Felony Hobbying

I heard something a while back that I always liked – The problem with raising strong-willed, free-thinking adults is that you have to live with strong-willed, free-thinking children.

We have our share of that going on at our house, but really what we’ve mainly been dealing with is interests. So, ours goes more like, the problem with raising Son Number Two into a very interesting and widely-studied adult is that you have to live through all the projects. It’s not as catchy as the original, but it fits our situation perfectly.

Our first inclination that we might be dealing with a renaissance child was the crocheting in the second grade. He was good! There has been construction. There has been photography. There has been 3D printing. There have been internet sales and marketing companies. He’s owned multiple web domains. There has been electrical. There has been woodworking, wood burning (both art and arson), drones, painting, sculpting, drawing, photoshop, pebble art, cake making, and machinery design.

So, when he came to me last year and said he wanted to build a forge in our backyard, it was not a big surprise.

“Why do you want a forge?”

“So I can make knives.”

“Obviously.”

His first plan had a large homemade cinderblock forge inside an all-wooden Tuff Shed-type structure. He was going to put it where the old play structure currently sits, and he was either going to sell the play structure that he doesn’t own for the money to buy the shed, or make the shed out of the play structure. Details were loose, varied, and stupid.

I decided that catching a shed and two different neighbors’ fences on fire wasn’t one of my bucket list items, so I said no. Now, as every one of you who has raised or is currently raising a strong-willed, free-thinking child knows, that was not the end of the conversation.

I believe I heard the word “forge” about six million more times in the following four days. Just before my brain exploded, we settled on a small, propane, commercially-made, portable forge box that could go in our garage. Who needs to use a garage for cars, am I right?

And thus began the knife making. Like everything else he does, he dove headfirst into it and got pretty good, pretty quickly. He mixed in some artistic photography for his Instagram knife page, got a laser engraver for the handles, and pretty soon his friends took notice.

At this point, for legal reasons, I must tell you that everything I’m about to tell you is completely fictional, made up by me for entertainment purposes only. OK? OK.

One night at dinner, about a month after the forging began, Son Number Two says, “Oh, hey. I sold one of my knives today!”

My response was, “Hey, cool. To who?”

His mother, who is much smarter than me, asked, “Where?”

“To [name withheld for reasons that will become obvious]”

“Where did you sell it?” asked his very smart mother, again.

“My car. I had it in the trunk.”

“Where was the car?”

“In the parking lot.”

“The parking lot of school??”

“Yeah.”

When the steam stopped coming from my wife’s ears, she started to explain why that was not such a great idea, with words like “weapons” and “campus” and “expulsion” and “no college” and “dumbass” and a lot of other words.

I guess Number Two has some sort of death wish, because he actually interrupted her at one point to try the ludicrously false argument that the parking lot was not technically “on campus.”

It was at that point that I had to physically restrain my wife long enough for him to run.   

He made it out of the situation alive and un-expelled. Fast forward to a week or so ago when he got home from his spring break Europe trip, chaperoned by his favorite teacher and a few other school staff members. The group had taken a day trip to Geneva, so Son Number Two, of course, bought a few genuine Victorinox Swiss Army knives from the source.

He brought home a couple little ones for his brothers and a larger one for himself. I noticed as they were getting ready to go to school that he also had an extra.

“Oh, that’s [unnamed state employee’s] knife. I brought it home for them in my checked bag.”

“Well, that was nice of you. When are you giving it to them?”

“This morning.”

“At school?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I guess it’s a good thing your mom left for the day already. Try not to get arrested.”

(Again, I must reiterate, this is all fictional. Totally made up by me.)

I guess if one of your hobbies takes you down the path of High School Arms Dealer, it’s good to be in league with at least one or two insiders high up in the organization…

We really can’t wait to see what this kid does after graduation, and we have money set aside for the next chapter of his life to help him on his way.

Whether it’s used for tuition or bail still remains to be seen.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Whittling

We went camping this past weekend with two other families. All three families have only boys, so our campsite consisted of six sleep-deprived parents and eight single-digit-age, wild and excited boys. So we gave them all knives.

