How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself

by Robert Paul Smith

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  The next one we did was called Johnny Jump the Fence. For this you stick the knife in the ground to start; that’s Johnny. You put your left hand down on the ground; that’s the fence. To make Johnny jump the fence you hit the knife handle with the same two fingers you used to Spank The Baby, the knife flies up in the air, over your hand and into the ground, and Johnny jumps the fence.

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  If you’ve never played mumbly-peg before, you’ll think this is impossible. I’m not sure I could do it right now, because I haven’t played mumbly-peg in a long time,2 although there are a lot of things I do as a grownup that I’d rather play mumbly-peg than, but when I was a kid, I could do it, and so could the other kids. It’s a tough one, though, maybe the toughest one in the whole game. Now here is where, after you’ve missed a couple of times, you’ll want to have another try, and sometimes it’s a good idea—but just remember you’ll have to go all the way back to the very first thing. I used to, more often than not, take a chance on this. My friend Mitch practically never did. He grew up to be a lawyer, and I grew up to be a writer, and to this day, when I think it’s time to take a chance on something, I have to go see Mitch and have him tell me whether it’s a good thing to take a chance on.

  The next-to-last thing in mumbly-peg is simply to flip it over your shoulder and have it stick in the ground. When I say “simply,” I mean it’s simple to talk about. It’s hard to do.

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  The very last thing you do in mumbly-peg is to spell O-U-T, out.

  To make the “O,” you make your thumb and index finger of one hand into a circle and drop the knife through. (I know this is just like “through the well,” but it’s an “O,” too.)

  To make the “U,” make the same fingers into a “U” and drop it through.

  To make the “T,” take the knife flat on the palm of one hand with the point facing the ends of your fingers, hold out the other hand palm down, and bring the hand with the knife up and over so that the hand slaps the back of the other hand, the knife goes over and into the ground, crossing the “T.” I know that sounds complicated, but look at picture 20, and if you’re still not sure, get your father to show you, and if you’re still not sure, try it with a pencil first until you get the idea. That might not be a bad idea to try with any of the things in mumbly-peg you’re not sure of from my description.

  Now, there may be one or two things I left out, but I don’t think so. But if there are, stick them in the list according to how tough they are: the tougher, the further along in the list.

  I said at the beginning of the book, the things in the book are things you can do all by yourself. Now mumbly-peg is a game to play with other kids. There can be two or three or four or five. More than that, it really takes too much time for the knife to go around.

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  But it’s also a game you can play by yourself. And the rules still hold. If you miss, and take another chance and miss again, go all the way back to the beginning. As I said, a Scout knife is good to play mumbly-peg with, but you can really play with any knife. The only thing is, if it’s a knife with a p blade, watch what you’re doing, even more carefully than with a Scout knife.

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  Those people are around again, telling me how they played mumbly-peg. Okay, they called Wind the Clock “Slice the Cheese,” and I told them that on my block Slice the Cheese was something entirely different, and it had nothing to do with slicing, cheese, or mumbly-peg. I feel sure your father will show you Slice the Cheese, or maybe he calls it Slice the Ham, but I don’t know how happy you’ll be to learn it. And some other people tell me instead of doing O, U, T is out, the way we did it, they said O as they flipped the knife off their shoulder, U as they flipped it off the elbow, and T as they flipped it off their wrist. It seems to me some kids I knew used to do it that way, too.

  Now, maybe you want to know why they call it mumbly-peg. Well, we never knew why when we were kids. It was called mumbly-peg because that was its name, like your name is Marmaduke. Much later on, I found out why. Some places, when they played, at the end of the game they cut a wooden peg the length of the winner’s little finger, and sharpened it. The peg, that is, not the finger. Then each player in the game got to hit the peg with the handle of the knife, holding it by the blade, using it as a hammer. I have been told each player got to hit the peg twice, though some people tell me it was figured out in some involved way they no longer remember. In any case, you hit the peg into the ground, and the loser had to pull it out with his teeth. Of course, if you got the peg far enough into the ground, the loser had to eat a little dirt to get at the peg, and chances are when he got his mouth full of dirt, he mumbled something—just what, I would not care to say. So, he mumbled the peg, and the game was called mumbly-peg.

