It turns out it's not so easy to explain the concept of honor to a five-year-old. This is one of the wonders of parenthood: knowledge that you have spent decades taking for granted suddenly requires detailed explanation. How do you explain honor to anyone, let alone a five-year old? Lord knows I don't want to start talking about Latin word roots. Only assholes do that. It went like this:

"Yes, ninjas are definitely tough and cool. But they have no honor."

". . .?"

"Ninjas sneak around in the shadows and throw crushed glass in your eyes when you find them. Where's the honor in that? A samurai has honor. A samurai would never throw crushed glass in your eyes. Dude, have I never told you about samurai?"

That's all it really takes for a new obsession to start at our house, fueled in this case by knowledge ill-gained from classic samurai movies and reading The Tale of the Heike once in 2004, with all its feuding clans of samurai and warrior monks and raging fires, earthquakes, battles, suicides and executions. I knew reading that book would all come in handy someday, I thought, clenching my fist with this minor victory of fatherhood while explaining the concepts of seppuku and bushido to a fascinated five-year-old boy. I mean, when one of the core tenets of your existence is that KNIGHTS ARE AWESOME, what do you even do with the knowledge of how much more awesome a samurai is compared to a bunch of sweaty guys from France stumbling around in tin underwear? I mean, even after they knew guns existed, the samurai were like, "Nah, man: swords are better." For like centuries! So I'm explaining feudalism and Japanese isolationism and holding a globe while talking about the geography of northeast Asia and it's starting to get a little too homeschooly up in here so I tell him that the only thing the samurai ever did was train to fight and then go out and fight: "In battle the samurai showed no fear and actively sought death. During peace time they would grow restless and get in fights for no reason. They would overreact and imagine slights from common people and the law gave them the right to cut down anyone, man, woman, or child who disrespected them. They also had to do anything their masters told him without questions. If their master was killed they had to go kill the guy who did it and bring back his head and throw it on their master's grave and then probably commit hara-kiri on the grave too and man there must have just been piles of dead samurai everywhere in medieval Japan." I should probably go ahead and hire a scholar of Japanese history to instruct my son on the dull realities of the Tokugawa Period so he doesn't rely solely the word of a man whose knowledge arrived via far too many B&W samurai movies. 

Aside from his honor, the coolest part about a samurai was probably his armor. Samurai armor so bizarre and terrifying yet also colorful and beautiful. The University of Michigan Museum of Art had a full suit of Edo-era armor that I used to stare at all the time when I was in school, and I drove the kids over to Ann Arbor to see it a few weeks ago (unfortunately it wasn't on display). My son and I have spent a lot of time looking at pictures of samurai online so I wasn't surprised at all when all he wanted for his birthday was "samurai armor" and damn, I was excited to make it. I still have my boy with me all day Mondays and Fridays and those are the days we make stuff and then go out and have adventures. He is so much fun right now.

For this armor I started with those huge rectangular shoulder pads (sode), punching tons of holes in the leather and using embroidery floss for the traditional silk cords that make traditional samurai armor so colorful. In retrospect I wish I had used something thicker, like shoelaces or even nylon parachute cord.

Then I made the cuirass (do), also out of good 8-9 oz leather. I found some old woodblock paintings of Japanese dragons and incorporated some of my favorites into a single design that I drew and carved into the leather. The dragon also loops around onto the back of the armor. After carefully carving the design I nervously added the dye, mixing green and gold leather dyes for the dragon's skin. I was so inspired by all the real armor we looked at that I really wanted to make this as beautiful as I could.

After adding buckles and straps I got to work on the helmet. It was so much fun seeing that helmet (kabuto) take shape. The back is made from overlaying strips of leather tied together with the embroidery floss. Of course no samurai helmet would be complete without the metal crest signifying what clan the samurai belonged to. We chose the fairly common one that resembles the leaves of the sagittaria plant (don't worry: I filed the edges dull). 

Next we worked on a mask (hoate). A lot of the old masks had big bushy mustaches so I couldn't resist. He really loves looking at himself in these pictures.

Whenever I show him these pictures, he stands behind me imitating all the moves he's doing in each shot. It's pretty awesome. All the designs on the arm and lower torso protective plates we found in the gorgeous Utagawa Kuniyoshi samurai woodcuts that we looked at for inspiration. One day we went to the Oriental garden on the grounds of the Cranbrook Educational Community and went on a hunt for enemy ninjas and nasty sea serpents.

In most of these pictures he's holding his leather naginata spear.

