TOOLS

            Hanging on a leather strip from a nail on the greenhouse wall is a hand spade, its handle wood, its blade a fierce copper designed to uproot the most determined weed. Rewarding my passion for gardening, my brother gave it to me for my birthday.  The spade is a more sophisticated tool than I would have purchased for myself, and so I wrote him a thank-you poem, which he, in turn fashioned on a wood slab to hang alongside his gift. How often tools bring us together.

            In a tidily organized drawer in the garage, my husband stores his father’s tools: a skill hand drill, several wood planes and specialty hand saws.  His father was a finished carpenter whose tools have long since been improved upon by technology.  Nevertheless, my husband stores those tools with the same reverence he has for any memento of his father’s life.

His dad’s lessons endure in the storage shed adjacent to the greenhouse where my husband has affixed wooden pegs in measured spaces one from the other to line up all sorts of gardening implements: hedge clippers, shovels, rakes, each in its place.  When my sister-in-law visited and spied what her brother had organized, she laughed out loud at the reincarnation of their father’s devotion to his tools.  Like father, like son, you might conclude, but surely no different than my daily use of a small cutting board once belonging to my Mom.  Why have I not replaced it with a larger one?  You know why.

            Tools are extensions of ourselves – the paintbrush to Monet, the baton to Leonard Bernstein.  Tools can be the measurement of our lives.  The artist, Jacob Lawrence, was not a builder, but his paintings and prints are full of tools — tools, hanging, tools overflowing in drawers.  We are fortunate to own a self-portrait Lawrence drew of himself in the later years of his life.  In the portrait, he sits before an open window in his Seattle studio surrounded by tools.  In his hand he holds a plumbline up to the window while looking over his shoulder at Harlem from which he came.  A plumbline is an essential tool for a builder because it works with gravity to assure things are aligned.  Is Jacob Lawrence reflecting on the journey of his life, looking back to see if his course has been true?  As a symbol of measurement, the plumbline occurs more than once in the Bible.  In the book of Amos, the Lord explains his judgement to Amos: “I am setting a plumb line among my people Israel: I will spare them no longer.” (Amos 7: 7-8)

            Although we most often think of tools as creative instruments, the Smithsonian Institute has an exhibition of Civil War weapons it calls “The Tools of War.”  The Bible has much to say about those tools as well.  In Micah 4:3, it is written, “He shall judge between many peoples, and shall arbitrate between strong nations far away; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”  Even as I copy this quotation, my mind moves to the Middle East and to Ukraine.  What more can I say that is not already in our hearts?  Here is a photo of a sculpture in the garden of the United Nations, a work of art by Yevgeny Vuchetich, a1959 gift of the Soviet Union to the United Nations.  The title is: Let Us Beat Swords Into Ploughshares. Surely ironic this Veterans Day weekend.

            The poet, Robert Frost, was always ready to see stark ironies:

      The Objection to Being Stepped On

At the end of the row
I stepped on the toe
Of an unemployed hoe.
It rose in offense
And struck me a blow
In the seat of my sense.
It wasn’t to blame
But I called it a name.
And I must say it dealt
Me a blow that I felt
Like a malice prepense.
You may call me a fool,
But was there a rule
The weapon should be
Turned into a tool?
And what do we see?
The first tool I step on
Turned into a weapon.