Just Thinking

Small actions, over and over

A couple weeks ago I was in Red Wing, a lovely town in Southwestern Minnesota, right on the Mississippi River and nestled in its bluffs. The town is home to at least two companies of note: Red Wing Pottery, established in the 1860s, and Red Wing Shoes, which began in the early 1900s and continues to be a renowned maker of steel-toed and other rugged work shoes. On the town’s main street is a Red Wing Shoes outlet store and in that store is a museum.

This is a picture of a sewing table, original to the factory, and a Puritan Sewing Machine, circa 1905. Amazingly, this kind of machine is still in use producing shoes (here’s a video). In front of the machine you’ll see a pair of scissors tucked under leather straps. Decades (a hundred years?) of sliding that tool out of and back into its place has worn a deep groove in the wood.

Here’s a close up:

The groove is certainly a surrogate marker of the wear and tear of repetitive work on the human body. But it’s also a marker for the force and power of steady accrual of minutes and hours at work to produce, create, and shape anything, like the shaping of rock by a steady stream of water over the course of many years. We can rarely see the cumulative inventory or impact of one’s lifetime of work in one place. (The shoes sewn at this machine by any one sewer would fill how many rooms?) But I like this mental image as a marker of the power of steady small actions.

What I've been working on

Here's what I've been working on for the last several years, a manuscript with the working title, A Working Progress: Notes on the Pursuit of Livelihood. I've been writing it mornings and evenings before and after client work, on days in between client projects, on the weekends, and on "vacation" days.

Here's what it looked like in an earlier in-process phase a couple years ago:

In its twenty chapters, I've tried to essay--as in to test the nature of--the subject of "work" with an eye toward making peace and discovering meaning. I got the idea to use the word "progress" in the title when I read Fanny Howe's The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation. She writes, “What is a Progress but an account of a series of pitfalls and illuminations leading to revelation?” I love that. 

So now it's all tided up and looking for a place to go. Think good thoughts would you, or even a prayer if you feel so inclined, that there might be a good future for this work. I'll be posting more on this manuscript and the topic of work in the weeks to come. (And if you're an agent, give me a call!)

In the meantime, you can check out my curated Tumblr blog, On Work, which features a collection of items of interest on the topic of work and vocation gleaned from the web and occasionally my notebook. It is a filing cabinet, of sorts. The posts from and links to outside sources don't necessarily indicate my opinion or endorsement but are there as food for thought and to reflect the broad range of thought on this weighty topic.

Job description

I was in a coffee shop on Park Avenue in NYC awhile back. I want to name the place but have a feeling that perhaps I shouldn't (but if you look closely at the picture you can figure it out). The story can be told without the name, anyway. Imagine it to be Anyplace, USA. The display case featured truffles, pralines, and chocolate bars, salads and sandwiches, freshly squeezed juice and bottled water, granola and yogurt parfaits. Behind the counter, coffee was being ground and pressed, milk steamed and frothed. 

It was the last day of a stay in that city and the oatmeal on the menu, topped with lingonberries, called to me as comfort food. While I was eating at a table against the wall, I watched the guy who had waited on me (he looked just like Hugh Grant) look out the window, then turn to his colleague behind the counter, a young woman of light complexion and long blond hair, and say, "The homeless guy's back; every Friday he comes to organize his cans." 

He took a black paper cup from a stack of cups, fill it with coffee, and carried it out the door. I leaned back in my seat so as to see through the window what would happen next on the sidewalk outside. He stood talking to the guy with the cans, the steaming cup of coffee already transferred. Interesting, I thought, and proceeded to wonder about the nature of this Hugh Grant-like barrista. 

I finished eating then went back to the counter to get some yogurt and coffee to go and said to the young woman, who had also been watching, "Well, that was sure nice of him." 

I didn't expect the response she gave. It made me wonder even more, and this time about her as well as him, and about this place and its ethos, and then about what is this thing we call a job description and how narrow or wide should it be.

“Just part of the job,” she said.

Metrics

Using Wordle I made a word cloud for an essay of mine, "Metrics," that's in the current issue of Indiana Review. Try making a word cloud of your own. Just copy in some text and Voilá!

Smart women

This summer, my husband and I made a day trip to Stockholm, Wisconsin, a tiny town on the Mississippi with a population of about only 100, but many art galleries and shops. I found this mug at one of the shops. 

