How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself (2 page)

If you're interested in making a real climber out of it, cut little notches all the way around the rims of the spool and that will give it a good grip.

Of course, once you know how to do it, now that I've told you, you can teach another kid, and then you can have races or hill-climbing contests, or just plain fights between your tank and his.

 

 

Another thing we used to do was make what we called a button buzz saw. This is something you can make in about five minutes any time you've got nothing special to do. First you have to find a button, the bigger the better. It's got to be the kind that doesn't have a shank, but two or four holes like this.

Get some dental floss or fishline or any kind of thin strong string, and put a loop through like this.

The dotted lines are because there isn't room on the page, but the loop should be about a foot long.

Now put your two index fingers—those are the ones you use for pointing—through the loop like in the picture and twirl the button until you've got the string twisted on both sides of the button. Then pull. The string will unwind and seem to get longer. Just before there's no more slack
in the string, loosen it by bringing your hands together. The button will wind up the other way, and you just keep on doing this. It will feel as if the string is a rubber band. This is because it's twisting and getting shorter, untwisting and getting longer, and of course when it twists one way the button goes around in one direction, and when it twists the other way, the button reverses. If you hold the button, while it's going around, up against a piece of stiff paper, say the cover of a magazine that's sticking out over the end of a table, it'll make a kind of siren noise. I can't tell you exactly how to do this, it's kind of a matter of feel, but after a while you'll find you can make the button not only go around, but it will travel, while going around, first towards one hand and then the other. You probably know how to use a yo-yo, and this is the same general idea, but we didn't know about yo-yos, because there weren't any yo-yos to know about then.

 

 

By the way, as long as we're talking about spools and buttons: it's entirely possible that you won't find either a spool or a button of the right size around your house; when I was a kid, all mothers sewed and eventually there was an empty spool, and when clothes wore out, mothers used to cut the buttons off before they threw the clothes away,
and save them in a big box. But as I say, that doesn't always happen any more, and if you can't find a button or a spool at home, take a walk and go to the tailor shop, or cleaning store, or whatever they call it in your town or neighborhood. As I said this book is things you do yourself; so don't ask your mother to do this. That's against the rules. Go yourself and ask the man in the store. And if you're really lucky—I never was—there's a kind of spool that's used on great big factory sewing machines, about the size of a can of peaches. If you get one of these, get a really big rubber band (you'll probably have to buy it—when we were kids and wanted big rubber bands, we used to cut them out of an old automobile tire inner tube, but lots of tires don't have tubes any more). Instead of matchsticks, use pencils, and if your mother makes jelly herself, you know about the big disk of wax that's on top. If she doesn't make jelly, and if she makes jelly and doesn't use wax, cut a great big washer out of soap.

 

 

Now I'll tell you how to make a handkerchief parachute. For this you'll need an old handkerchief—it's got to be an old one, that you or your father don't use any more—some string, and a stone, or some washers. Lay the handkerchief out flat.

Now take a piece of string, cut it into four pieces, each about a foot long, and tie one piece around each corner. Twist up the corner and tie a square knot. That's right over left, left over right.

Pull the strings out straight so the corners of the handkerchief are all together. Now take all four strings and tie a knot about three or four inches up from the bottom. We used to hunt around and find a stone with a kind of dent in the middle, so you could tie the string around tight. But we rarely found a good stone, and it almost always comes loose sooner or later, and then I found a box in the basement that had a lot of heavy washers in it. If you can find washers, it's better. You put the string through the holes
and tie it up tight. If all you've got is a stone, tie it the best you can, in all directions.

Now take the center of the handkerchief between your thumb and index finger and whirl it around and around, until it's going good. You can tell it's going really good when you hear it make a kind of whistling noise. Let go of it when the stone is coming up. The stone will carry it up in the air, then it will start to fall, stone first, the handkerchief will open out like a parachute, and there you are. Lots of times it will get caught in a tree or on a telephone wire. What do you do then? If you can climb a tree, you climb the tree. If it's on a telephone wire, you do
not
climb the telephone pole, because maybe it's also an electric
light pole, and the kind of electricity that runs in those wires is very dangerous. If you threw it in a tree that's too tall, or if it's a telephone wire, build another parachute.

 

 

While we're at handkerchiefs, we used to make blackjacks out of them. Not real blackjacks, not heavy or hard enough to injure anybody, but they were pretty good for fighting. You could catch a kid a pretty good shot with one, and he could thump you pretty good, but they didn't do any real harm. Take a handkerchief and lay it out flat. Fold it in two, and then again.

Now take the three top corners all together and roll up the handkerchief like this.