Big Tree, an Allegory

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away from here but still visible on Google Maps there was an average man living in an average house built in an average street, just like yours. He was a man who loved to make furniture in his garage. Every evening, he’d take a cup of tea out to the garage and sit in the cool concrete enclosure with his collection of ancient tools and an assortment of wood.

The man was not always a skilled craftsman. He’d begun his hobby very young, his none-too-bright parents giving him a saw and a hammer for his fifth birthday. After the cuts healed a little, he began to realize that the tools with which he’d hacked and beaten had a purpose. One day, almost by accident, he made a spice rack. His parents hugged each other and congratulated themselves on producing such a fine boy. The boy learned from books he’d taken from the local Library how to make dovetail joints, smooth wood with the grain, and conceal the tiny brass screws with craftsmanlike precision. As he grew in his knowledge, so his physical strength grew, too, until he was able to heft heavy hardwood planks about the room, and make exquisite tables, boxes, chests, cupboards, beds and chairs in the sawdust-scented haven he’d created for himself.

Of course, his parents bragged of their son’s achievements to their neighbours, and those neighbours bragged to their neighbours, until the whole town knew of the boy’s skill with wood. His reputation didn’t stop there. As he reached manhood, he was disappearing into his room each evening and coming out with the most fabulous furniture that had ever been seen across the entire land.

Despite those in power often being the last to hear about what is happening with the common folk, the King eventually heard about the young man, who could make furniture the like of which had never been seen in the history of his land. The King resolved to give the man a Royal Commission to create the biggest table the world had ever seen, so that the King could sit at its head and command the biggest dinner party ever held. He sent his Royal Bugler to blow a summoning sort of tune, and the man came. He did not speak when he heard the King’s Commission, but, rather, bowed deeply and left the room, still bowing, backwards.

The man was astounded. Such a task had never been attempted. He packed a small bag with some chocolate and coffee, and headed for the forest. In order to make a table of such noble vastness, he would need to cut down the biggest tree he could find, and turn it into planks of wood.

For several months he sought such a tree, with no small amount of hunger. It was as he was trying to catch a squirrel so that he could follow him home to his nuts that he remembered the Library. With a stroke of luck, he found his card intact, and went and took out the biggest book he could find. It was called The Mammoth Book of Freakishly Huge Trees. He looked in the index, under “B” for “Biggest”, and soon found his quarry. The biggest tree. Ever.

And so it was that the man awoke the next morning, and, with the biggest saw ever, cut down the biggest tree ever, to cut into the biggest planks ever, to make the biggest table ever seen.

It didn’t take long. The ancient giant did make a sound as it toppled through the forest, but the sound was the deep exhale of an old man, as he falls into permanent sleep. Relief. It took even less time to strip the tree of gnarled branches, each as big as the second biggest tree ever seen, and an entire ecosystem escaped quietly into the forest from the fallen canopy.

Still less time did it take to slice the giant into vast wooden planks, smooth off the coarse splinters and fashion the wood into the biggest, most beautiful, table the world had ever seen.

The King was overjoyed. He summoned his favourite courtiers from across the land, and held a banquet the likes had never been seen before, and were never seen again. During the banquet, the King lifted his massive golden ceremonial goblet to propose a toast to the master craftsman who had created this magnificent piece of furniture, but the man was nowhere to be found.

In his average house, in his average street, the man was troubled. He struggled to sleep, and lay awake, instead, thinking of the biggest tree being turned into the biggest table. As he lay tossing and turning, he had an idea. What if, from this day on, he made tiny furniture? He could save the land from becoming a barren place, and still do what he loved to do.

The next evening, the man slipped into his garage. He rummaged through offcuts of wood until he found what he was looking for. He took the small pieces of wood, all that was left of a now-extinct species of mountain willow, and made a footstool. It was perfect in form and function. But it wasn’t good enough. The man worked all through the night, making miniature jewellery boxes, lampstands and writing desks, until finally, all his wood was gone.

