Large Fierce Mammal

My Mother always admonished me to put on clean underwear every morning because you never know when you’ll encounter a kind offer for sex. Or in case you get in an accident of some other sort. Anyway, that was a long time ago so the actual reason is vague, but the message was conveyed with sufficient clarity for me to continue the practice right up to and including this morning.

I also remember reading a memoir written by an accomplished and highly decorated soldier who served in an airborne regiment. I can’t for the life of me remember his name, and if what I’m about to reveal of him twigs any remembrance on your part, Goode Reader, do please remind me by leaving an enlightening comment.

He compared the way he would prepare for a mission with how he would get ready for a date with his “best girl”. Groomed and fresh smelling. Wearing his best combat uniform, cleaned and pressed. Boots polished and kit above reproach. Blades honed and oiled. Rifle immaculate. You can’t argue with that approach and it never failed him. Maybe you’re going to die today, or maybe you’ll help someone else do it. Either way, and at all points in between where nobody dies, it’s a day you’ll never get again, and that makes it an important day so don’t show up looking like a bum.

Dress and personal style are important to meeting every day with panache. Mrs. LFM is quite aware of my personal colour code and can pick out the hue of underwear I’ll be wearing on any day based solely on the morning’s discussion over coffee.

Dress From the Inside Out

By LFM

Black for facing evil,
Blue for speaking Truth,
Red for those contentious days,
And in the voting booth.

Grey for vague morality,
Both in and out of doors,
My state of mind’s reflected
In the colour of my drawers.

Mrs. LFM, Bairns, Dogs and I live in an antique farm house the original construction of which predates electricity and indoor plumbing. The wise and hard working crew who threw their blood, sweat, and tears into its building and sustenance dug a well 20 feet deep on the hill overlooking the house, and by their choice ensured enough gravity fed water pressure to permit all household water needs to be met even if we didn’t have an electric pump. The aquifer that feeds our well is an amazing thing, and even in this unusually dry Summer has been tenaciously retaining water. Even so, wise water management demands military showers and toilet flushes in strict accordance with the rule, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.”

There’s an old joke that goes, “Some people say the glass is half empty, and some that it’s half full. I think the glass is just too damn big.” Today’s poem is inspired by that humourous sentiment, the primal tenacity of our well, and offered to Nature with the most profound thanks. Us LFM’s are sure it’ll rain again some day!

The Song of the Hand Dug Well

By LFM

I reached down twenty feet of well
Sixteen to dip my cup,
And in the dipping found four feet
Of water looking up.

The rain of Summer’s scarce this year,
But that’s no cause to cry,
Because my well is partly full
Instead of mostly dry.

The title of this piece carries forward from one I wrote back in April of 2014, and is motivated by fallout from my joyous efforts in restoring a very nice old scythe to service. It joined the LFM stable of steel about a month ago courtesy of the Esteemed Peter Thompson. Wooden snathed (the handle portion of a scythe is called the “snath”) with sensuous curves and fitted with a lively Austrian blade, its debut here has prompted me to much research that, up until now, would have been motivated more out of interest in the subject than practical application.

Speaking as a Bladesman by the broadest definition, and knowing that my audience contains a significant component of like mind, I’ve paused today to reveal three bits of Wisdom that, to my mind, hold comparisons speaking to the universality of steel, in all its incarnations. For your consideration Goode Reader, I believe each holds relevance to the realities of the world, and those of us who strive within it.

The first …

“Besides, even if one knew the exact number of stems per area, real life is often more colourful than an arbitrary classification based on head counts. Are the stems young and juicy, or are they old and tangled? Equally important, how sharp is your blade?” ~ Scythe Connection

How sharp indeed!

The second …

“… for every ‘rule’ or tradition I have for scythe design and technique, somebody someplace else did it a little differently and got the grass cut.” ~ David Tresemer

And the third …

“There are only two transgressions for which a blacksmith can go to Hell. The first is hammering cold steel; the second, not charging enough.” ~ From The Scythe Must Dance by Peter Vido, published in 2001 as an addendum to The Scythe Book by David Tresemer, 1981

Until next time.

