I don’t remember much about my great-grandfather, my grandad’s dad, as I only met him once when I was about six years old. He died when I was 9, so I never got to see him again after that. We never called him by anything other than Clyde, which was his name. For years I thought Clyde was simply another name for Grandpa. It seems when he got married and they had their first child, he didn’t feel he was old enough to be a father, so his children always called him by his name. When his grandchildren were born, he didn’t think he was old enough to be a grandfather, and so they also called him Clyde. Of course when the great-grandchildren started showing up, it was the same story.
It was about a 6 hour drive to his house, so we didn’t go often. In fact, that one trip when I was six is the only one I can remember. Clyde was an avid fisherman, fishing every day as long as the weather was agreeable. He was also a dedicated whittler. Because of these two hobbies, Clyde had an impressive collection of knives. I was too young at the time to really appreciate all that he had, but I knew that whenever he handled a knife, he knew what he was doing.
Every evening as the sun was going down, and everything in the town was retiring for the evening, Clyde and all the other old men in that little section of town would gather at the town square where they would all sit around on the wooden benches and whittle till there was no more light to see by. Each man would show up with his pocket knife and a handful of twigs, and as they chatted the evening away, the shavings began to fly.
While most would just whittle a stick down to nothing, and then begin on the next one, there were a few who would pick up a stick, turn it gingerly in their wrinkled old fingers as if pondering one of life’s great mysteries then, without hesitation, each man with methodic slices of his knife would begin to uncover whatever riddle he felt had been buried deep in that tiny piece of wood. Oh, what mysteries they were. Where most would have seen just a dried up old stick, these old men were able to find birds, dogs, boats, and just about anything you could imagine.
At the end of the day, when all the men finally sauntered home, there was nothing left of the day but a pile of shavings a foot deep. One could almost see the day’s problems, troubles, and anxieties left in that pile of shavings, left there to be blown away in the wind.
You don’t see that any more. Most boys of today wouldn’t know how to just whittle a stick into a pile of shavings, much less be able to carve out some representation of real life. I remember those days fondly, knowing that they are probably gone forever. If only we of this generation were able to see deep into the meat of those twigs laying around and see something that is there, just waiting to be opened up to the world.