The next evening, he lay in bed again, tossing and turning. Once again, he had an idea. He’d make perfect tiny furniture out of trees he’d grown himself, so that everything he did was sustainable and he’d be exercising total responsibility. And so the next morning, he created a forest. He took seedlings and grafts, pots and bowls, strung the roots with wire and began to landscape the entire garage with his bonsai garden. The trees began to grow.

After a few years of patient pruning and shaping, the first trees were ready. The man took a tiny axe, and felled them with swift blows. Not wanting to waste time, he stripped them of their miniscule branches and microscopic leaves, and worked through the night once more. He made staircases and wardrobes, bookshelves and hatstands, until; once again, all the wood was finished. He stood, towering over the furniture, more beautiful than any doll’s house had ever seen, and wept. He was not satisfied. He took the remaining seeds from the bonsai forest, and planted another, even tinier forest. He made bonsai trees from bonsai seeds, and grew trees that were almost invisible to the naked eye. He spent years almost blinding himself trying to tend to his garden, and finally, when he was old and bent, and much smaller than he’d been in his youth, the smallest trees ever grown were ready.

He gathered the pots and bowls in his aching arms, and took them to the palace. The old King had long since died, choking on a peach pit one evening at one of the many feasts he held at his favourite table. The man placed the pots and bowls on the table and walked away. As he did so, he walked backwards. It was a vast room, and so, as he reversed, his fading eyesight first lost track of the pots and bowls containing the smallest forest ever seen, then, as he continued to limp painfully out of the room, the giant table he’d once made with his gnarled hands also grew smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until finally, it disappeared.

Cover Letter From Hell

RE: HONEST WORK

Dear Sir/Madam

I read with interest your advertisement on www.areyoudesperate.com, and would very much like to apply for the position. I attach a scanty and disjointed CV for your perusal.

In brief, I have been self-employed for several months now, but my employer has shown no interest in furthering my career prospects. It’s ironic, really- a former employer was funded in part by the United Nations, so I was UNemployed. Now I’ve gone lower-case. Before you get the impression that you can add –able to that word, I’d like to interject.

See, it’s been six months since I had a salary. You can imagine how that must be. Maybe. Think about it: How many months would you last before your painstakingly constructed universe fell apart if you were out of work? Well, I recognized that mine would have a sell-by date of perhaps two months, if I ignored the clothing account I’d opened in order to buy clothes. For work. Let it be said, that I was then, and remain, a hopeful, optimistic person. It has nothing to do with conceit, or self-deception, but I imagined that, given a diligent attitude and a winning smile, I’d quickly find another position.

And here I am, perhaps two or three hundred applications later. Unemployed. Of course, I made an effort to develop a sustainable income by spamming every single contact I had and reminding them, sometimes on my knees, only just managing to stop short of a cardboard sign, that I am a great writer.

Yeah. You’d think it would be easier? So much rubbish out there- so many campaigns cut and pasted from other ones, which weren’t that good to begin with; so much communication which appears to have been written by the same hard-working guy who writes instruction manuals for electronic goods. I can almost picture him, wishing he could use more adjectives, instead, having to tell people to connect wire-port A to machine cusp X, especially when neither of those parts are labeled in such a way in the plans, but there you go- that’s the thankless job of a writer.

Uh huh, you’d think it was easy to write, but it isn’t. Especially when the brief has more holes in it than a crocheted g-string, but I still love to do it. You know why? Because I had an affair. I used to do things like work behind a till in a bookshop, or check in cars to be serviced, but then my id seemed to take over. Bad id! I said, but ids are notoriously bad at listening, so it overruled me. It started to flirt with writing. An article here. A chapter of a book there. Nothing too serious. But, in the way of affairs, it caught up with me. Before I knew it I was maintaining two blogs, selling business writing, populating websites. It was as though I had a lifetime of wild oats I needed to sow, and didn’t care about the format or the context any more. Man. I just knew I had to write or be damned!

I’d looked at my expenses- you know- three children, rent, food and of course the usual debts we city-dwellers incur with our hedonistic lifestyles, and guessed at a figure I’d need to earn. I’m chuckling as I think of that, now, because I’d be happy with even half of that amount.

