it. And from that, I have tender feelings. That changed me. That"s when I decided to devote myself."
I feel sorry for everybody who cannot help themselves. For that reason I never rest. As soon as I"m off one case I am on another. I have to sometimes say, "Don"t call me for a week." I am so tired. Sometimes I have to leave the house and hide away. They keep me busy, busy, busy all the time. People that I take care of years ago are callin" back and askin" for me.
Plenty of nurses don"t care. If they get the money, forget it. They talk like that all the time. They say to me, "You still here?" I say, "Yes." "Oh, you still worry about that old woman." I say, "That"s why she pays me, to worry about her." Most of the nurses have feelings.
If I had power in this country, first thing I"d do in nursing homes, I would hire someone that pretended to be sick. "Cause that"s the only way you know what"s goin" on. I would have government nursing homes. Free care for everybody. Those hospitals that charge too much money and you don"t have insurance and they don"t accept you, I would change that -overnight.
Things so bad for old people today-if I could afford to buy a few buildings, I would have that to fall on. You got to be independent. So you don"t have to run there and there and there in your old age. They don"t have enough income. I don"t want to be like that.
An elderly person is a return back to babyhood. It give you a feeling how when you were a teen-ager, you"re adult, you think you"re strong and gay, and you return back to babyhood. The person doesn"t know what"s happening. But you take care of the person, you can see the difference. It makes you sad, because if you live long enough, you figure you will be the same.
POSTSCRIPT: A few months after this conversation, her "baby" died.
HERBERT BACH.
We are called memorial counselors. We use telephone solicitation. We use direct mail. We put ads in papers. In any kind of field you look in the haystack for needles.
We call ourselves the Interment Industry. The funeral industry is a little bit different. You conduct a funeral, it takes one or two or three days, and that"s the end of that. But we"re responsible for fifty, a hundred, two hundred years. People will come in and say, "Where is my great-grandfather?" If you don"t have a record of that, we"re in trouble.
We"re in a creative field. We get into engineering, into landscaping, into purchasing for flowers. We get into contracting and road building. We cover areas from working with a bereaved family to dropping a sewer thirty feet into the ground so it will properly drain. Oh yes, there have been significant changes in cemetery management.
In the old days the cemetery was strictly a burial ground. When somebody died, they would dispose of the remains. They left it to each family to put in some sort of tombstone. Today the cemetery is a community inst.i.tution. It should be a thing of beauty, a thing of dignity.
In the old days the cemetery served a simple purpose. Today we think of it in terms of ecology. Green acres in the center of residential and commercial areas, newly built. We have 160 acres here. Around us are industrial parks. Still, we have this green . . . The cemetery field has become professionalized.
In the old days each little church, each little synagogue, would buy a piece of land, and the s.e.xton would keep the records of who and what was buried where. There was no landscape design, there were no roads, there was no draining. Our landscaper does the annual World Flower Show. One of our architects had done the Seagram Building. We use forward-thinking people who make the cemetery serve the whole community.
The olden days, the maintenance of the cemetery was left to the individual family. One family would pay and the others didn"t. You would have weeds in one area and someplace else cared for. Today, in a modern cemetery, you have trust funds. Whenever a family purchases, a part of that money is put into a trust. This trust is inviolate. In this state it"s held by a third party, a bank. You know that cemetery is gonna be cared for.
We have eliminated tombstones and monuments. We use level bronze memorials. You get away from this thing of a marble orchard-and the depression of cold, cold stone. What you see are shrubs and flowers and trees. The beauty represents something for the entire community.
We are only fifteen years old and our trustee has close to a million dollars to help pay for the maintenance. When the park is complete, the trust will run between twelve and fourteen million dollars. Only the interest can be used. So we put in works of art.