I've been making the kids wooden ninja swords for months so we have a bunch of them.  I told him all about how the Japanese perfected the art of sword making and read him passages from books about all the labor and the many craftsmen it took to craft a single blade. In one of the books we read it said that most samurai boys were given their first set of armor and swords at age five. I made him a special sword for these adventures out of a beautiful wood called katalox. Like any good samurai, he gave his sword a name ("golden dragon"), so I carved a dragon on the sheath and dyed it gold.

We like to go to the park and have fake samurai battles where we run toward each other like they do in the movies and then with a single slash one of us falls down and dies dramatically. I taught him all four Japanese words I know: hai, iie, ikimashou, tachishoben (yes, no, let's go, public urination). He yells them at me randomly while running toward me with his katana.

 

I almost didn't share this project because we're venturing into some fairly extreme nerd territory here, but in the end I don't care. We're also having a lot of fun.

Just a few pictures from our trip down south (Lexington-Knoxville-Asheville-Columbia-Charleston).

I'm sitting in shirtsleeves somewhere in Charleston, South Carolina and a few dozen voices on the phone screen are complaining about how cold it is back home. We came here, in part, to escape the weather but in this day and age though you may be able to escape the snow and cold the complaining on Facebook will follow you to the smoldering gates of hell.

In Aiken last night we sat down with an old friend and his family for dinner at a beautiful old restaurant where I was afraid to take off my coat because all I had underneath was a t-shirt and there were so many poplin suits and sensible sweaters in there I'm still not sure we didn't stumble into a JosABank catalog shoot. I showed my friend's young daughter a photo of us all in the snow and she told me (though her dad once lived in the northern reaches of Michigan's upper peninsula) she's never seen enough snow accumulate in her Georgian yard to roll so much as a single snowball. As bad as snow can be, that doesn't sound much better.

The week before, snow fell in our backyard like it did when I was a kid. I grew up with "lake effect" snow that was so much more wet and malleable than the crumbling, bitter dust that cloaks the ground around Detroit. My kids were outside before me that day, and I heard them shout that one word that makes midwestern winters tolerable in childhood. "It's PACKY! PACKY!" Oh, what a word.

"What do you want to make?" I asked. Playing with my kids in the snow is one of the best things in the world. And it had been a few years since we've had really good snow like this, not since we built the Great Snow Troll of 2010:

I think the Great Snow Troll was at least twelve feet tall. We used a stepladder. We did build a more modest snow troll a few weeks ago, but that snow was gross. Just look at it:

He froze overnight and my neighbors had that disgusting thing staring into their back window for a week this winter (which I considered fair punishment for their highly questionable decision to sculpt those distinct abdominal muscles when they brought their own kids out to help). Then they wrapped a scarf around his eyes to make him look like a teenage mutant ninja turtle, which was awesome. The snow we had the other day wasn't anything like that sloppy filth, though. It was Hollywood snow. Bing Crosby snow. My son shuffled under me, between my arms, pushing each mighty snowball with me as it accumulated layer after layer of pure white snow, that lovely crunching groan at the ground and my growing boy in this unknowing hug: Sisyphus &Son, but smiling.

They decided they wanted a horse.

We used to build snow horses all the time, but I wasn't sure if we would be able to build one they could sit on like these kids did three years ago:

But we built the legs wide and strong, and gave it a go:

He lasted a few days, until one of the neighbor boys punched his head off while we were driving down I-75 to a more civilized latitude. All that's left of that day's uncorrupted snow is a patch of frozen slime on the site where that horse stood. Thank God.

* * * * *

We're back in Michigan now and it's trying to snow again, winter's death rattle. It's been a long one here, a winter of quickly-closed doors and forced heat and electric blankets and fantasies of fireplaces, flannel shirts, axes and chopping blocks. It's been an Ox Cart Man winter here: everyone has been knitting or making something all the time, and I've loved this winter of busy hands. My daughter comes home from school and she knits. She knits in the car, bets me how many rows she can get done before we get home and she knits in bed and falls asleep with needles in her hands. She never knits anything for herself. With the rash of winter birthdays and newborn babies that abound she has been knitting gifts and baby hats.

For her own eighth birthday I made her a little leather bag, a smaller version of the one I made for her mom, with pockets for her needles and then filled it with colorful yarn and supplies:

I love listening to her questions to her mother about knitting, all talk of numbers and purls and things I don't understand. She's always learning. She knit one of her friends a little gnome for her birthday. She worked so hard to make it perfect, and even knit it a little blanket with her initial on it:

I was so proud of her. Later she came back from the birthday party a little upset because the gift had been overshadowed by an American Girl doll one of the other guests gave the birthday girl and I had to say, "It's hard to compete with that, sure, but those parents only spent their money. You spent time to show her how much you care and she knows that, and that's what matters." While under my breath I'm asking who brings a $110 doll to a child's birthday party? For my birthday last month she knit me a yarn dwarf that is supposedly Bombur from The Hobbit and you'd better believe that thing has a place of honor right next to my computer. And if she knits me a sweater, you'd better believe I'll wear it even if makes me look like Bill Cosby on his way to Burning Man.