Two of the brothers had received their very own Swiss Army-style pocket knives from the Yosemite gift shop on their last camping trip, so they brought them along. This led to all the other boys clamoring to have a turn with the knives. Not wanting anyone grabbing for a fast moving blade, in the interest of safety, us dads dug through our camping gear and gave them each their own pocket knife, and taught them the manly art of whittling.

It went something like this:

“Dad, can I use your pocket knife?”

“Sure son.”

(Glare from wife)

“Hey, son, if that knife gets dull, you can use one of the daggers your mom is staring at me with.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Here, check this out. This kind of single-blade knife is cool, because if you put your index finger on this little lever and flick your wrist like this… bam, like a switchblade.”

(Icier, dagger-ier glare from wife)

“Never do that, though. Sorry, honey.”

As is so often the case, the fatherly approach to this type of situation differed slightly from the motherly approach. We dads thought the proper approach was to give our sons detailed instructions on proper knife safety and whittling technique, make sure the first aid kits were fully stocked, then sit back and watch them learn by doing.

As near as I could tell, the mothers’ approach was to attempt to keep them away from all sharp objects until they turn 25.

The dads finally won out, once we promised to take an active role in the refereeing of all knife-related activities, and soon all the boys were happily seated in their camp chairs around the fire pit, whittling like mad. We did, however, run into a few unexpected issues that we never got fully worked out.

For starters, we couldn’t get them to keep their elbows resting on their knees, allowing them to whittle straight out away from themselves. They kept leaning back and bringing the work closer to them and higher, ending up with the stick up by their face and the knife whipping rapidly past the tip of their nose.

They would also get easily distracted, but would continue to whittle, while their eyes wandered off to something more interesting beyond the fire pit. We kept having to say, “Either stop whittling or watch what you’re doing.” Again, the learn-by-doing method would have taught this quite a bit faster, but I guess the moms wanted to save the Band-Aids in case of a bear attack or something.

The kids would also regularly get up and walk around the inner perimeter of the campfire chair circle. It turns out that seven-year-old whittlers have little to no awareness of their surroundings, and neither do five-year-old walkers while in a campfire chair ring of whittlers. Most of our time was spent yelling, “Stop walking! Watch the knife! Be careful! Don’t stab your brother!” etc.

We had to make sure that the whittling remained the standard “sharpen the end of the stick,” or “get all the bark off the stick,” because some of the other things they came up with were not optimal. I found Son Number One with the stick pressed against the top of his knee, sawing a notch all the way around the stick with the knife blade. He was almost through when I stopped him. “Let’s try not to test out dad’s tourniquet skills on this trip, OK buddy? Besides, your mommy would faint and hit her head on a rock. We don’t want that.”

The next day Son Number One and Two both decided that they wanted to make miniature canoes out of ¾” diameter sticks that were 6” long. I just couldn’t see the interior of the mini canoe getting hollowed out very safely, and I figured our first aid kit would probably fall a little short if we had to attend to a knife sticking all the way through a hand. “Why don’t we just stick with ‘standard whittling’ instead, OK?”

For the boys, almost as exciting as being allowed to whittle was the prospect of simply having the knife with them in their pockets. My boys kept asking me if they could take the knives with them into the woods.

“No.”

“Aw, dad. Why not?”

“Because you are not allowed to whittle unsupervised, or more than 50 feet from the first aid kit, and whittling is all you're allowed to use the knife for. Why do you want it?”

“For bears.”

“If you see a bear, I would like you to call to me, instead of trying to take it on with a 2-1/2” dull blade… Unless we tied the knife to the end of a long sturdy stick…”

(Icy dagger glare from wife)

“Never do that, though. Sorry, honey.”

It was a fun weekend. The boys started to learn a new skill, and they all lived to tell about it. As a side bonus, the activity of whittling did serve to slightly lessen the requests to throw another pine cone on the fire, although wanting to throw the other guy’s whittling stick in the fire did result in a few near knife fights.

Even though their mothers refuse to believe it, they were in far more danger after the whittling than during, from running around with the sharp, smooth sticks they made. Our knives were pretty dull.

All in all, it was a successful trip. We came home with all eight boys with the same number of holes in their bodies as they arrived with, and by the end of the weekend they had successfully whittled hundreds of sticks, which was fun for them. They had also successfully whittled their mothers’ nerves down to sharp, raw edges.

Thankfully, we don’t whittle at home.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

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