How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself

by Robert Paul Smith

  We used to use acorns or horse chestnuts for ammunition, because we never got to control these slings very well. Put an acorn in the cloth or leather—here’s really the only part that’s different from the slingshot: when you tie the strings, try to make the cloth or leather into a little pouch—hold the ends of the string and whirl it around your head. When you’ve got some speed up, let go of one of the strings, and the acorn will fly. Don’t expect to hit things the way you do with a slingshot right away, or even ever. It takes a lot of practice to get this one going right, and we were never able to get nearly as accurate with this as with a slingshot.

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  If you live out in the country, you probably know about whipping apples, but if you don’t, or if you only go to the country for vacations, here’s the way it goes. What you need is a long, whippy branch or switch, and an apple tree that nobody’s paying any attention to, like the one in my back yard. You’ll find apples on the ground, either green or a little squishy. Sharpen the end of the switch, stick it into the apple, bring your arm back and throw, sort of like casting a fishline. I think you’ll be amazed at how far you can throw this way, much faster than just throwing with your hand. It’s sort of like having an arm six feet long. I guess you could do this with any fruit or nut that was soft enough to stick on the end of a branch, if you don’t run across an apple tree that nobody’s paying any attention to in your part of the country. If you find some clay, and mold it into balls, they work well, too.

  The Indians used this same idea to make throwing sticks. There are darn near as many ways of making throwing sticks as there were Indians, but the idea of all of them is the same, and it’s the same as whipping apples, a way of making your arm longer.

  The general idea is to make a stick with a bump, a hook, or a nail in it.

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  Then make an arrow to put on the bump or hook or nail.

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  You hold the throwing stick with your hand bent back, the arrow lying along the top of the stick. Whip it forward the same way as you would do with the apple whip or a fishing pole, so that as you throw the throwing stick comes up and over and releases the arrow. You can make these any way you like; you can put points on the arrow with a nail or by sharpening it, you can put feathers on the back—and you’ll find it’s a whole lot easier if you don’t use feathers, but make a slot and make the feather-vanes out of cardboard or thin wood.

  Like the old-fashioned sling, this one takes a little doing, but the Indians used it; lots of tribes never used bows and arrows at all, but throwing sticks all the time. No, I’m not that old. I didn’t know any Indians, except once a year, one used to come to our school and give a speech. It is my recollection that he was the Indian whose face you’ll see on an old Indian Head nickel. He never said one mumbling thing about throwing sticks. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what he talked about at all. I just know he came to the school every year, and said the same thing every year.

  I don’t know how old you are, and I really don’t know any more how old I was when I did the different things in this book, so if you find that some of the things are too old for you—wait until you’re old enough to do them. If you find that some of the things in the book are too young for you, first figure out if they’re really too young, if nobody else knows that you’re doing them. I know that when I was a grown man, my wife and I went to live in Mexico for a while, and walking down the street one day, I saw a whole bunch of kids playing with what was, for me, a brand new toy. It was a yo-yo, and I’d never seen one before. I bought one—I told the shopkeeper that it was for my kid, but I didn’t have a kid then, and I brought it home with me. Now certainly a yo-yo, as a matter of fact any toy, was too young for a man almost thirty years old, so I used to sneak out in the back yard when I wanted to learn how to use a yo-yo, and any time anybody came to the house when I was doing it, I stuck it in my pocket and pretended that I had been out back doing something important and grownup.

  So, first of all, remember that the name of this book is How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself and if some of the things sound a little childish, figure it out: do you think they’re too childish, or do you think that if someone else saw you doing it, he would think it was childish? And if you really are too old to do some of these things, why don’t you show your kid brother how to do them, or your little sister, or any little kid on the block? He or she or they will think they’re great things, and they’ll think you’re great for showing them.

  Take, for example, polly-noses. You know how, in the fall, those little wing things fall off the maple trees. They look like this.

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  First of all, if you’ll get up on a fairly high place and just drop one, you’ll see some real flying. Then, after you get down from the high place, if you’ll separate the two wings at the joint, you’ll see that the base of each half is sort of double. If you’ll stick your fingernail in between the two halves and pull them apart a little, you’ll find that there’s some sticky stuff that lines this place, and if you put it on your nose, it’ll stay there and you’ll have what we called a polly-nose. Polly was what we called a parrot, and somehow we thought that with these on, our noses looked something like parrots’ beaks.

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  Silly? You bet. But sometimes it’s fun to be silly, and didn’t you laugh just the other night when the man on television put on a funny hat?

  That reminds me of another kind of silly thing we did. We called it owl-eyes. You need another kid, or a docile parent, for this. Put your nose up against his, and your forehead up against his. Both of you close your eyes, one of you or both of you count, “One, two, three, owl-eyes.” As you say “three,” both of you open your eyes at the same moment, and I’ll guarantee you’ll see owl-eyes. I just got to wondering what would happen if you did this all alone, by pressing your nose up against a mirror instead of another kid. I went and tried it, just this minute. It works, so this is something you can do all by yourself.

