On Carving a Spoon

The crafts and the works of artisans are the purest and most difficult things I know, but carving a spoon is easy—that’s how my grandfather made it out to be. Every Christmas, he'd spend time hidden away in his garage and come back hours later with a spoon in his hand.

When I turned seventeen, he let me watch. It was the first time, and the only. Tucked beneath the cardboard boxes and scattered water gallons was a small desk with tools placed meticulously in order, one-by-one. He sat me on the stool besides him, and he put a finger to my lips, and he said to me, half-whisper, half-wink:

You want to know how to carve a spoon?

First, you leave your house.

This is the first step, and the hardest. You pack up some of your necessities into a small burlap bag: your ax, your ruler, your knife, and maybe an orange, or an apple, or whatever you grab first, and you haul it over your shoulder, hanging. There’s an excitement in your heart as you place each item, feeling their smoothness, their roughness, their texture. Your mind wanders—and, for a second, time speeds up around you, and you are there, in that forest, the trees above you, making up the sky, the brown stump logs by your feet, shaded, perfect, in that little secret area of the earth. The memory hangs in the air temptingly and it does not last long before you’re back again, straddled by the earnest present. You'll be at the door at that point, steps away from freedom—you must not look behind you. 

Bear the temptation of the dent in the wall, the garlic hanging by strings, the pictures on the fireplace. You’ll be begged to put down your bag and sit on the couch; save it for another day—or worse, buy a spoon from the store—but you can’t. Tell yourself you need this. Turn, and face the sky. Reach out your hand, let the sun kiss it, warming your frigid fingers. And when you’re ready, step forward. It’s all you have to do, but it is hard, he warned. Many people are not able to take this first step.  

Then, you find the wood.

You’ll be surrounded by trees. Giant things, billowing out like pillars holding up the sky. The grass kneels below them, and every natural thing seems to bend to their will. Their sprawling branches will hold up the air and you’ll feel as if you're suffocating. Just remember, as their chill shadow grazes your tiny back, that they are your gods in the valley of death. 

The wood can’t be too small, too big. You need to feel it out with your fingers, feel it out with your bones, something within you—instinct—that’s what needs to touch it. Once you find it, you’ll know. You’ll feel that tug as if you were born just for this moment. It’s like your molecules spill into one another, churning together, becoming something new. Your throat will feel tense, and you’ll feel something grapple at your vocal cords, trying its best to crawl its way out of the shell that you are. If it bites at you, that's the sort of wood you need to find. Well, he laughed, I’ve always thought you and I’ve had sharper teeth. 

And once you’ve acquired that wood, he said, and he pulled me in towards him to show me this part, you must learn to understand it. He held the wood in his hands and he traced it carefully, every nook, every groove, every cranny; he held two fingertips to it searching for the pulse of life in between the cellulose and bark. He said sometimes it would reveal to him in a tiny whisper where his own heart lay, somewhere between muscle and fat.

And when he was finally laid to rest, I stuck one of his spoons right up in his dirt, facing towards the sky.

To carve a wooden spoon, you need a knife, an ax, a block of wood and some dedication. Loyalty, focus. Fear, worry, dread–hateful, angry thoughts and a quiet soul. To carve a wooden spoon, you must be human. You must be willing to chip a couple nails, to notch your skin with dark scars, to be happy with yourself if it all turns out like shit, because most of the time that's what it'll come out to be.

When I came home after the hospital, his garage was empty. No water gallons, no cardboard boxes, no smell of wood and cologne. Just his empty desk, the light filtering through the window beaming a spotlight onto his old carving station. I sat there for hours staring at the block of wood, wondering if it’ll ever come out to anything at all. The desk was primed for surgery, tools neatly placed after check after check after check. 

And so I gulped, and so I paused, and so I thought, and so I ran through all the scenarios and mistakes I possibly could have made, placing the knives up and down again.

Before he died, I asked him what to do if I couldn’t anymore–if I looked at the block and I felt nothing at all. 

His eyes were closed, and he filled the room with the cold arid pressure of nothing. He looked a little like a puppet tied up in strings, half folded in on himself, but I think I saw a little grin behind his mask, because he knew damn well he entrapped another.

Then, I suppose–he choked–you place it down, you open the door back into that wilderness, and you search for a new wood block. 

So I gathered up all my belongings into a small little burlap bag—my pen, my journal, and a half-sliced apple—and I gazed into the wilderness, determined to suck the marrow out of life. I didn't look back.