01/11/2022
One of my lasting memories of Cuba was the apparent ingenuity it has taken to ‘make do’ for three, maybe four generations. Just look how 60+-year-old vehicles have been kept operable; yet an even more scaled-back mode, the tricycle-powered taxi, is as just a viable a mode of transit.
Alice Walker suggested to live frugally on surprise and the unexpected. There must be something to keeping the inner life tuned up instead of concentrating on the outer trappings for personal harmony.
While in undergrad, I gained carpentry skills working alongside my father. He attacked every challenging project with determination and ingenuity – no matter how late we had to work! He would not willingly let a project cause him to give up and when it did, it would be just enough kick in the pants to send him home that night to figure out a solution. In my early days of ‘apprenticeship’ he chided me about limiting the strikes to the head of a nail to avoid heating the metal, warping the nail.
The lesson was punctuated with the story of how his grandfather operated a saw mill in Tennessee. I always imagined the saw mill being like the big mills in the northwestern U.S., like those in Oregon and Washington.
Yet, in reality, the saw mill was his yard.
Great Granddad recycled salvaged wood from demolished barns. In doing so, he salvaged nails by painstakingly straightening each one of them and preserving a nail’s usefulness and value. He collected nails and sold them by the keg or by the pound. Great Granddad took a Model T Ford truck, removed three wheels, hoisted the truck onto blocks, jerry-rigged a wide leather strap to the remaining wheel and used the Ford’s engine to power a ripsaw.
Thus his sawmill.
He sold the salvaged wood to Knoxville College and The University of Tennessee for firewood. Great Granddad's first employment was his work as a stoker for the Tennessee National Railroad, feeding coal into the hungry belly of railroad engines. Between the fruits of the saw mill and his job on the railroad, he was able to send one of his sons to school to learn the science of embalming. That son later founded a funeral home and partnered with his brother, the money man. They went back and forth between Tennessee and Detroit, the Motor Capital, to purchase vehicles for their venture, and eventually settled there.
Salvage. Make do. Make the best of life. Dream a lot, measure success a little less.
Expect nothing; live frugally on surprise.
~Alice Walker