This morning, and for reasons too convoluted to recount, I remembered an interview I watched back in my long lost childhood on a CBC Television show called Take 30. The interview was with Margaret Powell and was conducted by Adrienne Clarkson. Margaret Powell’s notoriety at the time arose from her memoir titled Below Stairs, based on her eleven years of service as a maid in one of the Great Houses of England. Her book  has been credited with inspiring a popular television series called Upstairs, Downstairs.
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Just yesterday, my friend the Esteemed Cowboy John laid down this challenge:

I used a word today that I simply love, and honestly don’t use enough. I don’t think it is used enough period. It is “feckless”. So I challenge my friends to USE this word today. Either in text or spoken. It is actually an easy word to use, though we don’t use it often.

I’m a day late, but I’m game.

As we age, we become less compliant, and this can be readily observed in the world. Those predisposed to compliance in perpetuity find this unsettling when they notice it at close quarters being expressed by people they know, and often feel entitled to intervene. Fuck them.

Some of us elevate our non-compliance to a High Arte, and it is to those I dedicate today’s poem. Oh, and John too, even if that might seem redundant.

Eschew the Feckless

By LFM

Who seeks to live Life free and dreckless
Needs must learn a way that’s techless,
How to mend lest he be mechless,
Eschewing all that’s mean and feckless.

Though critics caution Hyde and Jeckyless,
Even they may learn to heckless.
He is stayed from paths most reckless
Who fears his balls become a necklace.

A choice I’m disinclined to make, even as it becomes progressively more common. (LFM Photo)

Grohmann Knives (GK) designs and produces its excellent line of outdoor and kitchen cutlery from its factory outlet in Pictou, Nova Scotia. If there’s anyone who owns and uses a Grohmann knife anywhere in the world who can utter a substantive criticism of its quality and craftsmanship, he or she is a rare beast indeed, and as I go through the world in my travels, the sight of one of their characteristic pouch sheaths dangling from someone’s belt is a notably common thing. Even in this day where a set of nail clippers is deemed too dangerous a weapon to be permitted aboard a commercial flight outside of checked baggage.

A family run business, GK has been at it for more than 50 years with a history that stands as representative of all truly great success stories that had their genesis in the aftermath of the social meat grinder that was World War II. Old World craftsmanship meets turmoil and uncertainty and, with a family to protect and raise, finds a new beginning. As often as not, the outcome is a wonder to behold, and so it was with Grohmann Knives.

I give you this personal view without reservation, and most particularly so you will understand that the spirit of what follows is not one motivated by rancour. None of this is offered as a recommendation that anyone should steer clear of Grohmann Knives, but rather in the hope that it might serve as a wakeup call to the company’s management.

The net cost of my decidedly negative experience carried a price tag totalling $32.00 Canadian plus the 15% Harmonized Sales Tax (HST), so $36.80 CAD overall. Not an amount I would be inclined to quibble about considering the quality of the product I was wishing to purchase, but the manner in which the matter was handled as it made its way from sales staff and (allegedly) upward to the company President, should be an item of concern as it implies Grohmann customer service has, at least in my case, become contaminated with the same blasé incompetence that characterizes the way things are done in much of the business world today.

No.4 “Survival Knife” with sabre grind – click to enlarge (Source: Grohmann Knives)

My saga began last Autumn, and initially didn’t involve Grohmann at all. A knife design grew from an afternoon discussion with my Esteemed Friend Peter Thompson that was initially intended to be built from the ground up from a carbon steel blank. As our back and forth discussions progressed through into the new year, I found myself one day holding my Grohmann No.4 “Survival Knife” in my hand as a light bulb switched on in my head. The profile was perfect for what we had in mind but for a few characteristics that a nip here and a tuck there would bring into line with our vision.

I knew GK offered some of their more popular knives in the form of a kit that included everything required for the customer to build a knife to their tastes. I also knew they offered some of those self-same popular designs with two options that would be ideal for our project – carbon steel instead of stainless, and flat ground (the cross section of the blade tapers from the spine to the edge) instead of what GK calls “regular sabre grind” (the cross section of the blade is flat for some distance from the spine until it begins to taper toward the edge).

Checking the Grohmann website, I found that the No. 4 Survival Knife was available in kit form in BOTH regular sabre grind AND flat grind at the  price of $97.50 + HST for either variant. Presumably in stainless for both.