I digress. I’m impressed that you manage to stay sane in the position you are- having to discern with velour polo neck psychic powers the extent to which someone is employable from a CV. Are you kidding me? Mine looks like it was designed by dyslexic spiders. Hang on…

Sorry about that- homeless guy just knocked on the door, can you imagine! He wanted me to give him stuff. I’m tempted to ask him for his card in case I’m habitat-challenged quite soon.

Where was I? Ah. So you can pick up stuff from a CV, right? Well, I must have inadvertently added some typos. See, mine should read: multifaceted and experienced, but, judging from the lack of response, must actually read: mildly dysfunctional and smelly. I can’t understand why I’ve only ever had three responses after sending application after application.

I’d better not keep you. I suspect you have lots of emails to ignore, and facebook statuses (or is that stati?) to update.

Perhaps I’ll bump into you soon, but if not, I wish you well in your career. Feel free to keep my unglamorous tirade on file, for future reference.

Yours truly,

Scott

Please refer to cardboard sign for personal details.

New Tricks

He looked down in astonishment at the coil of steam that rose from his hand. Extending his wrist to examine it, he blinked twice at the wisps of smoke rising from the place where his trigger finger used to be. The round had spun shrieking through the calm morning and neatly removed it at the first knuckle, the heat of ignition blazing still hot enough to cauterize the wound as neatly as a surgeon trained in the civil confines of an urban teaching hospital could.

Instead of looking down to where the separated digit might lie, perhaps flexing in the ochre dust, his minded folded in on itself like a decorative napkin, hiding the silver-plated thoughts he should have been thinking. He caught a glimpse of an ancient man, legs crooked by years of the saddle, hunched into his stool on a shady porch. By the old man’s side a glass glinted, droplets of condensation chasing each other down the sides to the hand-shaped oak boards beneath. The old man was squinting at a piece of wood, methodically shaping it with a pearl-handled blade. His eyes were rheumy and seemed to shed permanent tears; weeping for a life gone, or a limited future. Who knows.

And as he stared inward at this old vision-man, he felt… nothing. Not fear, not calm- but maybe the absence of calm. The absence of everything.

Even as time regained its usual haste around him, he knew the old man was himself, an ancient container holding the brittle memory-remnants of a life and lifestyle now as forgotten as the stars which slipped in to an orange pocket each day at sunrise. Stranger still, the old man would never exist, for as he looked at the space where his pointing finger, his beckoning finger, his gouger and router used to be, a second round cored his scalp behind his ear, whipping around the inside of his skull like a deranged baker riling cream, until it had thoroughly erased all thought, memory and future from him, and burst out of his eye-socket, to lodge in a sign across the road. The sign read WE WELCOME ALL VISITORS (AND THEIR CASH).

Breadcrumbs

Of course it never works the way you plan it. If life followed some predictable road map into the future, with all of the distractions neatly set apart from the road so you could cruise past without stopping, you’d just not bother with it.

If you could tell what was coming up, and make sure that you had everything you need with which to master it, tame it, or overcome it, you’d never actually know what you could be capable of.

Perhaps it’s more like this: a haphazard scattering of crumbs in a darkened wood, a tantalizing trail which misleads you into thinking that you have your bearings. Abruptly, the trail ends: a flock of misshapen and random birds are pecking. Looking at you. Mocking you. Their gleaming red eyes challenging you- where to now, mister- where to now?

You have no choice but to take a rag, wrap it around your eyes, and reel blindly through the undergrowth. The security in doing this comes from having the knowledge, deep down, that somewhere in the lightless overgrown mass is a clearing. A couple of trees, felled by a forgotten storm, or a pond, circled by the tiny footprint signatures of those who come to drink in the night.

You may not know where you’re heading, but from the clearing, you can see a mountain in the distance. It won’t be easy to get there, with your head to the forest floor, but you know where it is now. Even if it takes the most circuitous route possible to get there, and you emerge at its foot with your shins barked by rogue roots, your skin alive with the light scarring of thorns, you’ll end up where you need to be, at that time, for that reason. It’s inevitable.