I am not a grief psychologist. (Laughs.) I think death is a personal thing. We feel we have to do something to help people overcome their grief. At every interment service we erect a chapel tent. We have an outdoor chapel. We call it the Chapel in the Woods. We hold annual memorial services. So the family knows-even if they don"t come to the service-their loved ones are being remembered. We have a lowering device-the casket is put on that--covered with green. So people don"t see the bare hole in the ground, which is very traumatic. 79 Funerals are more restrained today. In the past people got very, very emotional. Today there is a dignity to the service. They don"t have to get emotional. They don"t have to do the kind of thing they did in the past to show everybody how much they loved the one that went away. The one big thing at the time of death is the guilt complex. We always felt we haven"t done enough for the person who pa.s.sed away. So we try to overcome this at the time of death.
One of the big things people say at the time of death is: "Oh, I loved him so much. I want him to get the very best." I want to get the finest of this and the finest of that. They are subjected to emotional overspending. At the funeral chapel they"ll buy the casket they can"t afford. At the cemetery they"ll buy the interment s.p.a.ce they can"t afford. We try to avoid that. We say it should be planned, like you plan life insurance. You wouldn"t drive a car without automobile insurance. You wouldn"t move into a house without fire insurance. Why not memorial insurance?
They can budget it over a period of time. If people don"t budget, they have to pay cash, right? If you don"t pay for a refrigerator, they can repossess it. If somebody pa.s.ses away and you make an interment, you can"t very well repossess the body. (Laughs.) So they have to pay cash here in advance. It"s a matter of budgeting.
ELMER RUIZ.
Not anybody can be a gravedigger. You can dig a hole any way they come. A gravedigger, you have to make a neat job. I had a fella once, he wanted to see a grave. He was a fella that digged sewers. He was impressed when he seen me diggin" this grave-how square and how perfect it was. A human body is goin" into this grave. That"s why you need skill when you"re gonna dig a grave.
He has dug graves for eight years, as the a.s.sistant to the foreman. "I been living on the grounds for almost twelve years." During the first four years "I used to cut gra.s.s and other things. I never had a dream to have this kind of job. I used to drive a trailer from Texas to Chicago." He is married and has five children, ranging in age from two to sixteen. It is a bitter cold Sunday morning.
The gravedigger today, they have to be somebody to operate a machine. You just use a shovel to push the dirt loose. Otherwise you don"t use "em. We"re tryin" a new machine, a ground hog. This machine is supposed to go through heavy frost. It do very good job so far. When the weather is mild, like fifteen degrees above zero, you can do it very easy.
But when the weather is below zero, believe me, you just really workin" hard. I have to use a mask. Your skin hurts so much when it"s cold-like you put a hot flame near your face. I"m talkin" about two, three hours standin" outside. You have to wear a mask, otherwise you can"t stand it at all.
Last year we had a frost up to thirty-five inches deep, from the ground down. That was difficult to have a funeral. The frost and cement, it"s almost the same thing. I believe cement would break easier than frost. Cement is real solid, but when you hit "em they just crack. The frost, you just hit "em and they won"t give up that easy. Last year we had to use an air hammer when we had thirty-five inches frost.
The most graves I dig is about six, seven a day. This is in the summer. In the winter it"s a little difficult. In the winter you have four funerals, that"s a pretty busy day.
I been workin" kinda hard with this snow. We use charcoal heaters, it"s the same charcoal you use to make barbeque ribs or hot dogs. I go and mark where the grave is gonna be tomorrow and put a layer of charcoal the same size of a box. And this fifteen inches of frost will be completely melt by tomorrow morning. I start early, about seven o"clock in the morning, and I have the park cleaned before the funeral. We have two funerals for tomorrow, eleven and one ". That"s my life.
In the old days it was supposed to be four men. Two on each end with a rope, keep lowerin" little by little. I imagine that was kinda hard, because I imagine some fellas must weigh two hundred pounds, and I can feel that weight. We had a burial about five years ago, a fella that weighed four hundred pounds. He didn"t fit on the lowerin" device. We had a big machine tractor that we coulda used, but that woulda looked kinda bad, because lowerin" a casket with a tractor is like lowerin" anything. You have to respect . . . We did it by hand. There were about a half a dozen men.
The grave will be covered in less than two minutes, complete. We just open the hoppers with the right amount of earth. We just press it and then we lay out a layer of black earth. Then we put the sod that belongs there. After a couple of weeks you wouldn"t know it"s a grave there. It"s complete flat. Very rarely you see a grave that is sunk.
