How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself (13 page)

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.

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, don'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.

The fish the same way.

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.

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.

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.

Fold these two halves together and then fold back the two thick pieces the other way so that the folded part lies even with the bottom.

We used to take the bottom and tear back through the thick part, to make two little tabs, one going one way, the other the other, to sort of hold the whole thing together.