No.4 kit with flat grind blade, collected from the GK website on 5 June 2016. Click to enlarge. (Source: Grohmann Knives)

I noted that the No.4 knife in fully finished form sold for $130.00 + HST for both the regular sabre grind and flat ground versions, and that an option they called “custom flat grind” could be had for an additional $25.00 + HST. None of these prices turned us off in the slightest, and it appeared that the “custom flat grind” option might just be the ticket – a flat grind #4 in carbon steel. At this point, all help from the GK website ran out and there was nothing for it but to consult the company directly for answers and prices. (more…)

Mrs. LFM photo – click image to enlarge.

I grew up in the small but (then) prosperous town of  Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, in a house across the street from what was generally referred to as “the Minister’s lawn”. A part of the grounds of the Anglican Reverend’s residence, it was a beautifully manicured expanse of table top flatness, and came to be used by the children of Lunenburg’s “Old Town” as a place to express those sorts of childhood revelries as leave permanent grass stains on pants, and semi-permanent ones on the skin of knees and elbows.

Less well known, and lacking in any kind of generally accepted name all its own was what I called “the Lilac Tree”. In the botanical world, the Lilac is wondrous in its variety. I can’t lay claim to the kind of horticultural knowledge that might permit me to positively identify mine, but that doesn’t bother me because my relationship with the Lilac Tree was an emotional one transcending any need for such specificity.

She grew hard against the back wall of the Minister’s garage, facing the lawn on the side opposite the garage door his car went in and out of. She was elliptical in shape and had grown so her branches enwrapped a hollow space within, so through a small circular opening that had formed where the branches reconverged on one another, one could crawl inside and actually stand in a perfumed wonderland that resonated with the steady drone of bees. When not in bloom, the space was silent; filled with the scent of moist earth and green. Yes, green, for that colour has a scent well known to those with nose to smell it.

The front door of my house was about 50 yards or so from the Lilac Tree. I used to like to duck inside when nobody else was looking and for hours, read whatever book I had on the go at the time. A large branch that had grown from the earth back near the garage had travelled parallel to the ground as it thickened so it formed a natural bench for sitting on or use as a back rest, and the whole thing seemed custom built for someone like me. Naturally, I wasn’t the only one who knew about it, but everybody else used it as an easily predictable place of concealment for hide and seek games until they came to know better, and so I was the only one who spent any time there.

Every Spring, I remember eagerly awaiting the Lilac Tree’s scented come hither as the buds of her blossoms formed their clusters, and then slowly changed from green to a dusky purple and thence through blue to a deep pink. The end of the school year and the excitement of impending Summer mimicked Nature’s urgency as Birds returned to mate and raise their young, insects buzzed and flitted to their work, and wildflowers bloomed everywhere. Yet somehow the Lilac Tree was at odds with all this. She waited for just the right time and then, one glorious day I’d step outside and feel my soul filling up with her kiss. Her lusty blossoms beckoned, and I’d pay the Lady a call as soon as the schedule of a school boy would let that happen. In my memories, time held no sway for her, nor for anyone held within her embrace, and I look back on what seem to have been Lilac scented months, even though I know that could not have been the case.

Now, in the final year of my sixth decade of Life, I share a plot of land with three lesser though eminently honourable Lilacs. Shrubs really, and yet each shares an identical blossom and scent with the Lilac Tree of old so that in the past couple of weeks each has slowly released that same heady aroma that takes me back, and that inspired me both to tell you this story and offer, in closing, this small fragment of verse.

The Lilac’s blossom breathes aloud
Her heady scent to sing
A languid contradiction to
The fevered pace of Spring.

Mrs. LFM photo – click image to enlarge.

Everyone now living is the product of tough, and as necessary rough, people, whether your 21st century sensibilities like it or not. Those of my own memory and upbringing were the kind of stoic, hard working, hard swearing, hard drinking, won’t take shit from anybody kind of folks who abounded in those days. It may seem ironic to the lost generation, but all the aforesaid being true, there was no carnage in the streets because in a world of people who won’t take shit, very little shit gets offered.

What follows is not intended to prove myself a badass (it was high school folks), nor is it to glorify violent measures as the be all and end all of conflict resolution, in the school yard or anywhere else. Society has bought into the idea that no expression of taking a firm stance; by thought, word, or (Heaven forbid) deed; has any place in the world. In this day of “microaggressions” where we are expected to regard events through a hypersensitive and even “gendered lens”, we find a “safe space” wherein even a stellar student in innocent possession of a workplace tool but who forgot his pocket knife was still in his backpack after morning chores on the farm, can be effectively expelled in a zero tolerance knee jerk to such “implied violence”.