To dig a grave would take from an hour and a half to an hour and forty-five minutes. Only two fellas do it. The operator of the ground hog or back hoe and the other fella, with the trailer, where we put the earth.
When the boss is gone I have to take care of everything myself. That includes givin" orders to the fellas and layin" graves and so on. They make it hard for me when the fellas won"t show. Like this new fella we have. He"s just great but he"s not very dependable. He miss a lot. This fella, he"s about twenty-four years old. I"m the only one that really knows how to operate that machine.
I usually tell "em I"m a caretaker. I don"t think the name sound as bad. I have to look at the park, so after the day"s over that everything"s closed, that n.o.body do damage to the park. Some occasions some people just come and steal and loot and do bad things in the park, destroy some things. I believe it would be some young fellas. A man with responsibility, he wouldn"t do things like that. Finally we had to put up some gates and close"em at sundown. Before, we didn"t, no. We have a fence of roses. Always in cars you can come after sundown.
When you tell people you work in a cemetery, do they change the subject?
Some, they want to know. Especially Spanish people who come from Mexico. They ask me if it is true that when we bury somebody we dig"em out in four, five years and replace "em with another one. I tell "em no. When these people is buried, he"s buried here for life.
It"s like a trade. It"s the same as a mechanic or a doctor. You have to present your job correct, it"s like an operation. If you don"t know where to make the cut, you"re not gonna have a success. The same thing here. You have to have a little skill. I"m not talkin" about college or anything like that. Myself, I didn"t have no grade school, but you have to know what you"re doin". You have some fellas been up for many years and still don"t know whether they"re comin" or goin". I feel proud when everything became smooth and when Mr. Bach congratulate us. Four years ago, when the foreman had a heart attack, I took over. That was a real rough year for myself. I had to dig the graves and I had to show the fellas what to do.
A gravedigger is a very important person. You must have hear about the strike we had in New York about two years ago. There were twenty thousand bodies layin" and n.o.body could bury "em. The cost of funerals they raised and they didn"t want to raise the price of the workers. The way they"re livin", everything wanna go up, and I don"t know what"s gonna happen.
Can you imagine if I wouldn"t show up tomorrow morning and this other fella-he usually comes late-and sometimes he don"t show. We have a funeral for eleven ". Imagine what happens? The funeral arrive and where you gonna bury it?
We put water, the aspirins, in case somebody pa.s.s out. They have those capsules that you break and put up by their nose-smelling salts. And we put heaters for inside the tents so the place be a little warm.
There are some funerals, they really affect you. Some young kid. We buried lots of young. You have emotions, you turn in, believe me, you turn. I had a burial about two years ago of teen-agers, a young boy and a young girl. This was a real sad funeral because there was n.o.body but young teen-agers. I"m so used to going to funerals every day-of course, it bothers me-but I don"t feel as bad as when I bury a young child. You really turn.
I usually will wear myself some black sungla.s.ses. I never go to a funeral without sungla.s.ses. It"s a good idea because your eyes is the first thing that shows when you have a big emotion. Always these black sungla.s.ses.
This grief that I see every day, I"m really used to somebody"s crying every day. But there is some that are real bad, when you just have to take it. Some people just don"t want to give up. You have to understand that when somebody pa.s.s away, there"s nothing you can do and you have to take it. If you don"t want to take it, you"re just gonna make your life worse, become sick. People seems to take it more easier these days. They miss the person, but not as much.
There"s some funerals that people, they show they"re not sad. This is different kinds of people. I believe they are happy to see this person-not in a way of singing-because this person is out of his sufferin" in this world. This person is gone and at rest for the rest of his life. I have this question lots of times: "How can I take it?" They ask if I"m calm when I bury people. If you stop and think, a funeral is one of the natural things in the world.
I enjoy it very much, especially in summer. I don"t think any job inside a factory or an office is so nice. You have the air all day and it"s just beautiful. The smell of the gra.s.s when it"s cut, it"s just fantastic. Winter goes so fast sometimes you just don"t feel it.
