Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [89]
You can make your own list of the ten greatest inventions of all time but leave a place for the wastebasket.
Wood 193 Wood
It was almost dark when I got to the country last weekend but I couldn’t keep from going up to my woodwork shop and turning on the lights for a look around before I unpacked the car.
The sliding barn-type door rumbled on its wheels as I pushed it open wide enough to walk in. Even before I hit the light switch, I loved it. The blend of the fragrance of a dozen kinds of wood went down into my lungs with my first breath of the air inside. The smell had been intensified by the whirling saw blade as I’d shoved the wood through it the previous Saturday. The teeth had turned the kerf into tiny sawdust chips, and those thousands of exposed pores had been exuding the wood’s fragrance while I’d been gone all week.
My shop is equipped with good tools but there is nothing merely good about my wood. The wood is magnificent. I’ve owned some of it for twenty years and will, in all probability, never have the heart to cut into a few of the best pieces.
I sat for a minute on a little stool in front of my workbench. It suddenly struck me as death-sad that in two weeks, three at the most, we’d close up the house for the winter and I’d have to lock up and leave my wood. It would lie there alone all winter, the great smell that emanates from it gradually dissipating into thin air without ever being smelled by a human being. Such a waste.
I looked at my favorite piece of walnut, the one taken from the crotch of a hundred-year-old tree.
“What are you going to make out of that?” people ask me when I show it to them.
Make out of it? They don’t understand. It already has been made into one of the most beautiful things in the world, a wooden board.
Look at it! Its grain and the pattern of growth are as distinctive as a fingerprint and ten thousand times prettier. Its colors are so complex they do not even have names. Brown, you say? Are there a thousand colors named brown?
My production of tables, chests, chairs and beds has been severely limited over the years because of my reluctance to cut a piece of my wood into smaller pieces. I have nine cherry planks twenty-five inches wide, fourteen feet long and an inch thick. There are any number of things I could make out of them but I like them better as boards than I would as furniture. To me, they’re already works of art that exceed anything I might make out of them.
I wish there were an American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Trees. Too many people are using wood to heat their homes. I hate to see an oak or maple log sawed into eighteen-inch lengths and then split for firewood.
A piece of oak or maple, walnut, cherry, even simple pine is more beautiful to me than any painting. From time to time, I’ve suggested we might replace some of the paintings in our living room with pieces of wood from my collection. I’ve had no luck with the idea.
It would be relatively easy to attach little eye screws to the backs of boards so they could be hung like pictures from the living room walls. I wouldn’t trade my cherry boards for Whistler’s Mother.
When I first began to like wood, I was attracted to exotic species. Wherever I could find them I bought teak, rosewood, padauk and a wide variety of mahogany. My taste in wood has become more sophisticated now, though, and I find those exotic woods to be out of place in America, so far from where they grew. Now I look for good pieces of native American hardwood.
A good piece of wood is beautiful and strong and it does what you wish to do with it. Do you wish to make a chair? A table? Perhaps you are skilled enough to make a violin. Maybe you want to build a house, a seesaw, a boat or a fence.
I turned out the light in the shop, filled the cart with the junk in the car and went down to the house. It’s going to be hard to leave my wood for the winter.
An All-American Drive
In 1966 I sold a magazine article for $3,500. It was what people used to call “found money,” because