  But as I say, we never did that. I’m sure we would have, if we’d known it was a way to make somebody eat some dirt. You can do that part of it or not, as you please. It all depends on how you feel about getting a mouth full of dirt.

  Here’s a thing we used to do in the summer, after a trip to the seashore. We always used to come back with a handful of seaweed, skate-eggs, fiddler crabs in a bucket of water, all sorts of stuff. By the way, for collecting nature stuff, there are lots of swell books, by people who know much more about it than I do. You can get them at the library, I’m sure. One in particular that I want to recommend to you is called Handbook for the Curious, by Paul Griswold Howes. It’s put together in such a way that if you have a thing, and you don’t know if it’s a bug or a kind of crab or a snake or a worm—this book will tell you. There are lots of books which will tell you what kind of a bug a bug is if you know it’s a bug. But this book will tell you first if it’s a bug, and then what kind of a bug it is.

  One of the things we were sure to bring home from the beach was a clamshell or two. They’re nice to look at, nice to have. You can use them as little dishes, to mix paint in, make paste in,3 even eat from, and if you can find a big enough one, your father will find it a handy ash tray.

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  But you can make something out of it, too. If you have the kind of front stoop I used to have when I was a kid, the steps made out of concrete, that’s your workbench for making clamshell bracelets. For whom? Well, for your sister, if you’ve got a sister, or your girl, if you’ve got a girl, or if not, just for the fun of making them. You can wear them yourselves. Indians wear bracelets, why not you?

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  If your front steps aren’t concrete, then look around. Probably the sidewalk is, or the garage floor, or a wall. It doesn’t make any difference, so long as it’s concrete, and the rougher the better. If you’ll hold the clamshell with the rounded part down, your hand on top, and just keep rubbing, first the outside layer will wear away, and you’ll see the polished shell underneath, and if you keep on rubbing, sooner or later—mostly later—you can grind a hole right through the shell. When it’s big enough to get your hand in, it’s a bracelet. This is something to do when you’ve got a lot of time on your hands.

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  Now I’m going to tell you about another thing we made, a kind of dart, and it’s my guess that when your mother or father sees it, you may catch a little hell; I don’t know. I did.

  So I guess right here, there better be another little speech about danger, like the one about knives. It’s my belief that things themselves are not dangerous. It’s the people who use them. One man driving a car is safe as houses; another is a menace to everybody on the road. I think the man who is safe is safe because he knows how to drive a car properly, and the man who is a menace is a danger because he hasn’t ever reall
y learned to drive. Sometimes the dangerous man is dangerous because he just doesn’t care, which is even worse. You know kids like that, I’m sure.

  But it doesn’t seem to me the answer to safe driving is to do away with automobiles, nor does it seem to me any more sensible to do away with bee-bee guns because some kid you know is a dope.

  I can’t give you any better argument than that to use with your parents about any of the few things in this book that are dangerous; and I must say that as far as I am concerned, with my own kids, I show them how to use the dangerous things, then watch them do it themselves, and if I see they don’t do it just exactly the safe way, they don’t get to use the dangerous thing until they prove to me that they know how to be careful.

  It’s got nothing to do with age, by the way; I know kids of seven that I’d trust with a knife, and I know men of fifty that I wouldn’t trust with a sharp lollipop stick.

  So that’s the end of the lecture, and this is how you make a needle dart. Get a thin needle from your mother. I’d suggest that you don’t hook it from her sewing box, but ask her for it. Ladies are funny about needles.

