artisan

Pronunciation:/ˌɑːtɪˈzan, ˈɑːtɪzan/

NOUN

a worker in a skilled trade, especially one that involves making things by hand:street markets where local artisans display handwoven textiles, painted ceramics, and leather goods

“We knew love. It wasn’t a matter of declaring it. It was proven.” ~ Seamus Heaney

I was on the phone with a friend the other day when I heard a high pitched whistle from the street. My friend heard it too, and I took a little detour from our conversation to explain that we were hearing the distinct sound of the knife-sharpener passing through my Mexican neighborhood. I like it. More than a call to potential customers, the knife-sharpener’s tune is a reminder of the presence of old ways amidst modern life.

I’ve been reluctant to take my dull knives out to the knife-sharpener, because I should know how to hone them myself. I know the high-pitched scrape of steel on steel from my childhood home, my dad making the long metallic strokes on each side of the knife that ensured an edge sharp enough to carve the Sunday roast. Honing knives is simple, he once told me, requiring me only to exert equal pressure on each side of the blade and then ever so carefully to test its sharpness on the inside of my thumb. Over the years, I have tried – driven more by nostalgia than necessity – but I cannot get it right.

It is my father’s birthday today, and I’m remembering an evening from this summer, back home in rural South Derry. One evening, I spotted him in his garage, perusing his collection of hand-tools for something my brother might be able to use. It’s a gentle start to the “cleaning out of the garage” that he and my mother talk about in ways we’re all afraid to take seriously.

Other than his beloved garden, this space is where my dad is happiest, surrounded by things he can rework and repair; things he can restore.

A maker of things, a fixer, he belongs in a Seamus Heaney poem. My father has the “Midas touch” of The Thatcher and even the grasp of the Diviner. I watched once, awestruck, as he “witched” water, the pull of it so strong where he stood, that the wishbone-shaped stick in his hands bent and almost tied itself in a knot, “suddenly broadcasting/ Through a green hazel its secret stations.”

Da is also a pragmatist, quick to remind me that his artisanal handiwork began out of economic necessity, his craft shaped and sharpened by the place that produced him. Even in hard times, he sang or whistled as he worked. With an ear for music, he is one of those people who can sit down and pick out a tune on whatever instrument is within reach. He always sang in harmony to songs on the radio or hymns at church—unaware he was teaching me to learn not the melody first, but a harmony. When he was just ten years old, recognizing his little brother’s musical talent, daddy made a guitar for him. And, years later, before I was born, he bought me the violin that would one day open doors for me in places like East Berlin before the wall came down. My father never bought an instrument for himself.

For my fourth Christmas, knowing I wanted a cradle for my doll, Gloria, he made one himself and painted it green. I imagine the scene, my father working under the “bare bulb, a scatter of nails, shelved timber, and glinting chisels” of Heaney’s “An Ulster Twilight.” Almost six decades later, it’s still in the roof-space above his garage along with other things that need to be “sorted.”

These days, I appreciate the way my father crafted a thing to last. In my mind’s eye, he is always doing the mental arithmetic, sizing up the situation, and cutting no corners. “If you’re going to do it, do it right.” I know he wishes he lived just down the road from his children and his grandchildren, to make things and make things right again.

It wasn’t until I was older, a parent myself, that I understood his obsession with fixing things. I also understood that maybe, as parents, each of us wants to fix the unfixable, to live forever so our children won’t have to experience the pain of loss. We want to stop time, close distance, and find the right words right when we need them. Sometimes, we fool ourselves into believing we’ve outsmarted the pain don’t we? With our reframing of things and the telling stories that soften the blow. Sometimes we are no match for the thing that cannot be fixed. My father knows this.

Two days after receiving the news from Arizona that my husband had died in our Phoenix home, I began packing clothes to make the long journey back. Like an automaton, I packed our suitcases with things we didn’t need, things to carry from Belfast to Dublin and on to chilly Chicago and then to a house full of sadness and inappropriate desert sunshine.

While packing, I remember noticing mud caked on the soles of my boots, a reminder of our walk at dusk through the wet leaves and muck of the Broagh Road. From half-way up the stairs, I handed them to my father and, as if life was still normal, I asked him to take them outside to shake off the dirt. Even as I did, I knew instinctively—and I was ashamed—that when those boots came back to me, they would be polished to a high shine.

Sitting on the stairs, my favorite boots gleaming in my hands, lines long memorised from Robert Hayden’s Those Winter Sundays filled my head:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

. . .

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
What did I know?

From the stairs, I watched him through the crack in the door. Stoic, strong as an ox, his head in his hands, a Bible open in his lap. Undone. He paused to cry out to God for help. He couldn’t fix this The man who had always fixed everything was no match for this – his only daughter widowed, his granddaughter fatherless. All he could do was polish my boots, the way he had once polished the leather brogues I wore to school.

What did I know?

I know this.

I love my father and have almost told him as much. Almost, because, as Seamus Heaney explained so well to Dennis O’Driscoll, “That kind of language would have been much suspect. We knew love. It wasn’t a matter of declaring it. It was proven.” It was, and it is.

It is a gift to know this, and for that I am indebted to the teacher who introduced me to the poetry in which I discovered my father—a man who can make things and find magic in the making of them, a man who also understands that poetry belongs to all of us and can speak on our behalf when the right words evade us. Once, following Seamus Heaney’s death, I was asked to give a speech on the poet and include some of his poems. Stuck for which ones to choose, I asked my brother who suggested I just gather the audience on a Zoom call and have our da read “Digging.” “That will floor ’em.” Yes, it would.

Poetry is close to prayer. Carol Ann Duffy once said it is “the most intense use of language that there is. It is the perfect art form for public or private grief.” It is also the perfect art form for gratitude and love unspoken.

I don’t know if I ever thanked him for cleaning my boots or sharpening knives or making things better, so I’ll do that now.

Happy birthday daddy. xo

A Call
by Seamus Heaney

“Hold on,” she said, “I’ll just run out and get him.
The weather here’s so good, he took the chance
To do a bit of weeding.”

So I saw him
Down on his hands and knees beside the leek rig,
Touching, inspecting, separating one
Stalk from the other, gently pulling up
Everything not tapered, frail and leafless,
Pleased to feel each little weed-root break,
But rueful also…

Then found myself listening to
The amplified grave ticking of hall clocks
Where the phone lay unattended in a calm
Of mirror glass and sunstruck pendulums…

And found myself then thinking: if it were nowadays,
This is how Death would summon Everyman.

Next thing he spoke and I nearly said I loved him. (From The Spirit Level by Seamus Heaney)