Perfect Tool

As some of you know, besides my decades in engineering or my current world as an audiophile CEO, I occasionally spend time shoveling manure. Management and Self-Help consultants can milk that work for all manner of metaphors regarding the value of manual labor, starting at the bottom, staying humble, or just knowing that some days you will wade in shhtuff. But this note is about none of that.

I shovel manure at the historic Hagemann ranch where I am a volunteer curator, shoving it into burlap sacks for locals to cart off to their personal gardens as rich soil amendment. It happens that when handing a manure-filled bag to an aspiring green thumb, they don’t want to sully their Prius trunk with loose manure. So among the steps in my process is one where I stitch the bag shut to keep the digested goodness on the inside and the Trader Joe’s bags in the trunk clean. That stitching is what I want to talk about.

As a hands-on guy I have held many tools, powered and un-, esoteric and dull, polished and rough. But every once in a while, a tool comes to hand that makes me smile.

In “How To Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, A Manual for the Compleat Idiot” John Muir (no, not that one) writes about the value of a quality tool. I don’t have the actual quote, which would require finding my copy, but he recommends owning quality tools so that at the moment when you are straining against a rusted bolt, your hand slips and the jagged edge of a corroded exhaust manifold slices your knuckles, you can pause, breathe, and reflect on the beauty of the fine tool in your now bloody hand. Were it a cheap piece of crap you might be inclined to fling it across the driveway, cursing its incompetence, but a fine, perhaps expensive, tool invites reflection, humility, and resolve.

Over the years of tools in my hands, many have been wonderfully functional, but occasionally one is so sweet, so unexpectedly functional and appropriate, that it transcends its station as a useful tool to become a Relativity of Theories, a Michelangelo of paintings, a Trevi of fountains, a Nations of lemon meringue pie. It makes little sense really, because the function ultimately is only what was intended. Indeed, it does exactly what, and maybe no more, than should be expected. And yet.

Once a burlap sack is filled with potent organics, we wheel it towards the “H Barn” so named for the letter nailed high above the rolling main doors by a previous owner whose both first and last names started with H. The barn is blessed with an electrical outlet near to the door, into which is plugged my humble yet perfect bag stitching machine. It is essentially a sewing machine with a pistol grip, with a simple mission to quickly apply a plain lock stitch to any swath of rough, torn, dirty, wet burlap put in its path. It must endure abuse and loose straw, overflowing manure and inept handling and still securely seal each and every manure bag. Which it does with a rate of success higher than a COVID vaccine. Mine, as it happens, is a relatively inexpensive import whose carry case is no more than molded Styrofoam, but the joy of neatly stitching shut a coarse dung-filled bag over which I have labored and sweat is near giddiness. In an effort to find some deeper meaning to my guilty pleasure of efficiently sealing bags of manure, I now wish upon each of you the joy of finding a few really, unreasonably, special things to hold in your hand that create a pleasant moment to break the drumbeat of stress, responsibility and chore otherwise making up much of each of our days. I would love to hear what of yours draws a smile as soon as it sits in your hand.