Anvil chorus

posted Sat, 02 Apr 2005

Harpo and I had the first half of our blacksmithing class today. I can barely type. Throwing a hammer around, pounding steel, is a lot harder than it looks.

Not that I thought it would be easy. I have finally learned my lesson on that. Many a disaster in my life, including more than one bad haircut and more than one bad haircolor job (yes, I am a very slow learner), has started with my musing to myself, “How hard can it be? High school dropouts do this sort of thing all the time and I was a National Merit Scholar.”

Life has slapped me in the face more than once for being an intellectual snob.

So we are taking this blacksmithing class for two days. Our project – don’t laugh – is the grown-up equivalent of an ash tray. We are making coat racks. We are supposed to each have five hooks for our rack, but I have already decided that I am going to have only three. After all, I do have a closet. I have another place to put my coats.

Although – this is an aside – I used to be a one-coat person. I had My Coat. That was it. That’s what happens when you grow up in a family with limited means (even though I didn’t know it at the time). Each of us kids had a coat. And that’s the one we wore for all occasions.

But I have just recently developed a passion for coats and realized, thanks to TJMaxx and the Junior League Thrift Shop, that I can have a coat for every mood without breaking the bank. Now I have my winter work coat, my black leather car jacket, my jeans jacket, and my two new spring jackets – the long coral one with the polka dots and a robin’s-egg blue short one with a belt. I will be able to use my coat rack!

The first thing we learned was how to make a point at the end of the steel rod. Then we had to stretch the point out and round the rod – which was squared – at the end. Then we curved the end into a hook. Then put a tweest in the straight part of the back of the hook. Then – and this is the part I haven’t gotten to yet – cut off the remaining rod except for a little end piece that I am supposed to hammer into a leaf shape. The leaf part will attach to the bracket that hangs on the wall.

This work involves fire and danger, so Harpo was in heaven. He pretended to be slow to catch on, but that was only to make me feel better. By the end of the day, he had five beautiful hooks lacking nothing but the leaf ends and I had only three. None of mine match each other, but I’ve decided that’s on purpose to give the rack artistic integrity.

The smithy was a mess, but really, how clean can you expect such a place to be? There are coal dust and steel shavings all over. The smithy cat, Puff, is a Persian who is apparently unafraid of using any of her nine lives, as she likes to sit right under the fire.

We go back tomorrow to finish, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to move my right arm in twelve hours. It took me a while to learn to hit the rod hard enough and even then, I found out I was doing it wrong. One of the teachers told me to hammer from my elbow and my shoulder instead of my wrist.

Great. All these years of being told, “It’s in the wrist” and now I find out that’s a big fat lie. I think part of it is that those hammers are too heavy for most women. I’m pretty strong, but there are only so many times I can lift a hammer and pound it against a hard object.

Then there are the blisters. And the attractive coal/coke stains on my clothes and skin.

But it was fun. I gotta tell ya – pounding really hard on something once you realize you are not going to slip and hit yourself feels really, really good. I highly recommend it. It’s cheaper than therapy.