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Recent Bios FAQ

147174 "Douglas K. Stevenson" <duck@c...> 2005‑06‑29 Bio mio
As a neogit I was just aft-scratching, trying to figure out why, say, even 
common little creatures are spelled differently by folk on this porch -- 
"rabbet" for example -- when Karl (yes, the other one) gently offlistedly 
reminded me that first time posters usually post a bio, which evidently 
meant that the biobite I tried to sly in on 2 June was judged to be just a 
cough and a mumble, as in now look the other way please, altho' it does 
seem to be true that by the end of a long enough mumble they'll have 
forgotten what was up there at the start of the sentence, let us pray.

I'm a psycholinguist. The easiest way to think of that is to remember
that Hitchcock film, and that'll take care of the first part.   

Grew up in Michigan in a GM family where father was, and both brothers 
are, engineers. And grew up believing that fathers normally are able to 
make or fix or fashion anything.  And that's the way it's always been like 
deep ice on the lakes in winter. Father's father's hobby had been 
woodworking as well, and my brothers have followed that grain.
   
There is, I think, something quite real in many of us, even if it's 
supposedly abstract -- that likes and even yearns for the texture of 
handtools, the look and the heft and the feel.  I like the look and the 
feel and, yes, the heft for example of those older screwdrivers where 
pear-halves of wood sandwiched the forgings.  Have a couple of 
brass-headed hammers around that I supposedly made to use with clock 
repair.  But really just like the way the polished sunsetty brass looks 
against the hardwood handle and the way it balances when, for instance, I 
decide whether or not that little spider prancing across the bench should 
be brassed back to his maker -- or might be just another neogit, trying to 
work out why spelling -- "rabbet" for example -- has gone by the      
boards.

That's the heart of it.  

And even when, say, working summers as a heater in the drop-forge 
at Buick, there was something about that working of the metal that 
gave a glow at the core. Whwhwhhhh----Ooooomp!  Course you got fire 
and flames and sparks too, a daily Fourth of July at union rates. And 
we could still smoke unfiltered Camels, and the summers were longer. 
  
Lived in several states following the usual gradschool crawl, and in
New Mexico where we had a house in the valley from a ret'd military
couple who'd let us paint for rent, with a fireplace, and, uh, liberated 
firewood from a student who worked on campus trimming -- hey -- trees,
and a Lab and two cats and a garden and an old Volvo (with red leather 
seats) that two druggies had driven straight through from Maine, and 
fishing whenever up in Durango (where I'd taught AmIndians) my wife, who'd 
I first met when I was just 15, and she was 24 (that's not true, but you 
have to check now and then to see if they're paying attention...) decided 
he'd be happy to just stay there, and drink beer under the spreading 
cottonwood tree, and damn, before I knew it she'd sold the furniture 
and we including our 6-year-old son were in Germany and I was offered 
tenure at the German university, and 30 years later, back in the US in 
Arizona, on pre-retirement leave ("for good behavior"), in a local 
hospital (the other hand from the one that had held the brass hammer), 
and this older non-male receptionist, who looked like she'd been so angry 
at the world so long that her brains had turned to hemorrhoids, asked me, 
once again, who my "provider" was.

When I'd left we'd had doctors and nurses and medics. We didn't have
providers. I thought maybe it was, you know, a religious question. 
So while I was aft-scratching, trying to figure it out, she turned and
asked our daughter (21), who knew, and after that, I was treated as if I 
were a cocker spaniel at the vet's with my owner answering for me.

"And has he had his rabies shots?"

Oh yes, and he's really into older, brass on wooden-arbors in 
wooden-plated pre-industrial Black Forest clocks. And restores 
them and writes about them.  
 
Regards,
Duck 
[ie from the German pronunciation of 'Doug']   

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Recent Bios FAQ