Backyard daydreams

For my last birthday my son gave me a copy of Michael Pollan's A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams. He knows that I have long daydreamed about squeezing a little writing studio into the backyard of our city lot. A Place of My Own is about Pollan's building of a one-room writing house on his wooded Connecticut property. Into the narrative of his personal project, Pollan weaves the story of architecture and construction to explore why our houses are the way they are. The book has certainly fueled my daydreams, but it's also given me other things to think about as well. I'm looking at my own humble house differently, finding in the window design, the roofline, the front entrance, some rationale that links to an architectural and philosophical chronology and not just to a decade. It helps answer the question, Why is it the way it is?, when I hadn't even really thought to ask the question before. I love when a book does that, posits a new question in my brain and thinking about the answer opens up new ways of seeing and understanding. I'm looking at other buildings with that question now. Plus I'm thinking about the people doing the building. Strangers once worked where I now eat and sleep and type this post. I know nothing about them, yet everyday I benefit from their careful measuring, sawing, pounding, leveling, and sanding. 

Carey Wallace "On Discipline" from Comment Magazine

Discipline is not a mystery.

Its elements are so simple they can seem mocking. Put down the extra slice of bread. Run one more mile. Pick up the pen, or brush, or violin.

It's no more complicated in the creative spheres. But it's every bit as elusive there as it is in the world at large. "I want to make work," people often confess to me when they discover I'm a working writer. "I just never seem to get to it."

The practical solution to their problem barely amounts to a paragraph. Choose a time to make work and hold that time inviolate, I tell them. If you lack inspiration, wait. Don't do anything else. The work will come. 

[Keep reading...]

via www.cardus.ca

Shout out for guts and charm

Last Sunday I met a young woman, Christina DeCuffa, who has recently started a business. She was one of many artists who opened their studio or gallery space to the public in the St. Paul Art Crawl, a weekend of coordinated open-houses at artists studios and galleries throughout St. Paul. Her business is called The Blushing Room. She designs wedding dresses, including custom designed gowns, plus provides hair and make-up services. In her loft studio, brides and their attendants can come the day of the wedding to get ready together, take pictures, and relax. This post isn't really meant to be an advertisement for her business—although if business comes her way because of this post, wonderful!—but more of a shout out for guts and charm. Christina was lovely and I wish her much success. 

Guest blogger: An aerospace engineer considers the case of the failed pen

This post is written by a special guest blogger, my father, John Erickson, who had a long career as an aerospace engineer with Honeywell. In response to my earlier post on the pen that leaked, he wrote this reflection, an interesting take on the risks and evaluation of equipment failure:

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I read of the case of the failed pen in the January 15 blog post. The decision to continue to use a pen at risk of failing and to accept that risk is no doubt acceptable, considering that the impact of future failures includes only possibilities such as a stain on an important document or damage to a valued item of clothing. However, the story led me to imagine that this pen was a mission critical part of an upcoming space mission. The incident that comes to mind is the case of the leaking “O Rings,” wherein NASA management chose to risk the effect of cold weather on the “O Rings,” resulting in their leaking and failing to contain the hot gases, thus bringing down the Shuttle Challenger, killing its seven astronauts, including Christa McAuliffe, the first member of the Teacher in Space Project. 

 If your pen were considered mission critical, the pen would probably be impounded for subsequent analysis, and you would be barred from using other pens from this company until it was determined that the failure was somehow unique to this individual pen. Your pen would then be the subject of extensive failure analysis to determine the cause and the possible corrective actions. This would include the ink as well as the pen proper: has the ink deteriorated and lost its intended viscosity, is it temperature sensitive, etc. The pen barrel would be analyzed to determine if it had cracked and was overstressed; the ball itself would be investigated to determine if it had been deformed and allowed leakage, had its retainer been damaged and allowed leakage, etc. And with an identification of the probable cause of the leak: what is the most effective corrective action, and what kind of tests are needed to establish that future leakages will not happen, etc. The investigation would rely on an extensive set of methods and tools that are probably continually being improved. (See this WIKIPEDIA link entitled "Failure Analysis.")

A personal experience that I remember well: It was back in the 1958 era and Honeywell was supplying the guidance system for the Titan Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. The system included a timer, which contained a number of switching timed events that initiated actions and maneuvers of the missile. During a particular test, the timer had displayed a one-time, non-repeatable failure, in one of the timed events. I was a systems engineer on the project and it seems that we spent literally weeks, investigating and subjecting this device to all sorts of stress tests in attempts to repeat and isolate this problem, finally identifying the spot where temperature stresses caused an intermittent shorting out of a circuit function, leading to corrections that prevented such future malfunctions. 

This has been a long comment in response to to the original blog post, but it’s been fun to imagine this other far-fetched type of situation, based somewhat on my work experiences.  

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Thanks for this blog contribution, Dad! Perhaps you will now be starting your own blog.

Key words: Santa Fe, turquoise, Ingmar Bergman

Comment magazine was good enough to publish a piece of mine in their Fall 2010 issue, an essay called "Spinning and Being Spun." Now that piece is available online. If you're interested, you can read it here.