Gary David, Woodcrafter

Today I had the chance to visit the workshop of an artist, Gary David, in Potosi, WI. My uncle Ole, who is visiting from Denmark, teaches woodworking and was able to spend the afternoon in the shop cutting out bow-tie joints and sanding table legs. 

Working with wood, Gary creates benches, tables, chairs, altars, and bar countertops. He's just created an altar for the St. Thomas church in Potosi, and he's also made the enormous main bar in the Potosi brewery. Alongside him in the shop, his maybe 12 year-old son works on the lathe, carving candlestick holders and baseball bats with precision. A box of used crayons sits on top of the lathe, ready to be heated and melted onto the candlestick holders for layer dying.

What a great place that must be to work in! With a spring right out front of it and the Potosi Brewery right across the street. Below are photos of his shop and of the bar in the brewery:

Marty Robbins- Big Iron

Classic. My dad just picked up this Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs record, and I've taken it upon myself to sneak it up to my room for listening. Along with listening to that, I am drinking my new favorite beer, Two Brothers Outlaw IPA (RECOMMENDED!), and dodging a cat's playful bites at my ankle. Cheers!

"A Discovery"

A few years ago, a friend gave this poem to me before leaving for Thanksgiving break. He tore the page from a book, and beneath the poem he wrote, "A Weird Fact: My favorite Kind of butterflies are the kind with black and yellow spots. What's your favorite kind of butterfly?" and below that he wrote, "**Also included: A neat white rock I found a while ago that I use as a paperweight if the mooood (with an arrow pointing to a drawing of a cow) should strike". 

I still have the shimmering white rock but I haven't seen or heard from this friend ever since. Here is the poem, written by Nabokov, titled "A Discovery":

 

I found it in a legendary land
all rocks and lavender and tufted grass,
where it was settled on some sodden sand
hard by the torrent of a mountain pass.

The features it combines mark it as new
to science shape and shade — the special tinge,
akin to moonlight, tempering its blue,
the dingy underside, the checkered fringe.

My needles have teased out its sculptured sex;
corroded tissues could no longer hide
that priceless mote now dimpling the convex
and limpid teardrop on a lighted slide.

Smoothly a screw is turned; out of the mist
two ambered hooks symmetrically slope,
or scales like battledores of amethyst
cross the charmed circle of the microscope.

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer — and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep)
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.

- Vladimir Nabokov, May 15, 1943

New Order- Bizarre Love Triangle

"53"

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
for even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile 

-E.E. Cummings

"How Baseball Saved My Marriage"

One happy hour drink in Orono and now I’m driving
up the Penobscot just for kicks, past the bridge to Indian Island,
past the just-closed Georgia Pacific plant, tidy yards
of Milford, “Place of a Million Parts” junkyard,
the drink still warm in my belly, the strong, true edge of things

glowing with rich clarity in the late summer, late afternoon light.
Dylan’s tangled up in blue on the radio, dozens of migrating
nighthawks flit over fields along the river, crickets shrill
in tall grass, window draft tickles my tan shoulders.
Later tonight, the Red Sox will win with another Big Papi

walk-off homer that will make me whoop to myself in the car.
But for now, I’m moving through Olamon, Passadumkeag,
away from the river, into the woods. It’s the end of a long day,
but there still seems to be plenty of time and road ahead.
Something about the light, the beauty of the sky, makes me think

I should keep going right on to northern Maine, all the way
to Canada. I could just keep driving all night, potato fields
north of Houlton balancing the dark outside my car windows,
lights across the St. John beckoning me over the border.
I’ve got a full tank of gas, credit cards in my wallet. I could

drive all the way to Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island,
stay in some quaint inn on a craggy coast, walk low beaches
in search of sandpipers heading south from the Arctic.
How far north do roads go? But it grows late, shadows deepen,
and so far from home, I realize I don’t know the station

broadcasting tonight’s game. So it’s finally baseball
that curbs my sudden wanderlust. It’s the simple pleasure
of a good game coming up that makes me turn around
to re-enter the bubble of radio reception, to start
the long drive back to everything familiar and well-loved.

-Kristen Lindquist