Insufficient Funds

It’s kinda weird the way people tell you not to panic. I can say that, because I do it myself. Sure, I get told it a lot, so maybe I’m more prone to it than others, but I think that panic is under-rated. If you’re doing a balancing act: sitting on a dodgy bicycle on top of a razor blade wired to explosives, it’s time to panic.

If you’re watching the shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho, then you don’t want to calmly encourage the woman to relax and meditate on her blessings, you want to scream at her. GET OUT! PANIC AND RUN!

If you happen, unluckily, to be tied down to a railroad sleeper with a runaway train heading for you, then it’s ok to feel more than slightly anxious.

I’m no stranger to the paralyzing effects of panic and anxiety, and of course you want your friends to keep dodging the bullets, but sometimes there just aren’t immediate options. You know you’re panicking when you are so muddled you can’t remember the words to the Serenity Prayer. Hmm. Serenity. I’m not sure I know what that is.

So today for me is a day to panic, a little like a startled furry creature in the headlights of an oncoming car. I’m hoping that some sensibility kicks in, and I dash to the freedom of the hedgerows lining the road, instead of running into the opposite.

I hear screaming can be therapeutic. Right?

Cusp

Sometimes it's actual nostalgia: a feeling that some ghosts from the past are still rattling chains in my head. Family times from childhood, places, songs, people. They sneak in with their compound memories, an echo of smells or photographs, of recordings or furniture. They are the husks of shed snakeskin, there and yet they exist only to show what has gone before. They are the moulds from which came the brass statuary of reality, and yet they are just plaster- broken. The shattered powdered mass cannot recreate the entirety. They are the abandoned burrows of earth-bound creatures, the shadows of objects in negative, removed from the sunlight.

Sometimes it's a feeling of nostalgia for that which may not happen, or just a daydream, slumbering in the possible or impossible future. Wistfulness is the warm outer-layer of hope, the maybe which keeps me placing one foot in front of the next.

Somewhere, between the past and the future, is where I hide- glaringly visible, and yet none of you here with me knows exactly where I've been or where I'm going. There are architects plans, the blueprints crackling in the breeze which lifts them aloft, sends them spinning crazily and unpredictably forward. The tumbleweeds left behind recede, rolling, bouncing into the ancient hills.

My Grandpa Was a Chocolate Bar

He was tall, wore glasses, and the photos of him for me are where the memories come from, rather than a sense that he was once flesh. I do remember snatches, perhaps even his voice, but he’s been dead for more than thirty years.

He was a successful businessman, running a family concern well and had great dignity. I’d say, based on the way his daughters reminisce, that he was a strict but doting father.

I think he’d only just retired to his hilltop home overlooking the River Tay in Dundee, Scotland, when he had a stroke that subtracted his reality from ours, and left him a series of fading memories. A favourite was the letters he’d write to his grandchildren at Easter- this three-piece suited gentleman- he’d write letters which had little drawings of rabbits to replace the word, and tiny sketches of zig-zagged eggs.

I remember my mum’s tears after the telephone call, and not knowing how to comfort her.

Oddly, now, the most powerful memory I have of him is the chocolate bar we found in the golf bag he left to my mum after he died. It was in one of the side pockets. Obviously there to satisfy a whim on the golf course- golf was an institution for him, being Scots. It represented, for me, the whimsical in his character- a man with a taste for the sweet, even when at his most focused.

It was a small chocolate bar. The brand name was Penguin- and it was a chocolate covered wafer supposed to fill the gaps during a tea break.

My mum kept it in a drawer next to her bed. Sometimes we’d rummage through the drawer, and look at it, smell it, trying to figure out what magic was contained in this- a snack created to be eaten but now containing mystical powers; a talisman.

That’s how life works. We work to create lives and lifestyles and memories, but in the end those memories belong to someone else, and we can’t control what they are. I’d like to stash things in a box which are important to me for my children to discover one day, but I think each of them will find their own talisman of mine to cherish.

Maybe you’re holding onto something special that reminds you most of someone not around anymore. I wonder what those things are…

(That's him, at the top, in the middle, in his Christening gown, around 1912)