Sooner or later, however, what we did with burrs was throw them at each other. If they get into a girl’s long hair, they can be a nuisance to get out, and don’t ever throw a whole ball of them. They can hurt. There’s another kind of burr, shaped like this:
We never found a use for them, but they were kind of nice to look at. By the way, in the old days, when my grandfather was a kid, these were used for finishing off homespun woolen cloth, to bring up the nap.
You may have noticed by now that the things in this book don’t come in any sort of order; that some of the things I’ve told you about are for indoors, some for outdoors, some for spring and some for fall and some for winter: as I told you before, you’re not supposed to do all the things in this book in order: when you’ve got the spool, build the spool tank. When you’ve got the burrs, make a burr basket. I think the best way to use this book is just to read it through once, and then put it somewhere where you can find it when you want it. And then one day, when you’ve got nothing special to do, hunt out an old handkerchief and make the parachute. Or find a button and make the buzz saw. But read the book through once. At the back, I’ll put an index so that you can find out what you want when you want it.
One thing you’re sure to have any old time is a pencil; and here are two things we always did with pencils, as soon as we owned a pocketknife. Right now, before I tell you about the pencils, let’s have a little straight talk about a knife. I don’t know how old you have to be before you get a pocketknife; that’s up to your father. If you ask your mother, it’ll probably turn out that she thinks you ought to be twenty-one before you can have one. I think you’ll be able to work out something reasonable with your father. Well, let’s assume you’ve got the knife. Now, a Boy Scout knife is swell for mumbly-peg, a game which I’ll tell you about later. But for whittling, and for all sorts of making things, a plain old-fashioned penknife is the best. Personally, I like a small knife. You can hold it better and control it better. It’s my opinion that all you need in a penknife is one, or at most, two blades. The kind I like has a horn handle, and the blades are shaped like the one on this page. This one is drawn about full size. (Of course you’ll never have both blades open at once—This is just to show you the kind of knife.)
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Now, here’s something else that you’re just going to have to argue out with your mother; I did with my mother, my kids did with their mother. A sharp knife is safer than a dull knife. A sharp knife cuts more easily, you don’t have to use as much force on it, and you can control it. Nobody can do good work with a dull knife—and ask any carpenter, nobody can do safe work with any dull tool.
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Now, it’s got to be a good knife to be sharp. Nobody can put a good edge on a poor knife. A good one will cost more than a cheap one, but it’s worth it. It’ll take a good edge, it will hold it, and it will last practically forever. When I was a kid, we all thought the only good knife was a Case knife. They still make them, they’re still good knives; there are lots of other good knives, but I know about Case. You should learn how to sharpen a knife. For that you need an oilstone. We used to sharpen knives by taking a flat stone, spitting on it, and then sharpening it, but it isn’t as good as an oilstone. There are lots of books that will tell you how to sharpen all kinds of tools. They’ll be in your library, but the best way is to get someone who knows how to show you. In any case, the reason I mentioned the Case knife is that ever since I’ve known about it, the factory has guaranteed that if you will send the knife back to them at any time, they’ll sharpen it and send it back to you. And they do a swell job.
Okay, that’s it about knives. Now, let’s say you have the knife and you know how to use it, and you have a pencil.
One of the things we did was to cut a thin strip at the top of the pencil. Then we took a pen and wrote our names or initials on it, very small, like this. I know that you can get pencils with your names stamped on them, but we didn’t have them then, and somehow it’s different when you do it yourself.
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Another thing we did was to decorate our pencils by cutting. Take one of the hexagonal pencils (hexagonal means six-sided, as a square is four-sided). These are usually painted yellow. Now, cut a very thin sliver, like this, so you’ve lifted off a little square of paint. Now on the side of the pencil right next to the side you’ve cut, cut another little square of paint that you can sliver off. Now the next side, and so on all around the pencil, making a checkerboard effect.
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Working the same way, sort of, you can make a spiral all down the pencil. Or maybe you have some ideas of your own.
By the way, in the spring and summer when you can find a green branch of some kind, you can do all these things and many more with the branch. You cut very lightly, just enough to cut through the dark bark, and when you peel that off, you see just about the whitest white you’ll ever see. We used to make walking sticks out of these branches, but we never really used them for walking. It was just to make designs in the bark.
If you can find a willow tree in the spring, you can make a whistle out of a willow branch, but you’ll have to get a book from the library telling you how, because I never could make one.
