About three months ago my father sent me a question. The precursor was the fact that All Saints Church was having an auction to raise money for the upcoming mission to El Salvador. The question was: “Do you have anything you could bring from Albania that we could auction off?” The answer seemed simple, seamless, brief yet honest: “No.” I didn’t tell my father that. Instead I looked around my apartment at the various treasures I had accumulated over the previous five months and concluded: “I can bring home three hand-forged axe heads and a knife made by me. Oh, and a printed copy of the blog I’ve been keeping, signed by the author himself.”
All of these seemed like relatively simple things to produce. The church we’ve been building in Fushekruja is a short walk from Osman. Osman is one of the most talented men I’ve ever had exposure to. He has been a blacksmith his entire life, and his mind is like that of my Uncle Norman’s: organized, precise, imaginative, and beautiful. Osman had agreed months before to help me forge a knife of my own design, hand-forged axe heads can be readily purchased from the pazar in Fushekruje, and my friend Cory Lockhart told me about an online service which prints blogs into book form.
One of the axe heads sold for a generous sum to a man named Ian. On Sunday last I spoke with my friend Chelsea Cook at church. Ian is Chelsea’s work mate. Chelsea is about as beautiful of a person as you are likely to meet. She and my good friend Kris Bates have been nurturing a love for some time, and are on the docket to wed in May. Congratulation you two. So, there I was, Seattle 2012, trying to make good on commitments I made from Eastern Europe some months ago.
The axe heads were advertised as axes, and Ian must have been expecting a fully functional axe i.e. something which a man can wield to bring a fully erect tree to a prone resting place along the forest floor. A visit to Hardwick’s Hardware in Seattle turned my predicament into a blessing. I love that place. Any carpenter, shipwright, furniture maker, or cabinet maker would love that place. Before leaving I not only had the materials to turn a simple hand-forged axe head into a limb lopping leviathan, I had the knowledge to produce a dangerous weapon of the woods. And so I did, and was able to meet Chelsea’s deadline of yesterday plus one without any hickups.
albaniacalling 