When I finish my work here, I just don"t remember my work. I like music so much that I have lots more time listenin" to music or playin". That"s where I spend my time. I don"t drink, I don"t smoke. I play Spanish ba.s.s and guitar. I play accordian. I would like to be a musician. I was born and raised in Texas and I never had a good school. I learned music myself from here and there. After I close the gate I play. I don"t think it would be nice to play music when the funeral"s goin" by. But after everything . . .
I believe we are not a rich people, but I think we"re livin" fair. We"re not sufferin". Like I know lotsa people are havin" a rough time to live on this world because of crises of the world. My wife, sometimes she"s tired of stayin" in here. I try to take her out as much as possible. Not to parties or clubs, but to go to stores and sometimes to go to drive-ins and so on.
She"s used to funerals, too. I go to eat at noon and she asks me, "How many funerals you got today? How many you buried today?" "Oh, we buried two." "How many more you got?" "Another." Some other people, you go to your office, they say, "How many letters you write today?" Mine says, "How many funerals you had today?" (Laughs.) My children are used to everything. They start playin" ball right against the house. They"re not authorized to go across the road because it"s the burial in there. Whenever a funeral gonna be across from the house, the kids are not permitted to play. One thing a kid love, like every kid, is dogs. In a way, a dog in here would be the best thing to take care of the place, especially a German Shepherd. But they don"t want dogs in here. It"s not nice to see a dog around a funeral. Or cats or things like that. So they don"t have no pet, no.
I believe I"m gonna have to stay here probably until I die. It"s not gonna be too bad for me because I been livin" twelve years already in the cemetery. I"m still gonna be livin" in the cemetery. (Laughs.) So that"s gonna be all right with me whenever I go. I think I may be buried here, it look like.
BOOK NINE.
THE QUIZ KID AND THE CARPENTER.
BRUCE FLETCHER.
n.o.body likes to grow old, but I"m afraid I grew old at a very early age. The years went by quickly when I was very young, and all too quickly in the years when I should have been having fun. I became a concerned old man at a very early age. I began to grow gray when I was twenty-one . . .
He was one of the original Quiz Kids-first program, June, 1940. He was the youngest. "I was seven, going on eight." He partic.i.p.ated in the network program for three years, 1940 to 1943. He is thirty-nine years old.
"My specialty was Greek mythology and natural history. These two subjects were what they asked me about on the show. At home I"d sit on the floor and go through the book and recite off the names of the birds. My Aunt Louise thought this was very great and very wonderful. So she called in the neighbors to have me perform. One of the neighbors called the newspapers and they came and photographed me and reported on me. I was considered a child prodigy.
"After three years as one of the Quiz Kids, I was eleven and pretty obnoxious, I"m afraid. When you"re seven years old, these things are tolerable. When you"re eleven and becoming an adolescent, these things become intolerable. It was considered wise that I retire earlier than age fifteen, which was considered the graduation age for the Quiz Kids. I wondered what happened. From then on, I was just plain Bruce Fletcher."
My big ambition was to go to New York and Columbia University. When a Midwestern hick arrives in New York, you start at the bottom-and I did. I worked in a factory and was amused by the way it was run. Eight " the bell rang, all the machines started, and you started working like little machines yourself.
I found a job at a very exclusive men"s club for the social register only. What amused me was something that existed far beyond its time: servants were treated as servants. I cleared twenty-nine dollars a week plus two meals. They were slip-cowish, and this hateful chef sought to give it to the employees. Things became so desperate that one of the servants went up to a club member with some sausage that you wouldn"t feed a puppy that was starving, and he said, "Here, you eat this." Six months was a bellyful, I a.s.sure you.
I liked the factory much better, aside from the money. I was glad to be a cog in the wheel. At least it wasn"t humiliating. I felt that I could just go through the day"s work, make enough money, oh, that I could go to the Met three times a week or Carnegie Hall, and I could more or less live my life properly when my time was my own.
I was a young Columbia man while I worked in a cafeteria from 6:30 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. I was much respected by the management, even though I drove the people that I worked with insane, because I had standards they couldn"t cope with. I cannot stand laziness and neglect when I"m breaking my neck and somebody else is holding up the wall. I would scream b.l.o.o.d.y murder and carry on like a demon and a tyrant.
