Letters to the Editor
XOXO
Published Letters: 30 Editor's Choice: 3
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Musing
[Read the article: This blade slices, it dices]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I've got four knives. The one I never use is a very good Japanese vegetable knife. I keep it because it was a gift from my father, who has about a hundred knives. A former housemate of mine whacked up a chicken with the Japanese knife, leaving a couple of short cracks in the edge, and taking a little chip out of it. I was working in a coffee shop then, and one of my regulars was a knife-maker. I told him about the sad fate of my knife, and he asked to take a look at it. He did a really amazing job fixing it. He told me that it wasn't the more common folded steel, as I had supposed, but rather a sandwiched steel, a very, very hard layer, between two softer layers. It's hollow-ground on the left, engraved, with an antler ferrule. I expect that some day I'll give that knife to someone who would actually use it. The knife I use most is a six inch German chef's knife. I like it for many reasons. It's simple, clean, not fussy. I know it really well. I also have a four inch carbon steel paring knife, also German. That one belonged to my uncle, who died several years back. I had another four inch knife, but I gave it away, not needing two, and prefering to keep my uncIe's. I use his for some things, but I'm more likely to choke up on the blade of the six inch, for fine point work. My last knife is a twelve inch bread-knife, which I mostly use to split cake layers.
I am a handyman/carpenter, and some years back my neighbor, Mr. Wong, came to my shop with two scarred, uneven, pieces of wood. They used to be one piece, a cutting-board that his 95 year old father had brought with him from China, fifty-some years earlier. Qua cutting board, there was nothing special about it, even before it split. But of course, that wasn't the point. Wong's father wanted to know if it could be fixed. I put it back together.
The only knife in my father's collection that I covet is a Chicago Cutlery blade that he had when I was a kid, before he had the money to go shopping in Japan. It's in the back of a drawer some place in his fabulous kitchen, worn down to a quarter of an inch. From where I sit, that was my father's knife, and it took a hundred expensive and highly specialized blades for him to replace it. From where he sits, he started life in poverty, and now he can pretty much buy whatever he wants. We're each partly right.
I also have a machete, which belongs in the knife inventory. I mostly use it for brush, but it comes into the kitchen once in a while, when I need a cleaver. Colombian manufacture, with a neoprene handle. It's a poor stand-in for the one my grandfather gave me in Mexico, when I was seven. I snapped a third of the blade off that one while working in the woods, when I was sixteen or so, and the bake-lite handle cracked and fell off. I whittled a new handle out of maple, (with a Rigid case-knife, now long gone) and ground the broken end to a sharp curve. I really loved that tool. I lost it in the brush, up in Washington. Almost thirty years ago. Cest la vie. It was all I had from my grandfather.
I know all this can be trivialized. But so can anything, right?
My brother had a saying, "Never wear shoes that are smarter than you are." I'm not sure what it means, but I do try to keep it in mind.
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Tenure...
[Read the article: I'm a nude dancer trying to finish my Ph.D.]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My step-mother has it. For thirty-three years I've been listening to her brag on how she worked through grad school as a dancer. So have plenty of her colleagues. She's retiring on 100,000- plus a year in 18 months. It was a good investment all around. God bless The University of California, and struggling, earnest souls everywhere.