  In the summer, in my part of the country, late in the summer and right on into the fall, there’s a plant growing all over the place wherever there’s a brook or a stream or a lake. It’s called jewel weed, and it’s easy to find by looking for the orange flower. It’s a real pretty plant, and in the late summer and early fall, in addition to the flowers there’s a little green pod that grows on it. It looks like a tiny green banana.

  Well, if you find the plant, and if you find the pod, and if you squeeze it very gently, you’ll find out that it may look like a tiny green banana, but it behaves more like a tiny green banana-shaped bomb.

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  I’m sure all of you have seen pussy willow one time or another, and I’ll bet a hat that there isn’t one of you, really, who at one time or another hasn’t stroked one of the buds, because they’re so exactly like a kitten’s fur. Here’s one of the things I did when I was a kid that I don’t think I would have liked another kid to watch me doing. It seemed a little childish to me. But I did it, and I had fun doing it, all the same. You can take a knife, and slice right through one pussy willow the long way. Get a little piece of paper, and glue that half down. Then cut the tip of the other half of the bud, the short way. If you glue that on the paper right next to the first one, can you see what you’ve started to make? Looks sort of like a bee, doesn’t it. Well, with a pencil or a pen, draw in the legs. You can make it as simple or complicated as you like; you can—here we go again—go to the library and see what a bee really looks like, or you can go take a good look at a real bee, if there are any around, and you can make the pus
sy-willow bee just like the real one.

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  Or, if you like, cut wings out of cellophane or paper, and make up a new kind of bug. Maybe you’ll have an idea how to make a totally different kind of animal. A lady was telling me the other day that when she was a kid, they used to draw a fence on the paper, glue the pussy willows on, draw tails and whiskers—and there you have pussy-willow cats sitting on a fence.

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  I know this sounds goofy, but if you can get a piece of wood and ten pins you can make a piano. Oh, not a big piano like the one you have. You’d need a lot more wood and pins for that. This is a pin-piano, and it’s a musical instrument, and it plays very piano. The word piano means soft. The real name for a piano is pianoforte, and all it means is an instrument that can play loud or soft. Well, this is a pin-piano and it just plays soft. All you do is stick the pins into the piece of wood, each one a little further in than that first one.

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  If you take a nail and hit the pin, you’ll hear a certain note. By pushing the next pin in a little further, you’ll hear a higher note. And so on. Tune as you go, “do re mi fa sol la ti do.” But that’s only eight pins. Why did I say ten? Because you’re going to bend at least two of the pins trying to get them in to the right depth. We always did.

  When we were kids, we read in books about making cigar-box guitars and fiddles, but I must say they were never very successful, and these days, most cigar boxes I run across are made out of heavy cardboard. That’s a shame, because the cedar wood they were made of was just the right size and thickness to make all sorts of things out of wood, and in addition, cedar wood has such a wonderful smell. Coupled with the cigar smell, it was just about the best smell in the world. But some cigars are still packed in cedar boxes, and if you can get ahold of them, you’ll find the wood just the right thing to make many of the things in this book. Also, they’re held together with little tiny nails which are just the right size for cigar-box wood, to go through and not split. The way to get the paper off is to let the wood soak in water until the paste is dissolved, after you’ve carefully taken the box apart and saved the nails. You can hold the wood under water by putting something heavy on top of it. If you do it in the washbasin in your bathroom, the handiest heavy thing is your tooth-brushing glass filled with water. Once the paper is soaked off, it’s sometimes a good idea to put the wood to dry between paper towels or newspaper, with a heavy book on top, to keep the wood from warping.

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  As I say, the cigar-box fiddles we made never worked very well, but I can tell you an easy way to make a musical instrument that works. I know it does, because I made one a couple of months ago for one of my kids. Get a big empty tin can, the kind that has a top that comes off all in one piece, like a coffee can, or maybe, like me, you’ll be lucky enough to find an old beat-up canister that your mother’s through with, the kind that she keeps flour or coffee or sugar or salt in, the kind that has a lid that fits. I don’t really think it’s even important whether it has a lid on it, but that’s what I used and it works pretty well. I also found an old yardstick a paint store had given me, but any long thin flexible piece of wood will do. Punch a hole in the top of the can. You can do this by using a nail and a hammer. Get a piece of thin wire; if you or someone in your family or one of your friends plays the guitar or the mandolin or the ukulele or the violin, and they’ve got an old music string they don’t need any more, that will do fine. Whichever you get, tie a knot in one end of it, or if it’s too stiff to knot, tie it around a little piece of wood, so that you can thread it through the hole and pull rightly on it, without it coming through the hole. Now take the yardstick and drill a hole in that, too. Take the other end of the yardstick and put it against the side of the can, wind around the can with masking tape or adhesive tape or any strong sticky tape you have. Now bend the yardstick like a bow, but just a little ways, and thread the other end of the wire through the hole, and fasten that end of the wire down with tape, or tie a knot in it, any way you like so that the wire keeps the yardstick bent in a bow.