Through Columbia,80 I got a job as a proofreader at one of the biggest law firms in New York. Whatever the case, the law firm brought me back to the fact that I was not just somebody"s scullery maid. The people either liked me very much or hated me with a purple pa.s.sion. But I was respected. I"ve been respected on every job I ever had.
It wore out my eyes, just like you had them grated on a grindstone. You have to read small print all day long and keep your eyes glued to it. Also, we had handwritten doc.u.ments that the lawyers would send in. Some of their handwriting was like Egyptian hieroglyphics. We ran into ridiculous situations. If something went wrong, we would be blamed and heads would roll like cabbage stalks.
I left under circ.u.mstances of considerable honor. I was given a farewell luncheon by half the staff of the law firm, meaning the lawyers themselves. I was asked to make a speech and I was much applauded.
The most I made was seventy-five dollars a week. I consider making good money in this life where you can walk into a supermarket and you can fill up the grocery cart with everything you choose without having to add the prices of every item. This should have gone out in the thirties, when there was never enough money to go around. Ha ha. I did in New York what I do now. I add up the prices when I put things in the grocery cart to make sure that the purse matches the fancy.
During the years 1960 to 1968, he was on the west coast and in Texas. He worked as an announcer for three different radio stations, favoring cla.s.sical music. With his collection of ten thousand phonograph records, he made tapes for broadcasts. One job "consumed me day and night for a year and a half. Those were the happiest times of my life."
"Since coming back to Chicago in 1968 I have considered myself in retirement. At thirty-six I was no longer young. People hire people at age twenty. They don"t hire people age thirty-six. Oh, I"ve felt old since my twenties."
I now work in a greenhouse, where we grow nothing but roses. You walk in there and the peace and quiet engulfs you. Privacy is such that you don"t even see the people you work with for hours on end. It is not always pretty. Roses have to have manure put around their roots. So I get my rubber gloves and there I go. Some of the work is rather heavy.
The money isn"t good. The heat in the summer almost kills me. Because there you are under a gla.s.s roof where everything is magnified. There"s almost no ventilation, and I am literally drenching with perspiration by the time the day is over and done with. But at least I don"t have somebody sneak up behind you and scream in your ear abuse. I had enough of that.
The reason I like this job is because my mind is at ease all day long, without any tensions or pressures. Physically it keeps me on my toes. I"m a little bit harder and tougher than I was. I"m on my feet all day. I have an employer who"s the best one I ever had in my life. There has never been the slightest disagreement, which is a miracle. Everyone says, "Bruce is hard to get along with." Bruce is not difficult to get along with if I had intelligent people to work with, where people are not after me or picking on me for that and that and another thing.
I tend to concentrate so much on what I"m doing. That"s why I scare very easily. If anyone comes up behind me and speaks to me very suddenly when I"m at work, I"m concentrating so thoroughly I nearly jump through the roof.
I start at seven fifteen in the morning, and the first thing I do is cut roses. They have to be cut early in the morning. The important thing is to cut them so that they"re rather tightly closed. Bees and b.u.t.terflies don"t last very long because there"s no nectar and pollen. We cut the roses when they"re so tightly closed that they can"t get at them. If they"re kept in refrigeration and in water with the stems trimmed properly, they"ll be fresh a week later.
Of course, there"s always the telephone. That is a big problem. The greenhouses extend what seem to be miles from the telephone, but you can always hear it, even at a distance. It means a great big long run to get it, and pray that they won"t hang up before you can answer it. That usually means orders to be taken. Sometimes the day gets too much and I feel I want to die on the spot.
When the day is over I go to the library. If it"s a night of operas or concerts, I time myself accordingly. I always do as I did in New York. Unless I had to go stand in the standing room line at the Met, which meant getting there right after work, I"d go home, take a nap, so that I won"t fall asleep at the performance. And then come back and get as much sleep as I possibly can. The day isn"t complete unless I fall asleep with the reading light on and a book in my hand.