* * * * *

We woke to more snow this morning, but it was gone by the afternoon. The bike tires are all pumped firm and I've been informed that none of their sandals fit. They sit at the window alongside the dog, dreaming of strawberries and scabby knees and the smell of good dirt.

So we're driving through Kentucky, and oh man, things are crazy down here. I mean, in Kentucky you can get breakfast at Arby's.

These Carhartt-clad Kentucky hipsters take the bike lane thing to whole new level. "Awww, cars, man, WHYYYY?" To his credit, he seemed to be following all the rules of traffic. I like to imagine that when he woke up that morning he said to himself, My parole officer may have taken my driver's license, but he can't take away dear old Bucephalus here, no way. I would bet cash money they were headed to the nearby Liquor Barn:

 

(it was, after all, a barn).

1. Downton Abbey is a pretty classy joint, but it would be even classier if they installed one of those motorized stairway lifts for Professor Mcgonagall.

2. The formal dining experience for post-Edwardian aristocrats is so inspirational! Next week I am going to dine on my microwaved frozen chicken tikka masala from a brass-plated TV tray.

3. This show is popular for the same reason that guy with bad teeth and the British accent takes home a different girl from the bar every night.

4. I was sure there would be at least one nun.

5. The men keep alluding to financial difficulties. You want to save a few bob each week so you don't have to fire your val-et (whatever that is)? STOP BUYING SO MANY TUXEDOS, YOU ASSHOLES.

6. Seriously guys: garage sale.

7. I would like this show a lot more if they hired Sean Astin to play one of the gardeners, wearing full hobbit regalia and talking in the same accent he used in Lord of the Rings. Sean Astin is the son of Patty Duke, which really makes him Hollywood royalty, after all.

8. Somewhere, someone in Grosse Pointe is masturbating to this dinner scene right now.

9. The Masterpiece Theater people must have blown their entire music budget on hats. They have one sound effect. Maybe for Season Four they can buy fewer hats and hire Coolio to do all the music.

10. I'll bet if William the Conqueror and his knights could have foreseen that the British nobility would end up like this they would have committed seppuku on the battlefield at Hastings.

11. I wonder how much urine is in that turtle soup.

12. Great, they're playing cricket. Because after forty-five minutes of listening to these people talk I wasn't bewildered enough trying to follow the complex unwritten ordinances of the post-WWI British social hierarchy---I really needed a breezy depiction of a formal sporting contest with inscrutable rules played by overdressed butlers to help convince me I'm being entertained.

13. I wish Honey Boo Boo was on tonight.

One thing that might help explain some things about me and the decisions I've made is that I grew up with a father who was always at home. Having now abandoned my professional career, it's not strange for me to see my kids growing up with a mother who leaves for a traditional job and a dad who is there during the day and whenever they need someone to be there, like all these furloughs from school they get every few weeks for parent teacher conferences or Caesar Chavez's nephew's birthday or the anniversary of the final battle of the Crimean War or two weeks for Christmas and then another week-long "winter break." My mother, a special education teacher, was also usually home during those times, and she also stayed home with my sister and me for a few years before returning to her career. She eventually became a busy school administrator and a part-time college professor. My dad always fixed cars and still, he is always at home.

He runs his own business, a one-man body shop in the "barn" he'd built in our backyard back when we lived out in the country, well before the city caught up with us and subdivided our woods with winding roads named after the trees they replaced with hastily-built homes that filled with bankers and doctors and businessmen who rose early to drive their BMWs past our house on their way to sit at desks all day and do the sort of important things that people with real jobs do. Each morning my dad would walk out to his backyard shop where he restored antique cars for successful men who could pay a master craftsman to tinker away at the ninety-year-old hunks of rusted steel they'd found in some old barn and shipped to him in boxes and months or even years later they'd drive away in gleaming, puttering realizations of history. Often they would win awards for those cars like prize race horses they never trained or rode themselves.

