When I think about the things of which I know virtually nothing, it scares me a little. I may know a few dates and facts in history, the names of my favorite books, and a line or two of poetry, but I really don’t know near enough.
Like many homeowners, I know how to replace a water heater and rewire a lamp, and I can hang mini-blinds without mashing a thumb. Much past that, and I’m a little iffy.
When I listen to music, say Vaughn Williams’ 5th Symphony — one of my favorites — for instance, or even Eric Clapton doing his thing on the guitar, I have no idea how people can make something that beautiful happen. Since I struggled with “Ole King Cole” in an aborted attempt at playing the violin in sixth grade, I know I don’t have a clue as to how people can make music in their heads, let alone how they write it down for others to play.
I can understand plinking out a tune on a piano with one hand; add the other hand and that’s coordination that leaves me scratching my head. There are women at our churches who really know how to play the piano, but how they do it, I can’t say. One friend, Kevin Hoggatt, played a beautiful piece at church a few months ago, and he “plays by ear.” He can’t read a note of music. How is that possible?
I know that when I see sculpture, perhaps something as wonderful as Daniel French’s Lincoln or West Terre Haute sculptor Bill Wolfe’s work, I feel small because I struggled to make a decent-looking ashtray in seventh grade shop class. There is a magic in their hands that just isn’t in mine, and good potters, pie-makers and painters have the touch, too.
I used to spend a lot of time at Salty Seamon’s art studio, and the stuff he threw in the trash after he showed me a little bit about shading or perspective or washing color was better than I could ever hope to do. He would sit at his painting table, a piece of paper anchored to it with masking tape, and create something where there was nothing before — a sycamore tree, a wheat field, a blackbird, a barn.
My friends Joe and Dennis can make a table, a baby’s cradle or a child’s toy out of a few sticks of oak or sassafras; I admire that, and I’ve told them so. They may have degrees in mathematics, but they also see how to apply that subject to the building of a deck or the framing of a barn. What I may have halfway learned at a blackboard in school comes alive for them when cutting angles, figuring area and making trim. They leave me smiling when I smell the wood and feel the grain of their labors.
My father-in-law, a retired farmer, never had much money in his life, but he’s amazed me for years with his ability to keep old mechanical things going with little more than baling wire, spit and a prayer. He understands how things work and begins tearing into them while I’m still looking at the operator’s manual. He once completely dismantled a balky old lawn tractor of mine on my garage floor, tossing incomprehensible pieces into five-gallon buckets. After I ordered the part he said that I needed — waiting on it for weeks — he came back to that garage, dumped the parts on the floor, sat on the bucket, and put my tractor back together. I was impressed; he had nothing leftover and that previous pile of oily parts was back to mowing my yard in a few hours. I’m also happy to know that my son, who spent much of his preschool life with his grandpa, has a little of Gib’s mechanical ability; it’s going to come in handy someday.
I’ve often called one of my brothers-in-law to help me with electrical projects from time to time. Gene knows his stuff. What I assume or suspect will toast me on the spot makes sense to him. I simply don’t understand currents and resistance and figuring out exactly what I’m supposed to do with one of those little handheld testers. He always seems to have an idea as to where I can start when solving a problem, just about the time I’m convinced I have no options.
My brother, John, has made canoes, rebuilt motor boats, built cabinets and bookcases, remodeled bathrooms, refinished furniture, tanned hides, and has become quite a good cook to boot. What he knows, he’s learned by trial and error, by using his imagination, and by taking chances. I know I can do a few things he can’t do, but I think I’d rather know more of what he can do than what I can.
A good teaching friend, Mike Hardesty, is a computer guru; the man simply knows things about computers that I can’t fathom. I don’t know the difference between a byte and megahertz, but Mike eats computer manuals like breakfast. If there’s such a thing as technical common sense, he has it. He may swing a golf club like Fred Flintstone, but the man can scan, download, copy and paste and transfer with the best of them. He taught himself how to play the bagpipes and a half-dozen other instruments, too.