I don"t know what"s going to happen to me. It would be much more convenient if I had cancer and pa.s.sed away and say, "Oh, how tragic," and I could have the peace of the grave. I don"t know. I"d love to be back in radio, in the cla.s.sical music business. I blossomed forth like the roses in the greenhouse . . . I was in my own kind of work.
Peace and quiet and privacy have meant a great deal to me in the years since I made my escape. I didn"t feel free as one of the Quiz Kids. Reporters and photographers poking you and knocking you around and asking ridiculous questions. As a child you can"t cope with these things. I was exploited. I can"t forgive those who exploited me.
I would have preferred to grow up in my own particular fashion. Had I grown up as others did, I would have come out a much better person. In school, if I would fail to answer a question, the teacher would lean forward and say in front of the cla.s.s, "All right! Just because you were one of the Quiz Kids doesn"t mean that you"re a smart pupil in my cla.s.s." I wish it had never happened.
(Softly) But we were unique at the time. The Depression was over. America was the haven and all good things were here. And I was the youngest of the Quiz Kids. Of course, I"m a has-been. The Quiz Kids itself has been a has-been. But it brought forth something that was not a has-been. It achieved history, and that is where I"m proud to have been a part of it. (Laughs.) Ah, the time of retirement has come and I"m in it! I"m in it!
NICK LINDSAY.
Though he lives in Goshen, Indiana, he considers his birthplace "home"-Edisto Island, off the coast of South Carolina. At forty-four, he is the father of ten children; the eldest, a girl twenty-six, and the youngest, a boy one and a half years old.
He is a carpenter as well as a poet, who reads and chants his works on college campuses and at coffeehouses. "This is one of the few times in my life I had made a living at anything but carpentry. Lindsays have been carpenters from right on back to 1755. Every once in a while, one of "em"ll shoot off and be a doctor or a preacher or something.81 Generally they"ve been carpenter-preachers, carpenter-farmers, carpenter-storekeepers, carpenters right on. A man, if he describes himself, will use a verb. What you do, that"s what you are. I would say I"m a carpenter.
"I started workin" steady at it when I was thirteen. I picked up a hammer and went to drive in nails. One man I learned a lot from was a janitor, who didn"t risk the ebb and flow of the carpentry trade. You can learn a lot from books about things like this-how nails work, different kinds of wood."
He dropped out of high school. "It"s a good way to go. Take what you can stand and don"t take any more than that. It"s what G.o.d put the tongue in your mouth for. If it don"t taste right, you spit it out."
Let me tell you where the grief bites you so much. Who are you working for? If you"re going to eat, you are working for the man who pays you some kind of wage. That won"t be a poor man. The man who"s got a big family and who"s needing a house, you"re not building a house for him. The only man you"re working for is the man who could get along without it. You"re putting a roof on the man who"s got enough to pay your wage.
You see over yonder, shack need a roof. Over here you"re building a sixty-thousand-dollar house for a man who maybe doesn"t have any children. He"s not hurting and it doesn"t mean much. It"s a prestige house. He"s gonna up-man, he"s gonna be one-up on his neighbor, having something fancier. It"s kind of into that machine. It"s a real pleasure to work on it, don"t get me wrong. Using your hand is just a delight in the paneling, in the good woods. It smells good and they shape well with the plane. Those woods are filled with the whole creative mystery of things. Each wood has its own spirit. Driving nails, yeah, your spirit will break against that.
What"s gonna happen to what you made? You work like you were kneeling down. You go into Riverside Church in New York and there"s no s.p.a.ce between the pews to kneel. (Laughs.) If you try to kneel down in that church, you break your nose on the pew in front. A bunch of churches are like that. Who kneels down in that church? I"ll tell you who kneels. The man kneels who"s settin" the toilets in the restrooms. He"s got to kneel, that"s part of his work. The man who nails the pews on the floor, he had to kneel down. The man who put the receptacles in the walls that turn that I-don"t-know-how-many horsepower organ they got in that Riverside Church-that thing"ll blow you halfway to heaven right away, pow!-the man who was putting the wire in that thing, he kneeled down. Any work, you kneel down-it"s a kind of worship. It"s part of the holiness of things, work, yes. Just like drawing breath is. It"s necessary. If you don"t breathe, you"re dead. It"s kind of a sacrament, too.