Before I turned ten my dad had me working down there. He showed me how to properly fold and rip sheets of sandpaper. How not to waste it. He said for sanding the intertwining spokes of the wire wheels you'd find on cars built during the 1930s, my tiny fingers were better than any of the hundreds of tools he used in his trade. He showed me how to use the heavier grit to remove the rust and pits and then once he'd primed them for painting I'd go over them again with a finer paper. There were always piles and piles of wheels waiting to be sanded. He paid fifteen dollars per wheel and I learned that when you're not getting paid by the hour the slower and lazier you are the less you earn. He eventually recruited my younger sister as well, but it wasn't long before we both threw down our sand paper and went on a general strike that lasted for years. We could only take so much dust and classic rock radio.

Over the years my dad often needed me to come down to his shop and help him move one of his cars in or out of a painting bay or steady some heavy fender he needed to transfer from one rack to another. More often than not this ended with him muttering under his breath that he would have been better off doing it by himself. He was probably right. His perfectionism always made it hard to delegate his delicate work much beyond sanding wire wheels. He never really let me mess around with any of his tools, as important as they were to his livelihood. So I didn't want to learn. I grew up with an understanding of manual labor that the children of those who work with their hands often receive: as rewarding as it might be, it is awfully hard on your back. My dad would come in from his barn at night, primer dust in his hair and streaks of paint on his shirt and we knew better than to complain about our days.

Succeeding at school promised careers that wouldn't involve breathing in toxic fumes or callouses on anything but our asses. We were promised scholarships to colleges and lifetimes of ease and money that came without breaking our bodies (they said nothing about our souls). I retreated into books.  I specifically remember being fourteen and spending nearly all of one summer night and the entire next day reading the $3.99 pistachio-covered Bantam Classics translation of The Odyssey and my dad opening my bedroom door to gripe at me for my sloth, telling me to get me outside and do something. Just like that I went from young Keats to the shame of knowing he was right, imagining him at my age elbow deep in the greasy viscera of some old jalopy, learning about engine cylinders and transmissions while I grappled only with words that disappeared off the end of my tongue. Years later, while I was off at college or working at the law firm my dad would tell me about some teenage kid he'd hired to help him around his shop, some kid who was so grateful and hardworking and everything I never was, and all I could feel was shame. Growing away from his shop, his tools, that world, I learned to marvel at what he was able to do down there, as though it involved some kind of sorcery for one man to make a neglected hull of pitted steel look exactly like did when it drove off the Auburn showroom floor in 1937. When, of course, it really involved talent, and years of practice, and a whole lot of hard work.

I bought into the promise of my generation. I found a way at age 23 to make more money than my dad ever would. Of course I quickly learned the truth of that simple cliche; it didn't bring happiness, not when indentured to miserable sadists who thought nothing of taking away your weekend or forcing you to work until after the buses stopped running. I often spent my limited free time in the leisure of shopping for shit I didn't need because that was the only thing that made me feel better about losing all the time spent earning it. Hours and hours and hours where it never felt like I ever accomplished anything.

Right now, at this strange time in my life, nothing makes me happier than learning to make things for my kids. And that's how I found myself back down in my dad's shop.

* * * * *

About a year ago my dad brought me down to show off a project he and my mom had been working on. In semi-retirement they had started making large wooden sculptures of fish---the sort of thing you might see at a nice beach town art gallery. My mom has always been extremely artistic, painting and sculpting as a hobby. Every time we visited after that there would be more fish around, and they were clearly having a blast making them together. They've exhibited these fish at art shows and even sold several for thousands of dollars. Seeing my dad start working in this new medium really inspired me, and I asked if he would show me how to use some of his tools. For the first time in my life he let me use one of his bandsaws and showed me how to use various belt sanders and rasps. I went home and bought myself a saw and started making wooden swords. That led to making a bunch of other stuff, some of which I've shared here (including the toy yachts and the toy Colosseum) and of course this year I really wanted to make my kids' Christmas presents. I gave myself more than a month and told them I'd make them whatever they wanted. My daughter knew right away that she wanted a large horse that she could sit on that looked more like a real horse than her other wooden horse and my son wavered between (1) a police car he could really drive that had a computer in it for him to look up bad guys and could also transform into a helicopter and a submarine; and (2) a castle for his toy knights. I might have leaned on him a bit in support of choice number two.

This post is already long so I created a separate post with more details about how I made the presents with lots of pictures of how they turned out. On Christmas morning, I enjoyed every second of watching my kids come down the stairs and see, for the first time, the presents I had spent so many hours in the basement building for them.

