trying to write…

Again I’m drawn back to the pictures of my father’s workshop… It was a place of the senses: always much to see; the tap tap tap of mallet hitting chisel and the background of classical music or radio drama (Fibber McGee and Molly, Suspense); the smell of wood, each cut releasing a sweet fragrance; the taste of licorice, of Juicy Fruit gum; the feel of the wood as he worked it: the scooped grooves of the chisel, the rasped wood’s bristled hide, the slow progress toward smooth as the sandpaper numbers rose, until finally the wood had no texture at all, glossed, warm, silken. It was a place of welcome, of refuge, of tidy safety and messy imagination.

As I look again at this photo, I notice how much work is underway. There are about 15 pieces of sculpture on the workbench, in various sizes and various degrees of completion. The Möbius piece (which I wrote about here) sits on the sandbag that was my father’s preferred sculpture support surface and is probably the piece he was working on at the time the photo was taken. But others sit nearby, where he would contemplate their form, sometimes drawing on the wood with a china marker or a carpenter’s pencil, often switching between them to work first on one, then another.

This morning, the photo shows me something about my father that I recognize in myself: this pleasure in multiple projects. This is the way I work best, advancing in small steps on several fronts, accelerating toward deadlines, juicing the process with visits to other work, other words.

My workbench, my desk, is arrayed with projects in various states of completion, these words sculpting themselves on the sandbag of my laptop. No licorice, no Juicy Fruit, but strong coffee and sugarless peppermint gum. No music or radio, just the busy sparrows and chickadees, gulls and crows outside.

The words burred drafts, unpolished. Snapshot.