One nice thing about the crafts. You work two hours at a time. There"s a ritual to it. It"s break time. Then two hours more and it"s dinner time. All those are very good times. Ten minutes is a pretty short time, but it"s good not to push too hard. All of a sudden it comes up break time, just like a friend knocking at the door that"s unexpected. It"s a time of swapping tales. What you"re really doing is setting the stage for your work.
A craftsman"s life is nothin" but compromise. Look at your tile here. That"s craftsman"s work, not art work. Craftsmanship demands that you work repeating a pattern to very close tolerances. You"re laying this tile here within a sixteenth. It ought to be within a sixty-fourth of a true ninety degree angle. Theoretically it should be perfect. It shouldn"t be any sixty-fourth, it should be oo tolerance. Just altogether straight on, see? Do we ever do it? No. Look at that parquet stuff you got around here. It"s pretty, but those corners. The man has compromised. He said that"ll have to do.
They just kind of hustle you a little bit. The compromise with the material that"s going on all the time. That makes for a lot of headache and grief. Like lately, we finished a house. Well, it"s not yet done. Cedar siding, that"s material that"s got knots in it. That"s part of the charm. But it"s a real headache if the knots falls out. You hit one of those boards with your hammer sometime and it turns into a piece of Swiss cheese. So you"re gonna drill those knots, a million knots, back in. (Laughs.) It"s sweet smelling wood. You"ve got a six-foot piece of a ten-foot board. Throwing away four feet of that fancy wood? Whatcha gonna do with that four feet? A splice, scuff it, try to make an invisible joint, and use it? Yes or no? You compromise with the material. Save it? Burn it? It"s in your mind all the time. Oh sure, the wood is sacred. It took a long time to grow that. It"s like a blood sacrifice. It"s consummation. That wood is not going to go anywhere else after that.
When I started in, it was like European carpentering. But now, all that"s pretty well on the run. You make your joints simply, you get pre-hung doors, you have machine-fitted cabinet work, and you build your house to fit these factory-produced units. The change has been toward quickness. An ordinary American can buy himself some kind of a house because we can build it cheap. So again, your heart is torn. It"s good and not so good.
Sometimes it has to do with how much wage he"s getting. The more wage he"s getting, the more skill he can exercise. You"re gonna hire me? I"m gonna hang your door. Suppose you pay me five dollars an hour. I"m gonna have to hang that door fast. "Cause if I don"t hang that door fast, you"re gonna run out of money before I get it hung. No man can hurry and hang it right.
I don"t think there"s less pride in craftsmanship. I don"t know about pride. Do you take pride in embracing a woman? You don"t take pride in that. You take delight in it. There may be less delight. If you can build a house cheap and really get it to a man that needs it, that"s kind of a social satisfaction for you. At the same time, you wish you could have done a fancier job, a more unique kind of a job.
But every once in a while there"s stuff that comes in on you. All of a sudden something falls into place. Suppose you"re driving an eight-penny galvanized finishing nail into this siding. Your whole universe is rolled onto the head of that nail. Each lick is sufficient to justify your life. You say, "Okay, I"m not trying to get this nail out of the way so I can get onto something important. There"s nothing more important. It"s right there." And it goes-pow! It"s not getting that nail in that"s in your mind. It"s. .h.i.tting it-hitting it square, hitting it straight. Getting it now. That one lick.
If you see a carpenter that"s alive to his work, you"ll notice that about the way he hits a nail. He"s not going (imitates machine gun rat-tat-tat-tat) -trying to get the nail down and out of the way so he can hurry up and get another one. Although he may be working fast, each lick is like a separate person that he"s. .h.i.tting with his hammer. It"s like as though there"s a separate friend of his that one moment. And when he gets out of it, here comes another one. Unique, all by itself. Pow! But you gotta stop before you get that nail in, you know? That"s fine work. Hold the hammer back, and just that last lick, don"t hit it with your hammer, hit it with a punch so you won"t leave a hammer mark. Rhythm.