One of the things I found out when I was writing this book was that an artist can’t draw a picture of something without seeing it. I talked my wife into doing the drawings, and I’ve spent about a month now in making all the things in the book so that she could draw them. Fortunately for me, I was doing this in the fall, and I could tell her that the reason I couldn’t make a willow whistle was because the only time to make willow whistles was in the spring. If you want the real truth, I never even knew a kid who could make a willow whistle. But there were books in the library that told how to make a willow whistle, and I used to try. The only reason I’m even mentioning it is that people I’ve talked to claimed they knew a kid when they were kids who was able to make willow whistles. Maybe I’m just a dope about willow whistles and you’ll be very good at making them. But everything else in the book I’ve made. I made them when I was a kid, and I made them again as a grownup, and they work. This is a guarantee.
If you don’t know what a willow tree looks like, go to the public library and get out a book about trees. You’ll notice that all through this book, I advise you to go to the library when you want to find out something. I think just plain going to the library and getting out a book is a swell thing to do. It’s something to do, when you’ve got nothing to do, all by yourself. It’s a thing I still do when I’ve got nothing special to do. I just wander around until I find a book that looks interesting; let’s say, a book about ship-building, or rockets, or a story by some author I’ve never heard of before. Now, chances are I’ll never build a ship, or ride in a rocket, and maybe I won’t like the way the author I never heard of writes. But it’s interesting to know how someone else builds a ship, or plans to fly in a rocket, or how the author feels about things.
Now, as long as we’re talking about knives, let’s talk about mumbly-peg. This is a game you can play any time of the year it’s not too cold or too wet to sit on the ground—which means it’s really okay for any time except when there’s two feet of snow or a flood.
This is the game you play with a Boy Scout knife. There’s a long thin blade in it with a ridge along one side.
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The blade is called an awl, and it’s made for punching holes in leather and things, but when I was a kid, that blade was a mumbly-peg blade. Your father may have called it something else—I kind of remember some kids who came from another town calling it munjigo-peg, but
it’s the same game. I’m sure, just the way it was called a different name in different places, it’s probably played a little differently in different places—but here’s the way we played.
Sit down on the ground. Open up that awl blade; hold the knife flat in your palm. The idea is to flip the knife up, so it goes and sticks in the ground.
That’s the first thing in mumbly-peg. Learn to do this one first, and you’ll get an idea of how the knife balances and how high to throw it, and how to get your hand and knee out of the way. It’s supposed to stick in the ground, not in you. Incidentally, that’s another reason for using that particular blade. You notice that the tip is rounded and it doesn’t have a cutting edge on it. Also, playing mumbly-peg is not the best thing in the world for a knife blade, what with hitting pebbles and dirt, and this blade is not sharp to begin with, so it can’t be dulled, and that ridge along the edge strengthens it, so it won’t break the way a regular knife blade might.
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Now, if you’re playing with another guy, you choose up to start. One of you flips the knife from the palm of the hand. If it sticks up right in the ground, that guy goes on to the second thing. If the knife doesn’t stick, the other guy gets a chance to flip it from his palm. If it sticks, he goes on to the second thing. If it doesn’t, it goes back to you and you try and so on. This is the way it goes on all through the game, except for one thing which I’ll tell you about in a minute.
The second thing in mumbly-peg is flipping the knife, same way, only from the back of the hand, like this:
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Now here’s the thing I said I’d tell you in a minute. Suppose you have flipped it, and it stuck, from the palm. You go on to the second thing, the back of the hand. Suppose it doesn’t stick when you flip it from the back. Then you have a choice. You can take a second chance doing it from the back. If it sticks, you go on. If it doesn’t, the knife goes to the other guy, and when it comes back to you, you have to start at the beginning. This may not seem like much of a gamble to you now, but wait until you’ve done ten things, and you have to make the choice between trying it again, or going all the way back ten things to the beginning.
I’ve been talking to people about mumbly-peg and some of them say that when they played you had to reach at least the high dive (that comes later) before you got a chance to risk—that’s what we called taking a second chance, we said we’d risk. Some other people say that they couldn’t risk until they got to pennies, which comes later too, and still other people can’t remember. I’m one of those other people: it seems to me the people who say you can’t risk until the high dive are probably right. You can make your own rules about this.
Okay; after the palm, after the back, this comes next: you make a fist, with the fingers up. You lay the knife in the groove between the tips of your fingers and the fat part of your hand. You have the blade laying over the thumb, and the idea is to bring the hand around in a circle, and stick the knife in the ground. You have to do this first with the right hand, then with the left hand. This one is hard to describe, and it sounds hard to do, but strangely enough it’s one of the easiest.
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Next, very much like the one above except that you bring your two middle fingers down, your two end fingers sticking out, the knife as in the drawing.
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This one you do right and left hand.
Now, remember, each time you get your choice of taking another shot at it if you miss, with the understanding that if you miss again, the other guy gets the knife and when you get it back from him, if and when he misses, you have to go all the way back to the beginning.