I graduated from high school in 1975, and by today’s standards, most if not all of the good I’ve done in life would never have happened due to a combination of a criminal record and prison time. In the time these events occurred, I was an avid and experienced outdoorsman, never seen dressed absent the Swiss Army Knife in my pocket, and the 3.5 inch Gerber Folding Sportsman hunting knife in a leather pouch on my belt. It was all good, to the point where I was routinely asked by Teachers and fellow students to to cut things, and on one occasion was actually called out of class when a Teacher sent one of his students to my home room door to request the assistance I and my knives could provide. Even back in those days, not everybody carried, but those of us who did weren’t looked upon as brigands and incipient serial killers. I mention this because my knives, present and ready to hand though they were in every case, played absolutely no part in what you are about to read.

When I was in high school, I attracted the attention of four bullies, each in need of what Marc MacYoung calls an “educational beat down”, or EBD, that I was called upon by circumstances to provide. The first was the ring leader of an entourage of cling-ons, the second a late bloomer who woke up one day deciding that his road to popularity lay through me. The third was just an asshole who blew in out of nowhere, and the fourth was someone I met at a week long Summer season seminar in New Brunswick to which I was sent on recommendations by several of my Teachers based on my being their darling.

All three scenarios began with name calling which I ignored. Inevitably, this was incorrectly interpreted as fear and weakness, and so it escalated to physical contact. While all of the events leading up to the day each abruptly ended were observed and registered by people in authority, nobody preemptively spoke to me about how I felt, nor did they approach the perpetrators to warn them off. In fact, I never asked them to, and to their credit, neither did they reprimand me in the clear aftermath of my own solutions.

I hit 6 feet tall when I was 11 years old. I was physically active in the extreme which, combined with being prepubescent, created me very spare of frame. My physicality then, while too fit and nimble to be described as scrawny by anyone who knew what they were looking at, was certainly skinny, and I towered over everyone even appoaching my age group from that point until the end of my high school career. It’s said the nail that sticks up will be pounded down, and I discovered being tall to fit that description. Unlike the nail though, I had the option of having a meaningful dialogue with the hammer. (more…)

“A man cannot understand the perfection and imperfections of his chosen art if he cannot see the value in other arts. Following rules only permits development up to a point in technique; to advance further the student and artist must learn and seek other knowledge. It makes sense to study other arts as well as those of strategy. Who has not learned something more about themselves by watching the activities of others? To learn the sword, study the guitar. To learn the fist, study commerce. To only study the sword will make you narrow-minded and will keep you from growing outward.” ~ Miyamoto Musashi, The Book of Five Rings (previously quoted here in Art, Science, Life, and Reality – Certified Organic)

The “About” page of his official website describes Itzhak Perlman as, “Undeniably the reigning virtuoso of the violin, Itzhak Perlman enjoys superstar status rarely afforded a classical musician. Beloved for his charm and humanity as well as his talent, he is treasured by audiences throughout the world who respond not only to his remarkable artistry, but also to the irrepressible joy of making music, which he communicates.”

If you were watching The Ed Sullivan Show on the evening in 1958 when he first performed for a North American audience at the age of 13, you’ll have no choice but to remember him. If you watched the movie Schindler’s List, you experienced Itzhak Perlman’s artistry whenever violin was heard in the score. Not one to limit himself to the classical violin sound, he’s even been known to keep more exotic company. (more…)

Plying my trade(s) in rural Nova Scotia exposes me to all manner of ordeals and sights you just can’t unsee. Oh, the panic that can’t be unpanicked!

Case in point, the photos that follow taken last week on departure from a client’s premises. I’d say they are located in a typical area of woods and fields, but that’s pretty much everywhere around here unless you’re perched on the edge of a cliff, in a swamp, or in the water.

Interpretive hint: This is woods and fields, and don’t forget to click on any picture you desire enbiggened.

Deer herd, 11 o’clock!

“It looks like trouble kids! Let’s run over to them ones wot look like they knows wot’s going on!”

“Hurry! It’s moving closer! And wot has it got in its pocketses?”

“Oh look! Grass!”