Wood

You’re out of “the woods”. But . . .but this is like my family. This is all I have; it’s everything. This was the one place I could be me. Now, now what do I do? Where do I go? Yes, I realize our teacher is dead, but we could teach each other. Yeah but the only way we can get experience is if we keep woodcarving. I could look on YouTube and we could stay together, like friends do or we could pick up something else. Yeah, well I don’t know anything but woodcarving either. We could look on meetup or maybe there are online classes or communities or something and then his lessons and his legacy won’t die and we can learn other things about life and . . . Yes, I realize his wife gave away all his woodcarvings and woodcarving equipment but . . . Yes, I know she moved but . . .

*

Why don’t I start with some of the life lessons he taught me in woodcarving. Things like, “small cuts, small mistakes; big cuts, big mistakes” and it’s not just about woodcarving. And it’s easier to take wood off than to put it back on.

As Julie Andrew’s said，”Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start”. I was living in a cage, again, where the guards put me. The guards is short for legal guardians ‘cause it feels like they’re prison guards and I’m in jail. You cannot leave the building without telling someone where you’re going, you must eat the shitty food we have here since the state regulates what food we can serve you, the temperature of the food, and the portions of the food.

And I asked who. Who the hell in this moron state makes these goddamn regulations about what we can and cannot eat? The Department of Health. The fire department mandates monthly fire drills too. So at 4 am, once a month, we had to wake up for the fucking fire marshal. But I joined different clubs since the goddamn guards told me I’d better make this ALC work or they’d make me wardens of the state, which would be worse. Some asshole checks up on me every hour since the guards think I might do something at 4 am. Every morning at 4 am, I’m sleeping, unless the goddamn fire alarm goes off.

I tried playing Bingo, since isn’t playing bingo fun? Yeah, for about a week, then it gets irritating. No brain power in bingo. I’m 34 and everyone here is a senior citizen and I have to eat with them and I only hear about two things: The weather and how much pain they’re in. See what the weather’s been doing lately? Seniors are the only ones who care about emergency weather alerts. That and botany.

I got stuck doing games like Dominoes, CLR, Bingo, Aggravation, Uno, Shoots and Ladders, and every other dumb game imaginable. It’s better than staring at the wall all day, sometimes.

But once, someone in the Independent Living came to visit us in the ALF and invited us to his woodcarving class and, as usual, I tried it out. Has to be better than fucking Shoots and Ladders. Hell, one time a staff member asked if I wanted to play poker, since wouldn’t that be fun? I told her the only way I’d play poker is if it involved clothing. Needless to say, she never asked me to play poker again. But I put when woodcarving would be on my calendar and was escorted to the independent living community area and there was the man I talked to and he had raw sweet potatoes. I asked him why and he said this is how I start learning about woodcarving. He taught me three kinds of cuts on the sweet potatoes: The pull cut, the push cut, and the stop cut.

He’d introduce me to other things later like a dremel, garnish, wood stain, pyrography (and how to protect ourselves from carcinogens), and a lot of other things and me and …wait, my mind is contrived, it always has been. So, the guy… should give him a pseudonym, like Mike. Make it less confusing.

So, it was him and me (or is it him and I?) every week woodcarving and he said if I wanted to bring any of my friends I could, but the guards took away my cellphone and planner and I hated the people who I lived with. So, he invited people from another woodcarving group and we had discussions about things that weren’t the weather and pain. Things like gun control, people who are Muslim, oil, and we disagreed a lot, but with respect. We didn’t call each other names, we just explained our viewpoints and learned about wood.

Like there are different hardnesses of wood. Oak is too hard to carve and others are too soft. I love bass wood and Cyprus wood. I like how smooth the blade feels slicing through the wood like a knife through hardened blue cheese. I’ve cut myself several times, gone to urgent cares, but this is all I have. Carving, coffee, danishes, and talking. What the teacher learned on the History Channel this week like why Lincoln freed those he couldn’t and didn’t free those he could. (To keep England out of our Civil War).

And we each shared things, private things like how Bob lost his second child to a disease, fears we had, when we cried Bob’d give me advice on my carving and say things like nothing in nature had straight lines. Another person explained how paper pushers in the government care about me getting SSDI since that’s how they make money.

But everyone but me was near the end of their lives and Bon had diabetes and wound up needing dialysis, which he hated. He told me it was four hours of sitting in front of a tv like a zombie getting dialysis. And then Mike died and guys kept coming until they didn’t, since there wasn’t a teacher and I told them I could be the teacher and then the other guys kicked me out of the woods and canceled the club. I hate breakfast, lunch, dinner. I don’t care about the weather or their pain. Bob died of diabetes and they kicked me out. Now what?