  If you’ll pluck the string, holding the whole thing by the yardstick in your closed hand, bending the yardstick into more or less of a bow, you’ll produce a kind of ba-voom noise, which sounds very much like some of the noises you’ve heard on television when the man with the checkered suit has had one drink too many. You can also, by bending the yardstick more or less, play a tune on this—more or less. If you want to try different things, just take a rough stick and use it for a bow, like playing the violin, instead of plucking, and you can get a still different kind of noise by hitting the string with a stick while you bend the yardstick back and forth. I don’t know what the name of this is. It’s just a ba-voom thing.

  If you live in the part of the country where they grow lots of corn, I’ve been told and I’ve seen pictures of a thing that looks wonderful to me; a cornstalk fiddle. Where I grew up, they didn’t raise corn, and so we never made them, so I can’t tell you how, but maybe your father or your uncle or your grandfather knows.

  While you’re talking to your grandfather, maybe he still knows how to carve peach-pit monkeys. My grandfather did, and he also knew how to get the whole peel off an apple in one long strip every time. It’s pretty hard to do, making a peach-pit monkey, so hard I’m not sure a book can tell you how to do it. I know it’s too hard for me to tell you in a book, but I can tell you how to make a peach-pit basket, and a peach-pit fish, and a peach-pit turtle. Save the peach pits as you eat them, and get them as clean as you can by gnawing, and by pulling out the little threads that are left with your fingers. When you’ve got it as clean as you can, put it away and let it dry. Since peaches come in the summer, and carving things from peach pits is an indoor thing that you can do in the winter, leave them until they’re really dry. When they are, pick out a good big one to start, because it’s tricky work at best, and the bigger the pit, the easier for beginners. My guess is that if you have any tools at all, you have a coping saw. (Maybe you call it a jig saw.) With the saw, make one cut, just on the side of the little ridge, from the pointy end of the peach pit to about half way down. Then another cut, same way, on the other side of the ridge. Then another cut from the side of the peach pit to the first cut, same on the other side, so that your peach pit looks like this from the narrow side.

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  Turn the peach pit to one wide side, and then the other, and look at it. On one side or the other, and sometimes both, you’ll see just the tip of what looks like an almond. If you poke it with the tip of the smallest blade in your knife, you’ll find it’s soft, even softer than an almond, and you can pick it out, a little crumb at a time, or if the peach pits happen to be accommodating, out to help you, sometimes you can get the whole almond thing out in one piece.

  It is not an almond, by the way, and we used to think it was poison, and for all I know, maybe it is. I do know it isn’t good for you to eat. It tastes pretty bad, even worse than acorns, and they were terrible.

  Anyhow, you can see now the beginning of the basket. The part up on top is the little handle, the bottom is the basket part.

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  You’ll find that the reason some people call a peach pit a peach stone is because it’s darn near as hard as a stone, and to open up the hole to make a real good handle means chipping off the inside of the loop, one tiny little sliver at a time. I might as well tell you now, you’ll probably break two for every one you make, especially as you get better and try to make the handle thinner and thinner, more like a real basket. You can smooth off the outside, too, with sandpaper, or by rubbing it on cement like the clamshell bracelets. It takes a long long time. I guess I better tell you, if you’re not the kind of kid who’s got an awful lot of patience, donâ
€™t try peach-pit baskets.

  The way you make turtles is all with a knife, just cutting from the outside, like this. The reason for making the turtle at all is that the markings on the peach pit, when you start to grind it down, look something like a turtle shell.

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  The fish the same way.

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  A little ways back, I was talking about wooden cigar boxes, and what I always made out of the long thin strip that had been the front of the box was a paddle-wheel boat. Just cut out a boat shape on the front, and cut out a piece with your coping saw in back. Cut two little notches on the end pieces, smooth up the edges of the piece you cut out. Put a rubber band from notch to notch, put the piece you cut out halfway through the rubber band.

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  Wind it, hold it tight, put it in the water. It goes. You can fancy this up any way you like, putting a little cabin on the deck, or a mast, and if you can cut two little pieces of wood, you can fit the notch of one into the notch of the other, and put that in the rubber band, and have a four-blade paddle wheel.

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  It would be my guess that all of you know how to make airplanes (some people call them darts) out of a piece of paper. In case you don’t, you fold the paper lengthwise, open it out, then fold the two ends in like this, so what used to be the top of the paper now lies along the center fold. Now fold the two sides together to make sure that everything’s even, open it out again and fold again, so that the two new folded sides lie along the center fold.