How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself (12 page)

Silly? You bet. But sometimes it's fun to be silly, and didn't you laugh just the other night when the man on television put on a funny hat?

That reminds me of another kind of silly thing we did. We called it owl-eyes. You need another kid, or a docile parent, for this. Put your nose up against his, and your forehead up against his. Both of you close your eyes, one of you or both of you count, “One, two, three, owl-eyes.” As you say “three,” both of you open your eyes at the same
moment, and I'll guarantee you'll see owl-eyes. I just got to wondering what would happen if you did this all alone, by pressing your nose up against a mirror instead of another kid. I went and tried it, just this minute. It works, so this
is
something you can do all by yourself.

In the summer, in my part of the country, late in the summer and right on into the fall, there's a plant growing all over the place wherever there's a brook or a stream or a lake. It's called jewel weed, and it's easy to find by looking for the orange flower. It's a real pretty plant, and in the late summer and early fall, in addition to the flowers there's a little green pod that grows on it. It looks like a tiny green banana.

Well, if you find the plant, and if you find the pod, and if you squeeze it
very
gently, you'll find out that it may look like a tiny green banana, but it behaves more like a tiny green banana-shaped bomb.

I'm sure all of you have seen pussy willow one time or another, and I'll bet a hat that there isn't one of you, really, who at one time or another hasn't stroked one of the buds, because they're so exactly like a kitten's fur. Here's one of the things I did when I was a kid that I don't think I would have liked another kid to watch me doing. It seemed a little childish to me. But I did it, and I had fun doing it, all the same. You can take a knife, and slice right through one pussy willow the long way. Get a little piece of paper, and glue that half down. Then cut the tip of the other half of
the bud, the short way. If you glue that on the paper right next to the first one, can you see what you've started to make? Looks sort of like a bee, doesn't it. Well, with a pencil or a pen, draw in the legs. You can make it as simple or complicated as you like; you can—here we go again—go to the library and see what a bee really looks like, or you can go take a good look at a real bee, if there are any around, and you can make the pussy-willow bee just like the real one.

Or, if you like, cut wings out of cellophane or paper, and make up a new kind of bug. Maybe you'll have an idea how to make a totally different kind of animal. A lady was telling me the other day that when she was a kid, they used to draw a fence on the paper, glue the pussy willows on, draw tails and whiskers—and there you have pussy-willow cats sitting on a fence.

I know this sounds goofy, but if you can get a piece of wood and ten pins you can make a piano. Oh, not a big piano like the one you have. You'd need a lot more wood and pins for that. This is a pin-piano, and it's a musical instrument, and it plays very
piano
. The word piano means soft. The real name for a piano is pianoforte, and all it means is an instrument that can play loud or soft. Well, this is a pin-piano and it just plays soft. All you do is stick the pins into the piece of wood, each one a little further in than that first one.

If you take a nail and hit the pin, you'll hear a certain note. By pushing the next pin in a little further, you'll hear a higher note. And so on. Tune as you go, “do re mi fa sol la ti do.” But that's only eight pins. Why did I say ten? Because you're going to bend at least two of the pins trying to get them in to the right depth. We always did.

When we were kids, we read in books about making cigar-box guitars and fiddles, but I must say they were never very successful, and these days, most cigar boxes I run across are made out of heavy cardboard. That's a shame, because the cedar wood they were made of was just the right size and thickness to make all sorts of things out of wood, and in addition, cedar wood has such a wonderful smell. Coupled with the cigar smell, it was just about the best smell in the world. But some cigars are still packed in cedar boxes, and if you can get ahold of them, you'll find the wood just the right thing to make many of the things in this book. Also, they're held together with little tiny nails which are just the right size for cigar-box wood, to go through and not split. The way to get the paper off is to let the wood soak in water until the paste is dissolved, after you've carefully taken the box apart and saved the nails. You can hold the wood under water by putting something heavy on top of it. If you do it in the
washbasin in your bathroom, the handiest heavy thing is your tooth-brushing glass filled with water. Once the paper is soaked off, it's sometimes a good idea to put the wood to dry between paper towels or newspaper, with a heavy book on top, to keep the wood from warping.

As I say, the cigar-box fiddles we made never worked very well, but I can tell you an easy way to make a musical instrument that works. I know it does, because I made one a couple of months ago for one of my kids. Get a big empty tin can, the kind that has a top that comes off all in one piece, like a coffee can, or maybe, like me, you'll be lucky enough to find an old beat-up canister that your mother's through with, the kind that she keeps flour or coffee or sugar or salt in, the kind that has a lid that fits. I don't really think it's even important whether it has a lid on it, but that's what I used and it works pretty well. I also found an old yardstick a paint store had given me, but any long thin flexible piece of wood will do. Punch a hole in the top of the can. You can do this by using a nail and a hammer. Get a piece of thin wire; if you or someone in your family or one of your friends plays the guitar or the mandolin or the ukulele or the violin, and they've got an old music string they don't need any more, that will do fine. Whichever you get, tie a knot in one end of it, or if it's too stiff to knot, tie it around a little piece of wood, so that you can thread it through the hole and pull rightly on it, without it coming through the hole. Now take the yardstick and drill a hole in that, too. Take the other end of the yardstick and put it against the side of the can, wind around the can with masking tape or adhesive tape or any
strong sticky tape you have. Now bend the yardstick like a bow, but just a little ways, and thread the other end of the wire through the hole, and fasten that end of the wire down with tape, or tie a knot in it, any way you like so that the wire keeps the yardstick bent in a bow.

If you'll pluck the string, holding the whole thing by the yardstick in your closed hand, bending the yardstick into more or less of a bow, you'll produce a kind of ba-
voom
noise, which sounds very much like some of the noises you've heard on television when the man with the checkered suit has had one drink too many. You can also, by bending the yardstick more or less, play a tune on this—more or less. If you want to try different things, just take a rough stick and use it for a bow, like playing the violin, instead of plucking, and you can get a still different kind of noise by hitting the string with a stick while you bend the yardstick back and forth. I don't know what the name of this is. It's just a ba-
voom
thing.

If you live in the part of the country where they grow lots of corn, I've been told and I've seen pictures of a thing that looks wonderful to me; a cornstalk fiddle. Where I grew up, they didn't raise corn, and so we never made them, so I can't tell you how, but maybe your father or your uncle or your grandfather knows.

While you're talking to your grandfather, maybe he still knows how to carve peach-pit monkeys. My grandfather did, and he also knew how to get the whole peel off an apple in one long strip every time. It's pretty hard to do, making a peach-pit monkey, so hard I'm not sure a book can tell you how to do it. I know it's too hard for me to tell you in a book, but I can tell you how to make a peach-pit basket, and a peach-pit fish, and a peach-pit turtle. Save the peach pits as you eat them, and get them as clean as you can by gnawing, and by pulling out the little threads that are left with your fingers. When you've got it as clean as you can, put it away and let it dry. Since peaches come in the summer, and carving things from peach pits is an indoor thing that you can do in the winter, leave them until they're really dry. When they are, pick out a good big one to start, because it's tricky work at best, and the bigger the pit, the easier for beginners. My guess is that if you have any tools at all, you have a coping saw. (Maybe you call it a jig saw.) With the saw, make one cut, just on the side of the little ridge, from the pointy end of the peach pit to about half way down. Then another cut, same way, on the other side of the ridge. Then another cut from the side
of the peach pit to the first cut, same on the other side, so that your peach pit looks like this from the narrow side.