But who has time for the sharpening guy? (thoughts on an Old World moment in a New World diaspora)
June 9th, 2003 at 6:50 pmOn warm summer afternoons, usually around three or four o’clock, down the streets of my neighborhood there walks a man who pushes a cart.
That in itself might be reason enough to pause, in this age of empty sidewalks and clogged highways, that someone pushes a cart. On the streets of Chicago, though, in one of the last links America has to any kind of Old World mentality, it happens occasionally – Mexican elote peddlers, coolers of Italian ice welded to bicycle frames and pedaled down alleyways, guys who show up at street fairs with shish kebab grills on wheels and cold cans of pop. But out here on the Northwest side, up around the Portage Park area, we have our very own sharpening guy who pushes a homemade cart with a bell and a grindstone on it down our blocks, looking for blades to sharpen and offering nothing but what his mind can do and his hands can remember.
He doesn’t get many takers.
He looks the strange bird, to say the least: misshapen pants hitched up to his stomach, one leg shorter than the other and neither reaching down to his ankles, a hitch in his walk that turns every step into three separate movements. In fact, his whole body seems to be one large tic when he moves, right down to the involuntary grimaces on the weathered face and the sweatered shoulders swaying in invisible time. Down the street he walks, slowly, speaking to no one but looking for the entire world as if he is out here today because, well, somebody has to and what if there is a knife somewhere that needs to be sharpened?
For its part, the cart itself is an equally jury-rigged contraption. Two large wooden wagon wheels showing faded red paint from an earlier, more vibrant time, a smaller wheel for steering, and two extended handles like the grips on a wheelbarrow. Underneath a flat platform is a bell, attached to the wheels and clanging two tones every five seconds or so; on top there’s a grindstone attached with a frayed belt to a massive spinning wheel that cuts through the middle of the cart like a calliope dropped on its side. For fifty cents or a buck or two bucks or three for five or whatever it is, he’ll stop the cart, take your scissors or knives, open up the little seat, get out his box of tools, hammer and tap and wipe and peer and run his finger along the edge. And then, start to pumping the spinning wheel and its belt with an almost involuntary movement of his leg, pumping in a rhythm learned somewhere far away from the flowering magnolia tree he has set up shop under in order to turn your dull blades into something useful again.
Useful, like they should be. Useful, like all things should.
It takes twenty minutes or so, the sitting and the pumping and the whetting and the running of the finger; twenty minutes for one, thirty for two, and not a word while he’s doing it. Just the memory in his fingers and the implied transaction of honest work and a skill to be offered up, and the clanging of the coins and the opening and closing of the little tool box lid. And the sound of grinding stone on metal.
Twenty and thirty minutes ain’t so fast, and few have the time. As he sits, next to a fence by the side of the road, cars whiz past without a glance: huge, expansive SUVs, like Hummers and Escalades, their driver’s ears plastered to cell phones and the kids screaming in the back seat; the young punks in cars, full of freedom and convinced their only job is to throw of the shackles of a repressive world, starting with their unnecessary mufflers; the hip, urban kingpins, rattling their neighbors’ doors with explosive bass and dripping attitude; the company trucks and vans filled with the needs of real commerce and not some penny-ante guy on the side of the road who might have learned something at the hands of his father in another land. Or another time.
He’s a weird bird, alright, but my house doesn’t have enough cutting implements that are failing me to justify having him hang around another half hour or so. My neighbor does, though, which is why the cart has stopped, and I can see him, standing off to one side, watching and waiting, trying to start up a conversation just to pass the time and play up the neighborly bit. The kid next door comes tooling up on his bike and says his mom said the sharpening guy’s been pushing that cart since she was a girl. For a brief moment it looks like they’re done, my neighbor and his newfound service provider, but they’re not, for there’s another knife to go. The kid trails away, and I’m left to wonder why.
Why? I ask myself, watching the leg go up and down with the ceaseless need to energize the machine. After all, why bother? He can’t get more than a handful of bills on any given day, at most, and the blocks must seem endless in the summer heat with a grindstone cart in your hands. Most potential customers probably don’t even hear the bell, windows shut to the elements but not to the mechanical hum of the temperature control, and the thriftiness that once pervaded this working-class neighborhood of tidy bungalows and tidier lawns was thrown out with yesterdays’ news to make way for whatever’s come bright and shiny today. Nobody, or very few, need scissors and knives sharpened these days. And the Poles and Slavs, Italians and Irish of recent vintage who make up much of the neighborhood have little interest in old men and older ideas – however they got here, that’s most likely what they were leaving from, in some way and without looking back very much. The rest of us, we don’t even think about scissors until we need them, and certainly not thriftiness, and not the eccentricity of an old man and his need to push a cart. Call ourselves a nation that worships entrepreneurship as we might, but we like our labor invisible and our services fresh-faced and wearing a uniform – misshapen old men with metal dust in the creases of their palms need not apply.
But without an apparent answer and the sun setting on the day, I figure the cart is dragged from its overnight resting place on any given day for the same reason we drag ourselves out of ours: in the end, there’s no other choice. I’m guessing it’s not the bills and it not the talk, but maybe it’s the sun and maybe it’s the effort and maybe it’s who he is. The sharpening guy. Had this been in some other time, some other place, less harried and less sure of itself and less able to pass by history and knowledge and hard work without a second glance, he’d have an acknowledged place and a clear reason, no doubt. And people who might depend on him, perhaps, in some way, even if just for the continuity and the need for order and an occasional commercial transaction not dominated by corporate interests. Or the grasping need to squeeze every penny out of every moment and every customer.
