As a boy, I was the hyperactive type. I didn’t quite reach the attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) spectrum, but I fluttered around it. I drove everyone crazy with my constant tapping, fidgeting, and squirming. “I’m bored” proved my constant refrain.
As I grew older, my hyperactivity
found release in the world of employment. I truly liked working and burned
through a series of jobs (one of which found me killing gonorrhea and syphilis
by means of an autoclave in a health department laboratory) before finding a
fully engaging and productive career as an electrician.
Now that I’m nominally retired, I
regularly need to invent something to keep me busy. To that end, I dig holes
for things, pull noxious weeds, remodel rooms in the house, and so forth.
In more recent days, I have busied
myself by axing chunks of lodgepole and fir down to narrow lengths of kindling
for the woodstove. I’ve nearly filled a four-foot rack just outside my back
door with plinking pieces of wood.
Surprisingly satisfying, this.
—Mitchell Hegman
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