They totally knew what I was up to down there, but were forbidden from even setting foot on the basement steps. They started calling it my workshop. The castle is made completely from ribbon mahogany and ash. I had so much fun designing and building this castle. The front gatehouse has a drawbridge he can pull up and down using chains that flow smoothly through little pulleys I found at the hardware store. There's a portcullis inside the gatehouse he can bring up and down as well as a third set of doors inside the castle. Archers can prowl the ramparts and stand at the tops of the five towers, and inside the castle there's a dungeon with a door he can really lock and chains on the walls. Over the past few weeks it has withstood several frontal attacks, catapult bombardments, and even a fire-breathing dragon. Best of all, when he's done playing it serves as default storage for all the swordsmen who've so often threatened to impale my bare feet while walking around the house at night.

My daughter's pony is made from several pieces of basswood cut to shape, glued together, hand-carved, painted, and finished. I also made him a hand-tooled saddle and a leather bridle she can remove.

He's a little short and scrawny, but then again so is my daughter. They have become fast friends and he has already gone on several adventures. His most important adventure was the one she doesn't know about, back and forth from my dad's shop.

After I finished the fun part of shaping and carving the pony's head, I really struggled with building the rest of the body. With nothing more than my scroll saw, a few rasps, and no experience carving something this big, I just didn't have the tools or the know-how to get it done. I was in well over my head. So on a Friday with my daughter in school, my son and I drove to my parents' house two hours away and my dad spent his entire day working with me on his granddaughter's Christmas present while my mom entertained her grandson. He helped me fix the misshapen parts of the body with a fiberglass mixture and taught me how to use dozens of powerful woodworking tools that allowed me to accomplish in a few hours what would have taken a frustrating week in my basement. We worked alongside each other for hours. We were making a Christmas gift for a child, but this was the best Christmas gift he could have ever given me. There were a few moments where the old dynamic took over---where he knew he could do something better than me so I found myself watching him work---and that was okay. That was to be expected. And then he said in a moment of my own frustration with the equine torso emerging from the wood:

"You can't just expect to pick up a tool and use it perfectly the first time. These things take lots of practice. You don't think I could just pick up a law book or a camera or a computer and do what you do, do you? I have been doing this kind of work for a long time, and you act like you should be able to do it without working at it."

He was right, of course. When I look at my finished work through his eyes all I see are the flaws that he would never allow to remain. He has spent his life turning back time. Removing dents, and scrapes, and rust, returning ancient things to the state they were in when they were new. He was able to make a living at this by not forgiving himself an imperfection here and there, holding himself to perfection as the standard of his craft, a hard standard to find in any father. In comparison I am but a dabbler. I enjoy making the things I make but I fear I will never rise above the dilettante. I still have my words, though I struggle with those too. You can look at a piece of wood and see where it needs to be sanded to perfection, you can hold it in a certain light to see all its flaws and with the right amount of elbow grease you can make those flaws disappear into dust, but how do you do that with words? As I write and I write and I write, behind the scenes, and even here, how can I live up to the example my dad set for me? Scrape away a bit too much here, not enough over there, and even the finest sculptor with words must retain doubts. Still, I know that this is my primary craft. I will keep working at it.

* * * * *

Back in December my son was pretty sick and missed a lot of school before Christmas break, so a few days ago was his first time heading back to preschool after nearly a month and his desire not to return was resolute. I desperately needed him to, despite how much I love being home with him. After that month I needed a day to try to write some things that required more the three minutes of attention I can give anything when he's home. After some early morning foot stomping and stubborn refusals, I pleaded with him desperately: "I need you to go to school so I can get some work done." That somehow worked. "Alright," he growled, and after some talking I realized he thought I meant I needed to get some work done on his presents for his upcoming birthday. My 4-year-old son thinks my job is to make him toys and costumes. I think I can live with that for now.

Continuing our tradition of hiring an artist we admire to do our annual holiday card, this year we asked local Detroit artist Michael E. Burdick and he thankfully agreed (we're not nearly as cool as most of his other clients, which include many of the new small businesses helping to revitalize Detroit). It was great working with someone local, we were able to meet over coffee during the process to talk about ideas and look at sketches. I told Michael about an incident a few weeks ago when my family was sitting in the living room and a huge red fox sauntered right past our window, turning to look at us all as we gathered in awe. He turned that moment into this beautiful card that will always help us cherish that memory.

I love how it's also a portrait of our family captured in that little story.

Next week I hope to share a bit of what I've been working like crazy on the past few weeks. Until then, happy holidays everyone.
________

2009 Sweet Juniper Holiday Card by Samantha Wedelich
2010 Sweet Juniper Holiday Card by Yelena Bryksenkova
2011 Sweet Juniper Holiday Card by Heather Ross