The old saw, leaning by the old Airstream near the old guava tree
This past couple of weekends, I’ve been pruning the trees on our property. We’ve got six or seven fruit trees, many of them upwards of 50 years old, a good percentage of them showing the wear of years. I use various tools, but the one that’s most reliable is the tree saw in the photo above. It’s a simple device: a long serrated blade screwed to a five-foot pole. The serrated blade curves toward the sharp tip, so you can insert it at an angle into the tight crotch of a branch and if need be, cut in short, quick motions.
One interesting thing about this saw is that it’s at least 50 years old too, but it whistles through the branches of the varied trees, no matter the wood’s hardness or bulk. The saw was given to me by my girlfriend Alice’s farmer father, a bit before his death. He also gave me a much more modern tree saw, a nice lightweight aluminum one, with a telescoping height-adjusting pole. That one I gave away. The old one is so balanced, so sound and so fundamental to its purpose that it made no sense to have the fancy one.
Pruning this weekend made me think of the tools I use more often than saws: the software tools I use to prune words. I was a copyeditor in the mid-80s for a big software company, and they had developed their own word processor. It was DOS-based, of course; the earliest, miserable versions of Windows had recently come out, and there was a DOS-based Word, but the owner of my company hated Microsoft, so he had to develop his own program to spite it. But I’d never used a word processor at all, so using the clumsy keyboard-defined field codes for headlines, bolding and italics still seemed amazing to me.
Word Fattens Up, Walks Sideways Like a Crab
But six months later, the company sprang for Macintosh Plusses for the editors, and using the graphical interface, pulled into place by a mouse’s tail, made words on the page work so much better for me. I worked for other software companies in the 90s, when Windows and Word became entrenched, so I moved through the various iterations of Word, both Mac and Windows, because that was the tool within the world I worked. I tried a number of word workers through time—Wordstar, WordPerfect, WriteNow, and other simpler text editors—but because I worked in corporate environments, with seemingly invariant and unmediated corporate standards, Word was the de facto player.
So habituated was I to using Word that even when I became a full-time freelancer, many years ago, I continued to use Word, though by this time, it had become a lumbering code-monster with nine heads, coming in with zillions of templates, add-ons, graphical-handling (and crashing) features and menus with endless sub-menus—kind of like the Cadillac that Johnny Cash sang of, that was composed of the parts of twenty Caddies from twenty different years.
Having to Use a Sled to Lug Your Word Processor Around
Now, there are multiple opportunities to shed myself of Word: many other programs, like OpenOffice, can save in Word’s old .doc format (though the newer .docx can be problematic). But I’ve become so used to Word’s ways, bloated as they are, that I haven’t wanted to spend the time in learning a new program, and I don’t want to worry about possible conversion problems for my corporate clients. So I continue to muddle with Mac Word 2008, itself an aging tree.
But for blog posts? I always use the quick and easy TextEdit, the text editor that comes with the Mac OS. It’s clean and lightweight, like that pruning saw, and does simple tasks squarely and reliably. There’s no aluminum involved.
PS Any of you weaned yourself off Word, if that’s what you were raised on? Let me know what you use to work with words.