Dress Up

Another post that is too many months late. As usual, I'm sorry about that. I have been waiting for something exciting or at least happy to happen so I have something fun to write to you about but the last few months have been...less than ideal. I don't really want to focus on those events though, as there are always positives that can help outweigh the hefty hits my family has been dealt lately. Halloween is tomorrow, so it got me thinking. Perhaps I could tell you a story about Halloweens past, my dad's little known but actual superstitions, Shirleen's memories of bobbing for apples as a girl. But I decided to tell you a little bit about just me this time.

In kindergarten, our class visited the fire station. My class packed our little bodies into a tan trailer decked out to look like a living room and bedroom. The trailer was outfitted to simulate a fire emergency so we could see how smoke behaves and learn how to evacuate were we to experience such a thing at our own house.  I remember thinking, while I was stopping dropping and rolling along with my classmates, 'well if I were a firewoman this wouldn't happen at my house.' I then reasoned that if I were a police officer, no one would burgle my home. If I were a doctor, perhaps myself, and no one I knew, would get sick and die. I decided that a doctor would be the most useful profession to pursue. I mean since I already learned how to stop drop and roll, how hard could it be apprehending a burglar? Plus they make alarms for those other two scenarios.

For that Halloween, and the subsequent ones following, I dressed up as a neurosurgeon. My mom procured adult sized scrubs for me from UNC Hospital where she was currently in school. I proudly donned my surgery smock, mask, and sterile green gloves and ventured out to trick or treat in my neighborhood. When my interest didn't wane over the years and I continued to ask for the surgery smock on October 31st. my mom took me to UNC's brain lab to see a human brain. (I remember I was eight years old, but also I have a record of that day in my third grade journal I recently discovered in a tub of my school work my mom has saved for me.) I remember the brain to be folded into dense gray tissue filled with crevices, not a squishy, malleable mess you might expect given the many horror movie interpretations. As I grew, I kept thinking that is what I'd like to do, see what's in there, fix what's wrong. In high school, dissections in biology was my favorite time, my lab partners happily letting me do the worst (best?) of the exploration of the frog, shark, fetal pig. Their lab breaktime turned to concern when I went on, meticulously removing layers of matter in order to locate a shark's brain.

Sitting across from a friend at a downtown bagel shop watching her shaky fingers pull her bagel into pieces, I had a terrible urge to help her. I didn't understand why her hands were so shaky. Then I started noticing other people's hands as they focused on a task. What was wrong with everyone? Thinking back on the examples I was provided as a child of people working with their hands, all the jack-o-lanterns that were ceremoniously passed to my dad's expertise, watching his hands when he slowly and carefully shaved wood from a guitar neck. My mom's incredible watercolors and pencil drawings, watching her deft hands create and mold creative beautiful splints for her patients to recover in. They were as steady as mine so I never thought anything of it. After observing more carefully, I realized, perhaps the odd person was it me? Maybe my hands were the different ones, not those of my friends. I watch in terror each year as Nick carves his jack-o-lantern and I always regret handing him a knife, but to be fair, I cut myself with things significantly more often than he does...

In college, I worked in the biology lab cleaning and setting up for various lab experiments, pouring plates of agar for students to test various bacteria, mixing chemicals under the fume hood, running the autoclave to disinfect instruments. Oh also, one of my jobs was to feed the Madagascar hissing cockroaches, who's cages lined an entire wall of one of the prep rooms in NC State's biology building. They actually do hiss especially if they are annoyed you haven't fed them yet. Thinking back, I believe working in the lab was absolutely the highlight of my freshman year. Several times, when there were extra animals from a lab, say a student show up and the animal would have been wasted, my supervisor would allow me to do the dissection in my down time at work. I would take samples from various tissue, making slides to see what the cells looked like under the microscope. What fond memories....There is a little Halloween creepy for you.

Cut to now. I'm not a neurosurgeon. I didn't attend medical school. After switching my major from biochemistry, and earning a psychology degree with a biology minor (where my favorite class was neuropsychology, PS) I chose to take the LSAT instead of the MCAT. Fearing the extensive math section and that I wouldn't have time to draw out my equations in multi colored pens as I always had in all of my classes leading up to this test, I worried it wouldn't go too well. And harboring a strong love for the environment and enjoying writing led me in a different, seemingly easier, direction.

The point of that little history lesson is that things still seem to have worked out how they should. I don't get to dissect any animals or body parts, but I do get to use my hands and creativity to solve problems every day. My patients aren't necessarily alive, but a lot of times I feel that I am constructing a living being when I do my work. Often my tasks are tedious and difficult, and take a little bit of extra thinking. Like math, the socratic method of teaching and thinking quickly to spit out an answer is not my strong suit so I feel quite lucky to have stumbled into this job.

What does all of this have to do with guitars, other than to give you a little glimpse as to why I am here you ask? Good question. I will try to keep the rambling in check and give a quick anecdotal example. The other day I had to figure out how to cut a slot head peg head using my brand new milling machine. In my own shop. By myself. Without no one standing nearby to be sure I was setting things up correctly and cutting the right angles in the correct spots. The crux with a task like this is that at this point in the build process everything on the guitar is mostly finished. The guitar body is made, the inlays are inlaid, the fingerboard is glued onto the neck, the neck is fitted to the body and shaped to fit the owner's hand. There is little room for mistakes; in case of mishap, the only option is starting the neck over from a rough mahogany block.

Obviously I didn't want to make a brand new neck for my almost finished guitar so I knew I had to figure out how to set up my machine just so; set my router bit to the appropriate depth to keep the slots even and straight; drill the tuner holes exactly the same on each side of the peg head; file and whittle the edges of the slots to match each other; sand the slots smooth and clean. Though it took extra time, I decided to make a dummy peg head with the same dimensions as my guitar peg head. I practiced all of my measurements and set up on the prototype and tried them out. The results weren't as perfect as I would have liked, but I learned what I needed to adjust for the real thing.

When I was young and would ask my dad to help me make something in the shop on my visits on weekends, one thing that sticks is how long it took. I remember feeling frustrated because he would take AGES to actually do the thing I asked. I stood by and watched as he set everything up, eyeballing the placement of the fence on the table saw, then dissatisfied, scooting it a millimeter or so one way or another, patiently running through the entire project before ever cutting or gluing anything. I know now that he was teaching me how to truly, wholly make something.

The choices you make in life don't guarantee a certain outcome, but after awhile you can sit back and see where you've been and how you're shaped as a person because of those choices. I'm not a lawyer and I don't get to be a doctor. I don't get to know what it is like to fix a body and make someone better. But I feel like I have come as close to those feelings and actions as I will. After trying a different path I was still led back to working with my steady hands, seeing what is inside, and fixing what I am able. I learned from someone far more skilled than I, but now I can do similar work by myself; meticulously and with great care. Testing options and taking extra time to practice before just jumping in thinking I know what will happen. Now I have the knowledge and tools to be sure. And hopefully, as I keep working at this, I will be able to pass that part on to others wanting to learn. Not just the skills of guitar building themselves, but the artistry, passion, work and patience that goes into them.