  Then get a burnt kitchen match. Cut or break the burned part off. Now with the thinnest blade of your knife, make a cut each way in the end of the match. It may take you a few matches before you get it done properly. Then put the needle in the center of the cross, eye-end first, and push it as far up into the match as you can. Take a little piece of thread, and wrap it around the length of the split place. The best way to do this is to smear that part of the match with glue after you’ve put the needle in, wrap it, and stick the ends of the thread down with glue, too. If you have airplane cement, it will dry almost as soon as you’re through wrapping. Make sure the needle is as straight as you can get it.

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  Then cut just one slit at the other end of the match, about an inch long. Cut two strips of paper, the width of the slit and twice as long. Slip them both into the match at their center point. Then bend each little piece of paper back, so that you form little wings, the way it is in the picture. I think you’ll be pleased to find that this dart used indoors, will stick to practically anything, curtains, furniture, sometimes even walls, and it does not leave a mark. I wouldn’t suggest aiming it at the very best antique table in the livingroom, because even a little mark would convince your mother that the dart was dangerous.

  Of course it is, and I’m here to tell you if I ever saw a kid throw one of these at another kid, there’d be a ruction in the house that wouldn’t die down for a long time.

  When I was a kid, there was no such thing as a suction cup—you know, the little rubber things that you have on the ends of arrows and darts, the thing that perhaps your father has to hold an extra ash tray in the car. But we did use to make something that was very much like it. We called it a leather sucker. It’s a cinch to make. All you need is a piece of fairly heavy leather, but soft: not as thick as a shoe sole, not as thin as a glove. My cobbler (that’s what we called shoe repairmen when I was a kid) calls it inner-sole leather. It’s about an eighth of an inch thick, smooth on one side, rough on the other. You cut it in a circle, and the size isn’t important.

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  Two inches across is about as small as I ever made them and six inches is about as big. I always used them with the rough side down, but with the one I made today I found out it will work either way. It doesn’t have to be a very smooth circle, either. In the center make a small hole—the mumbly-peg blade of your knife is good for this—and put a good heavy piece of string through it and tie a good hard knot. Then put the leather to soak until it’s really sopping wet and soft. Take it by the end of the string and walk around until you find a good flat stone, and drop it on the stone. Make sure the sucker is lying really flat on the stone: you may have to tap it down gently with the sole of your foot or smooth it down with your hand.

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  Then pull up on the string: one of three things will happen: you’ll either lift the stone up, or you won’t be able to pull the sucker off the stone, or you’ll break the string, depending on how heavy the stone is, how strong you are, and how strong the string is. If you happen to live near a brook or stream, you’ll find that’s a good place to use the sucker, because there will be flat, wet stones there (it works best on stones that are at least damp), and because you’ll be able to keep the sucker soaking wet there.

  I built one this morning, just to be sure I remembered how they are made, and I don’t live very near a stream, so I soaked mine in the kitchen sink and tried it on things in the kitchen. With a sucker two and a half inches across, I was able to lift up an iron frying pan that weighs three pounds. I managed not to drop it on my foot either. (Hope you have the same good luck.) To get the sucker off a stone or a frying pan or even the floor, don’t just keep pulling up until it comes loose, because you may pull the string right through the sucker. Just lift up one edge of it and the whole thing will come loose.

  What happens with the sucker is a kind of interesting thing: although you may not know it, air weighs something. It presses down on us all the time, although we don’t feel it, and it presses down on everything—the ground, puppy dogs, tomatoes, and automobiles. When you put the sucker on the stone, being wet and floppy it fits on the stone so exactly that there is no air between the leather and the stone, but there’s lots of air pressing down on top of the sucker. That holds the sucker to the stone and when you pull up, there’s still air pressing down on the sucker, to hold it to the stone. The sucker is, we say, sticking to the stone.

  What you’re doing when you use a rubber suction cup is push on it so that there’s no air under it, but of course there’s air on top of it, so it sticks the same way.

  The trick in making a leather sucker is to make sure that the hole in the center is no larger than the string, because if it is, air will get in, and it won’t work.

