Idle Hands

Sonoran Dessert model makingMy parents raised me to work hard.  This was not done by heavy discipline or threats.  They raised me by example.  My mother and father worked harder than anyone I knew.  Every day dad would get up at 3am to commute to the city and open his garage, work the whole day and arrive home at 8pm in time for dinner.  Every day my mom would wake six kids, get them off to school and then prepare for her 12 hour nursing shift.  On weekends both worked tirelessly on home projects, kid projects and family gatherings.  I would ask to help but the process of these affairs were whirlwinds and I wasn’t always able to keep up.  It was like watching a construction crew build a house while running through a revolving door.  I would try to get involved but I was the baby of the family and I didn’t want to get run over so I watched carefully.  While watching I would draw or sculpt to process the lesson.  I learned with my hands.

In grammar school my hands served me well in art lessons but not so well in english and math.  Apparently drumming on ones desk or counting with ones fingers was a bad idea in a classroom.  Pointing at people was also frowned on.  Climbing the monkey bars, throwing tanbark, drawing in chalk on the sidewalk were all big parts of my daily curriculum.  Writing on paper was a challenge because I was intense and held my pencil like I was protecting it from kidnappers.  I wrote so hard that often I dug holes in the page when taking a test.  My erasers were worn to nubs daily as my perfectionism reared its ugly head in first grade.  When I painted, drew or sculpted all the intensity would melt away during the process.  It was my pure peace while it was happening but when I finished I always viewed my work with the most critical eye.  The process was wonderful the self reflection not so wonderful.  I wanted to be able to create what was in my head but my motor skills, life experiences and understanding were still being built.  If I could go back I would tell myself to lighten up and let it come with time(as I do with my three children).

I was not a reader in grammar school.  It was kind of boring to sit still that long and my hands could only drag along the words.  So I watched the other kids and timed my page turning to them while I fantasized about finding kittens on the way home from school or defending myself if zombies overtook the classroom. I remember going to a reading class away from my homeroom in first grade.  There were only about five of us in the group and we were given candy every time we read aloud.  I really believed we were the advanced ones.  Many years later my husband and a friend, both teachers at the time, told me I had been in remedial reading.  In reading, writing and arithmetic I was challenged but with my hands I was learning quickly.

Eventually I gained focus for school studies and after college graduation, I found a job for my hands.  I was hired to build natural history museum exhibits at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.  Finally I had found the perfect place to work!  The job was to include fabricating prehistoric dioramas of plants and animals for the Life Through Time exhibit.  My first day was truly one of the biggest moments of my life.  I walked into the studio and there were about five woman working in a space that reminded me of biology lab.  At each station they had magnifying lights, tools, clay and printed reference material.  One was sculpting trilobites, one was casting fossils from silicone molds, one was sculpting the texture on a prehistoric plant trunk.  It was fabulous.  The department I was assigned to was preparing, painting and assembling cypress tree branches but my supervisor was late that day.  I continued through the shop and found a man in a welding mask, full leather apron and large leather gloves creating a waterfall of sparks with a grinding tool.  He told me he was forging armatures for giant ammonite fossils.  Ammonites are prehistoric creatures that lived in shells like that of a nautilus or snail.  Another man was in a room that sounded like a wind tunnel.  It looked like he was heading on a space walk or going into a quarantine chamber for some rare contagious disease. He was dressed in a full white suit, gloves, booties and a hood but I could see his mustache through the shield on his face.  He was spray painting plant material that hung on a clothes line.  Finally I found what looked like my department but it was deserted.  There were sawhorses with large tree branches on them, piles of metal rod, a rolling cart and some power tools.  I had no idea what to do and my supervisor had still not arrived.  I didn’t want to look like a slacker so I set to examining all the items in my area.  That took about five minutes.  I was beginning to feel self conscious because I wanted to get to work but didn’t want to do the wrong thing.  I spent another few minutes looking at the surroundings like I was in search of something.  That way if someone was watching me I would still look busy.  Then I reviewed the items in my area as if perhaps I missed something the first time.  Still no supervisor came.  I decided to go back to the ladies in the sculpting room to see if they needed any help.  You would think I had asked if could french kiss their boyfriends (this taught me to empathize with new employees or volunteers -I try very hard to make people feel valuable and welcome).  I realized it would be  best to steer clear of that area for a while.  Then I went back to the guy making sparks but he already had an assistant.  She smiled at me when I asked if they needed help but said they were okay.  I started to sweat a bit because I was afraid that someone would see me wandering aimlessly about the shop trying to look busy while doing absolutely nothing.  I searched desperately for something to do.  A broom or a posted message to read, anything.  Finally I spotted a sign to the tool cage.  I walked briskly to it to give the impression of urgency to anyone watching.  Inside the cage I began reviewing and memorizing the tools.  I really had no idea what many of them did but saw some that we had at home or I had used in college.  To burn more minutes I picked up each one so that anyone stopping by would think I had a very important task at hand.  After about 20 minutes I had looked at every tool, read every label two or three times, and counted the shelves.  At that point I felt like I was in reading class at grammar school.  Nothing to do and no one to pace page turning off of.  I just started to wring my hands.  I looked at them while I did it and hoped it would help alleviate the anxiety of feeling useless.  Just then I heard a voice say, “I know how you feel”.  I looked up startled and horrified that I had been caught doing nothing on my first day of the greatest job ever.  A girl about my age with short brunette hair, jeans, boots and a cowboy shirt stood there smiling at me.  She reminded me of the pin up pictures of Betty Page with her blunt short bangs and dark eye liner.  I remembered her as the one assisting the guy making all the sparks.  She told me she understood how I felt because it reminded her of her first day at the studio.  She said she was just helping with the forging until the supervisor came to start us on the tree branches.  From that day forward she was one of my closest friends.  Together we painted, assembled and installed all the branches on the cypress trees for the exhibit and had a blast doing it.