Next one is like the two before, except that you just lay the knife flat on your palm. To be sure the knife doesn’t slip off, you have to bring your hand around quickly, and that’s why this one comes after the two before. You’ll have, by then, an idea of how to swing your hand. Incidentally: with these right- and left-hand things, they’re all one. If you miss, on the left hand, next time you do it you have to do right and left hands.
Here’s another place where the people I’ve been talking to don’t agree. Some of them say sure, they remember this one, others say they don’t. I think sometimes we did and sometimes we didn’t. You see, in the days when I was a kid, you learned mumbly-peg from another kid, and the rules you learned were his rules. If he came from another part of the country, he taught you the way the kids played there: nobody, so far as I know, ever tried to write down the way to play mumbly-peg until I got stuck with the job. And believe me, the last thing in the world I want to see is an official rule book of mumbly-peg, or mumbly-peg leagues or championships. You can leave this one in, or take it out. It’s your game, and you play it the way you think is right. Just be sure that when you play it with another kid, you’re both playing the same game.
Now: particularly when you’re doing the ones that mean you have to flip the knife over sideways, make sure the other guy is sitting across from you, not next to you, so he isn’t in the way if the knife slips: and if you’re the other guy, make sure you’re not sitting in the way. When we were kids, we used to play it squatting, not sitting, but that’s because when we were kids, if we came in with our pants dirty, we caught blue blazes. With the dungarees you kids wear, I don’t know how anybody could tell if they were dirty.
The next one is pretty easy, sort of a breather after the hard ones. It’s done standing up. It’s called the high dive. For this, you put the point of the knife against the fat part of your hand, the little pillow of your thumb. You balance the han-dle back against your finger, and then tip the knife over so that it flips over and into the ground.
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The next one is a real cinch. I really don’t know why it comes into the game this late, because you have to try pretty hard to miss this one, but this is where it comes all the same. It’s called through the well. All you do is make a circle with the thumb and index finger of your left hand, and just drop the knife through. Okay now, the next one is called pennies. You take the knife by the handle, rest the point of the blade on your first finger, put the first finger of the other hand on top of the knife, and flip. Same thing with point of blade on second finger, third, pinkie. Right hand first, then left hand.
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The next one is called nickels. You take the knife by the blade between your thumb and first finger, and stand up. You flip it. Then between your thumb and second finger, then thumb and third finger, then thumb and pinkie. First right hand, then left hand.
Pennies and nickels are kind of tough, and very annoying, and it’s here that you’ll be tempted to take your second chance and miss, and find yourself all the way back at the beginning, but it’s also where you’ll find you do it better if you keep on going, there’s a kind of rhythm to it; and it’s quite a choice which to do.
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All through the game, by the way, if you hit a pebble, it’s a free shot, and I imagine there will be arguments about whether it hit a pebble or not. The only advice I can give you is don’t holler it was a pebble if it wasn’t, and if it was keep on hollering until you win. The other thing there will be arguments about is this: Sometimes the knife won’t stick straight up. If it leans over, this is the rule: if you can get two fingers under it, it counts.
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The reason why there’ll still be arguments even with the rule is that sometimes it looks as if the guy is ootzing the knife up with his two fingers. It mostly looks that way when it’s the other guy, rarely when it’s yourself. Anyhow, this argument, like all arguments with your equals, is something you’ll learn to straighten out by yourselves.
Now that the argument
about the argument is over, we go to Tony Chestnut. If you break that name into pieces, it becomes toe, knee, chest, nut.
Sitting down, you put your heel on the ground, the knife on your toe, like this.
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Kneeling on one knee, the other like this, the knife like this, is knee.
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Chest is just the way you think.
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Nut is just what you’d expect. Use your forehead.
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And I expect that without my telling you, you have the brains to know that you have to lean over when you’re doing chestand nut so that the knife sticks into the ground, not you. But since I’m not sure whether you have the brains or not, I’ll tell you. Well, what do you know? I already did.
Now the next thing in mumbly-peg is Wind The Clock. You hold the tip of the blade between your thumb and index finger. With the index finger and next finger of your other hand, you hit the handle of the knife so that the knife whirls around in the air and sticks in the ground. This one is played standing up and is pretty tough to do. The reason I don’t tell you how many times the knife whirls around in the air before it sticks in the ground is because I don’t know. And if I did know, it would be different for me and for you and for your friend Charlie, because we’re all different heights.
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Next comes Spank The Baby. This is very much like Wind The Clock, and some kids used to do one or the other, and they used to call it one or the other. We did both. What we called Spank The Baby was to put the handle of the knife in your left hand with the blade pointing toward the right hand. Hit the blade with the index finger of your right hand so it flips up and over and in.
How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself Page 2