It's better to hope than to mourn

When Blair Marvin started making and selling bread 15 years ago, she promised herself three things: She would never preslice it. She would never bake it in a pan. And she would certainly never sell it in plastic.
Amelia Nierenberg. NYT. 


When I stepped off the train ten years ago in this small Wisconsin town, I promised myself three things: I would never eat bananas. I would never talk about bananas. And I would never look like a banana.

But what with incipient scoliosis and an attack of yellow jaundice, I've had to do considerable backtracking, as I begin to resemble a Chiquita brand Genus Musa. That's just a high-falutin way of saying 'banana.' I'm addicted to fancy and convoluted language, probably because I make my living by carving tablets into living trees for the local yokels. That kind of activity breeds logorrhea. 

Before I started my tablet-carving career here in Wisconsin, I thought I was going to be a novelist. I wrote the Great Mormon Novel while living in Utah, and when I showed the first chapter to an old missionary companion he told me it was interesting but I used too many big words. Instead of thanking him for his honest input, I threw a banana at him and never saw him again. That why I've got this thing about bananas, I guess. I don't really go into it very deeply -- shallowness is all, as Shakespeare might have said if he ran around with the same crowd I did as a young man.

So now I look like a banana and am talking, or at least writing, about bananas. But I refuse to eat one. That, at least, is something I can still control.

What people mostly want carved into living wood on their property, here in the Wisconsin hinterland, is a family tree (pardon the pun.) You know: "Thomas Pedersen is the son of Alex Pedersen, who was the son of Olaf Pedersen, who came from Trondheim, Norway, in 1899, at the age of sixteen to shoe horses at the lumber mill." That kind of thing. 

It's a good living. Steady work. And people around here never stiff you on a job. I normally charge between a hundred and three-hundred dollars, depending on how intricate they want their tablet. I don't carve willows, mountain ash, or walnut -- those trees have very delicate vascular systems, and carving through the bark inevitably leads to the death of the tree. But oak, pine, and elm can withstand the whole Decalogue, and more, carved into their trunks with no permanent damage to the tree. I once carved the entire Declaration of Independence into a ginkgo for a guy who lived in a hillside cave and wore an NRA cap -- and that tree is still flourishing on top of his hill. The shortest tablet I ever carved, to date, had only one word: William. It was commissioned by a birdlike old lady who offered to pay me with pennies. I did it for free. 

If you really, truly want to know why I have such a thing against bananas, want to know specifically and accurately, it's because after extensive biblical studies I've come to the conclusion that in the Garden of Eden Adam and Eve were not tempted by a serpent -- that's a typo from the original Hebrew. They were tempted by a banana. Now, I don't generally advertise this theory of mine to anyone but close friends -- so I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention it to anyone else. If it gets back to Salt Lake I could be in hot water.

It's against the law to marry if you're a woodworker in Wisconsin. They tell me this law was promulgated a hundred years ago because of the dismaying number of casualties among lumberjacks -- something like one in ten was sawed in half. So I'm not married, preferring to make Jack the Ripper love to the local trees. That's kind of a sick joke, I guess, but I've used it several times on nosy Parkers and it shuts them right up.

I bought a five acre lot a few years ago. Moved a mobile home onto it. It's heavily wooded, so now I use my spare time to carve the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night" into every tree on my lot. I figure that when I get all the trees done it will become something of a tourist attraction. Maybe make me eligible for some kind of artistic grant or award, like the MacArthur Fellowship or something. And of course it will stand as a monument to me after I am gone. For maybe twenty year

I never tell my customers this, but when you carve into living wood the tree considers it a wound and eventually covers up the entire 'scar' in about twenty or thirty years. I guess if they asked me how long their tablet will last I'd have to tell them the truth.

 Still, in this life it's better to hope than to mourn.