  Now, I’m sending you to the library again. If you have some leather left over, and if you have found out you like fooling around with leather, you can find a book in the library that will tell you how to make all sorts of things out of leather.

  If you have a horse chestnut tree somewhere in your neighborhood, there’s a game we used to play every fall when we were kids that I’m going to tell you about. You’ll need another kid to play with, but as far as getting ready for the game is concerned, you can do that yourself. Once again, if you don’t know what a horse chestnut tree looks like, ask somebody or look in the library book that I told you about when I told you about willow whistles.

  In the fall, on a horse chestnut tree you’ll see things called burrs.

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  They’re like the burrs you use to make burr baskets in that they’re prickly, but they’re quite different. They’re about the size of an apricot, they’re green, and they hang from the branches in clusters. Depending on what time of the year you go looking for a horse chestnut tree and what part of the country you live in, you’ll find them hanging from the tree or lying on the ground around the base of the tree. If you’ll spilt them open, you’ll find a horse chestnut inside.

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  Sometimes you’ll find them half open and you can just pull the two halves of the burr apart with your fingers, sometimes they’re still so green you may have to stamp on the burr with your heel until it splits. If the horse chestnuts are ready to use, they’ll be brown, a real wonderful glossy brown.

  If you split a couple of burrs open and find they’re white, or part white and part brown, or very light brown, you’ll have to go away for a day or two and try again.

  Now let’s say you’ve waited and you’ve got a bunch of horse chestnuts. By the way, when we were kid
s, the horse chestnut tree in my neighborhood was on a neighbor’s lawn. It might be a good idea to ask if you can go get them, if your horse chestnut tree is on a neighbor’s lawn. Not that anyone wants them but kids, but the ones you can’t reach, you’ll jump for, and if that doesn’t do it, you’ll shy a branch up into the tree to knock them down, and if the neighbor has just invested three million dollars in new grass seed, he may not like having it all covered over with branches and burrs and kids. But I’m sure he won’t be a grouch about it. Chances are when he was a kid he did the same thing, and you’ll come home with as many horse chestnuts as you can carry. I don’t have to tell you to look at them, because they’re the nicest things in the world to look at, and you’ll be doing that anyway. If you want them to shine more, take them and rub them up against the side of your nose. Perhaps you’ve seen your father or someone do that with a pipe. There’s oil on everybody’s skin there and it oils up the chestnut or the pipe and makes it shine.

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  Okay, now you have some horse chestnuts, and they’re fun to get and fun to open the burrs and fun to look at and fun to shine. There are things you can do with horse chestnuts, too.

  You can’t eat them, at least I never could, but here’s a game you can play with them. This, like mumbly-peg, is a game you need another kid to play with, but getting the horse chestnuts ready is something you can do by yourself. Pick out the ones that look good and solid. Now, bore a hole right through them, through the center of that rough, woody little part right through to the other side. You can do this with the mumbly-peg blade of your Scout knife, or with a long nail. We used to do it with an ice-pick, but I imagine a lot of you have never seen or heard of an ice-pick. When I was a kid it was darn near the handiest tool in the house. That was before electric refrigerators, and the way we used to keep food cool was, a man came in a horse and wagon every other day, or even every day in the summer. In the back of his wagon were great big chunks of ice, as tall as I was when I was little. He would ask my mother how much ice she wanted. She’d tell him a fifty-pound piece or a hundred-pound piece, and he’d take out his ice-pick—it was just a long sharp steel point set in a handle—and he’d chip a little line along the great big piece of ice and like magic, the big piece would break right along the line and there would be a fifty-pound piece. In the summer, we’d always wait for the ice man because when the ice split there’d be pieces of ice just the right size for putting in your mouth. Then he’d take a tongs that looked like this, jab both points in the ice, and sling the fifty-pound piece of ice up on his shoulder. He had a kind of leather pad up there. He’d carry it into the house and put it in the ice-box, just a big wooden chest with a door on the front. That’s what kept the food cool.