And so he’s out here, on the street, not for anyone else, and maybe not even for himself, but for the need, and the fact that it’s right, and that somebody must have something that needs to be sharpened. And he happens to be a guy who knows exactly how to sharpen it. Those two things only have to be put together; the bell’s enough advertising, people know who he is, they can choose to come to him, dull blades in hand or not. He’ll be here, after all, because that’s what he does, and that’s the way it’s done. For somebody, after all.
On warm summer afternoons. Usually around three or four o’clock.
very sharp!
Yet again, Mark, you manage to cut right to the heart of the issue with a well honed sense of the past.
Excellent.
We used to have a knife sharpener that wandered the streets of the suburb where I grew up (a northwest suburb of Chicago.) This brought back some memories. I definitely remember that bell.
There’s still a grinder that drives through my part of Brooklyn on Saturdays in autumn. He has a tiny and ancient van of foriegn manufacture, and he rings a bell on each block. I had him sharpen two of my knives once. He handled them with obvious care and respect and when I got them back, they could cut anything.
I live in a deplorably gentrified neighborhood (Park Slope, I admit it) and am sure many of my neighbors have chef’s knives of impeccable pedigree: Henkel, Sabatier, Global. I wonder how many of them have actually let the old grinder give their knives the care they need–and of the ones who don’t, how many are careless enough to put them in their dishwashers?
Sharpens for free, but charges by the lunge, perhaps? Would make for a nice slasher flick. No, really – You hit a lot with this one, namely the sense of community that has withered over the past (____) years. There’s no strings in the street anymore to remind you in which point in space you actually reside. In cyberspace, every service sounds like a click. Every voice is a cathode hum; eyes are ears and throats are fingers. Places are pages. News ages so fast it doesn’t deserve the name anymore. And behind everything is either a zero, a one, or a combination of the two that means something else entirely. Mark, you called attention to our strange metamorphosis as the universe we know slides through some kind of depersonalizing veil of detachment. Not that that’s anything new, but is it so old and commonplace that people stopped noticing? People have been withdrawing their investments from the Bank of Reality at a slow but steady rate, probably because the currency is deemed more and more worthless and potentially dangerous. Stay in the coccoon. All will be well. I am secure. Come to Mama. Instead of fixing the schools, people put their energy into home schooling, forfeiting the experience of living together for the hidden expenses of protecting our young. Keeping someone in a state of mental and emotional retardation is not protecting them. It’s killing the planet, one by one. For every person that withdraws from the basic societal model, that’s 100 people in the planet that disappear, just like that.
What a wonderful piece of writing. I remember the sharpening guy in my New Jersey neighborhood many years ago. My mother said that nobody sharpened knives better. You brought it all back. Thanks for that.
I could almost hear the sound of metal on stone.
You brought tears to my eyes. I have no words to describe exactly how you’ve moved me.
Maybe the cart with the stone are an excuse to take a walk; they were an excuse for a masterful piece of writing. There is pleasure to be had in doing something far better and more beautifully than most of us know how to do it. And there is a wonder in beholding the beauty.
I am the sharpening guy. Seriously. Today my wife and I own a hardware store, but I don’t work there, I have another job. A very well paying job. And J brings home scisors, mower blades, pruning shears, etc. and I sharpen them at night so she can take them back to her customers the next day. For a couple of bucks, that don’t mean anything to me. But these are older people who respect the property that they bought, and they will not throw away something perfectly good in order to purchase something new that is probably not as well made and costs too much in the first place. It may be an odd mentality for someone who trades in retail, but I would do it for free, because they deserve it. Those who respect a quality product and see it through to it’s full useful life. When they do need to replace it they will come back to my wife’s store and get another quality product, not Wal Mart.
i’m surprised the sharpening guy walks the streets in the cities of america. coming from bombay, india i’ve grown up seeing people peddle all sorts of wares and skills on the pavements. in two years in los angeles however, it is only mexican immigrants selling cheap ice cream in little carts that i can compare with what you describe. thanks for sharing this.
We do what we know which becomes what we are.
The sharpening guy may not know why he gets up each day and pushes that cart. But it’s what he knows, what he can do without thinking, his grade, it’s him.
I simply love how you paint such a picture with words.
I have so few Old World moments in real life that I need to experience them virtually. Thank you for that.
So, how do you feel about shoeshine stands? When I pass by them in Manhattan I feel they’ve popped out of an earlier era.
I remeber that same old gentleman walking down the sidewalk in the portage park neighborhood. Because I grew up in this GREAT neighborhood, around lockwood and grace street, which is near a east west street named irving park. I heard him this summer and caught a glimpse of him.And I have heard him in many years past quietly walking down the street with bells chiming and him softly saying “sharpening here”. And I hope that next summer I could get my knifes and mower blades sharpened if he is still living.
Mark:
Thanks for your portrayal of “the sharperning guy,” for I am one as well. I have been a professional sharperner for over 13 years with some of that time sharperning mobile. Though I used an inclosed van with a power generator and electric sharpening machines, I could still feel the sense of nostalgia in performing a service of a by gone age. People would come around my van in utter curiosity wondering what was going on in side. Though I no longer do mobile sharpening anymore (I’m making a career change into nursing), I do however continue to sharpern knives and such via a drop off location at a local butcher shop and my website. It doesn’t pay much but, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to give it up, It’s my labor of love. I guess I’ll always remain the “sharpening guy”
Nick: Sharper Approach