Over the years, I’ve come to marvel at what some people can do. Emma Jean Jackson makes some of the best noodles I’ve ever had; Carol June Wiggins and my mom sat for hours hunched over ancient quilting frames and made quilts beautiful enough to call art; my wife can do the Jumble we run in this newspaper faster than anyone on the planet. Phyllis Marsolf makes fantastic jelly; Dr. David Hay is a fine poet; Dan Collom and his crew of carpenters built history with their hands at Bridgeton.
Because I have a couple of college degrees and a few pieces of paper that entitle me to be called educated, some people may think I’m pretty smart. But I think I have them fooled a little. I can plant a tree, do some basic plumbing, take a decent photograph and quote Robert Frost. I was once told that I was good at trimming shrubs.
I’m smart all right; I know just enough to know that I don’t know much at all.
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail c/o The Tribune-Star, PO Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: When it comes down to it, we each know very little
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight
Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.
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The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped. Already, I have the overflow stacked on the floor and shoved into the spaces where previous tenants once lived. Gradually, expediency is replacing order, so fiction and non-fiction, biographies and novels, are scandalously co-mingling on my shelves.
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THE OFF SEASON: The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped.
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THE OFF SEASON: It’s taken long time to say thanks…
It was with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in my hands a few Mondays ago that I discovered that Mr. Hapenny had died.
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THE OFF SEASON: Lessons learned from the night the ice fell
The picture window of my cabin is sealed in a perfect glaze of ice as I write this, last Thursday morning, and since it faces due north and sees little direct sunlight, I imagine I will be looking through this shower door glass of mine for a few more days. But since I sit and watch the woods much of the time, instead of writing, I suppose the ice is serving a rare good purpose in keeping me on task.
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The Off Season: Pass a ‘midnight dreary’ with The Big Read
It was a pretty poor excuse for an evening one night last week as I lay beside our glowing fireplace, a pillow propped behind my head. I was spending some time with my current read, enjoying each page in the semi-darkness, smug in the knowledge that I’d not be heading to my classroom the next day.
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The Off Season: ‘Too old and too lazy’ to deal with coyotes
Despite the cold and the ever-present winter breezes that blow across our hill these days, I often find myself, even in the blue evenings, standing on the walk near my cabin, looking at the stars or watching for the last red-tailed hawks of the day as they float by in the drafts.
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The Off Season: The passion of having a passion is a great thing
It just occurred to me that I am fortunate to have a passion — a drive to do something that takes me away from the clutches of my job, of home repairs, of the mundane and the ho-hum.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
Video of M.I.A's Obscene Halftime Gesture
Obama Scraps Birth Control Mandate
US Airmen's Killer Sentenced to Life in Germany
Navy Names Ship for Gabrielle Giffords
5 Killed in Wrong-way Crash on I-10 in La.
Raw Video: Deadly Blasts in Syria
Raw Video: Italy's Mount Etna Bursts Into Life
Uzbek Man Pleads Guilty in Plot to Kill Obama
Romney Slams President Obama at CPAC
Woman Pleads Guilty in 1987 Newborn Kidnap Case
Raw Video: Rough Seas Stop Oil Removal
Gingrich: Pres. Obama 'waging War on Religion'
Test on Comforter in Powell Unit Shows Blood
Winter Slamming North Asia, Parts of Europe
Denver's Largest-Ever Drug Bust Nets Dozens
Androgynous Model Walks Runway As Man and Woman
Marines: No Punishment for Nazi-like Flag
Raw Video: School Bus Burst Into Flames
Syrian Forces Renew Bombardment of Homs
Skaters Still Hold Hope for Dutch Marathon
First glimpse of Blue Ivy Carter
Absolute Lin-sanity
Angry Dad Shoots Teens Laptop
Hero Driver Saves Kids From Burning Bus
Funeral to be held for Powell boys
Kobe was 'rooting for Patriots' in Super Bowl
Sandusky on having to stay inside and people turning on him
Wookie Sensation
Woolly Mammoth Caught on Camera?
Sandusky makes a statement
Did JLo 'Assault' Marc Anthony on Camera?
Christie Brinkley's Runway Slip
Toddler forced to run half-naked in snow
Halle Wants to Leave the Country
Northern Lights shine above earth
Plane makes perfect belly landing
Kris Jenner New Face of Arousal Oils
