“I was once a Foundling.”
–Din Djarin, from The Mandalorian
A few years ago I got a call from a gentleman about a knife that needed a new handle. He had a thick Australian accent and told me one of his friends was redoing some walls and ceilings in her house and had found an old cleaver behind the drywall. He asked if I would be able to put a new handle on it, and by the way it was also going to be a wedding present for his friend who found it.
A mysterious butcher’s tool in the walls? A wedding gift? Nuptials without knives are nuptials not worth having. Besides that, certain things in life have a habit of being found when we need them the most. This all sounded extraordinarily auspicious to me. Of course I took the job. I couldn’t have made this up if I tried.
I met my new Australian friend, who at the time was raising Alpacas (because of course he was), at a country bazaar just outside the city and picked up the cleaver. It was important to me to honor the found-nature of this deeply immodest blade of humble origins, so all the material save for the pin stock and adhesives came from refuse dumpsters or abandoned houses. I named the cleaver Wallace, and returned him to my Australian Alpaca friend. As with any other job I dropped the work off, made sure the person paying me was happy, and didn’t think much of it.
I did finally met the lady who found the cleaver at one of our shows, and she has bought a knife almost every year around Christmas time. She got in touch this year about having a knife made, and I realized that her and her husband had never seen how the cleaver was built.
I think the things that find their way into our lives are so much more interesting than the things we seek out. While it’s good to have a plan, it’s also important to acknowledge that plans fail, often spectacularly, and the best things happen to us while we’re planning something else. We stumble into to deep love, or fall into a career, and despite our best calculations, the special moments and deepest connections in our lives seem to occur solely at the whims of the universe. Very much like Wallace the Cleaver and his handle made from garbage that somehow found it’s way into our shop, it’s up to us to choose what to do with the things we find ourself with.
The Foundling was a commission for her husband, who was always stealing her knife, and was built using all sorts of materials that found their way to me.
groundedinfire 