How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself by Robert Paul Smith Page B

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,