How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself (8 page)

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.

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.

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 kids, 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.

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.

Well, each house had an ice-pick too, in case you wanted a smaller piece of ice, for putting in a pitcher of water or lemonade or something. So we always knew where the ice-pick was, right on the side of the ice box, and when we wanted to drill holes in horse chestnuts or belts or whatever, we went looking for the ice-pick.

You see, we didn't always know where our Scout knife was—if we had one—any more than you do.

Well, so you bore a hole in your horse chestnuts. Then you get a piece of strong string. An old shoelace is good, if you have an old shoelace. Thread the string through the horse chestnut, tie a couple of good hard knots on the bottom of the string so that the horse chestnut slides to the bottom of the string and stays there.

All you need is the one string, and the reason why I suggested a shoelace is because from time to time you're going to have to put a new horse chestnut on the string, and the stiff tip on a shoelace makes the threading easy.

We called the game killers. I am told that they play it in England and call it conkers, and somebody once told me that some places in England they play it with snail shells, too, but I don't know anything about that.