There was a time when you couldn't be a boy without a pocket knife.
By William Wetherall
I still have the Case knife I carried around in high school. Its two identical blades, one on each end, fold out from the middle. Each is about 6.5 centimeters or roughly 2.5 inches. Their edges will cut small limbs, and their points will stick in trees and of course sod.
The knife now sits in a small black lacquer tray in a recess in the wall of the vestibule of my home, where you step up into the hall after taking off your shoes. Sharing the tray are a pair of glasses, two screw drivers, needlenose pliers, the chop I use on receipts for registered mail and packages, and a pedometer with a chronometer.
I now use the knife mostly in the garden when I'm too lazy to get out the pruning scissors. At one time it was mainly used to cut the thick plastic straps that sealed the mail sacks of books that no longer come from the United States. I would whip it out and have the sacks open before the postman could unholster his cutter.
I also have a fairly modest Swiss Army knife. It has a large blade, a smaller blade, a can opener with a small screwdriver, a bottle opener with a large screwdriver and a wire stripper, a saw, a reamer, a corkscrew, scissors, tweezers, a toothpick, and a lifetime warranty that doesn't say which or whose life.
The saw could fell a tree or amputate a leg. Even the tweezers could be turned into a weapon of mass destruction.
The Swiss Army knife does not have a USB memory stick, but it does have a keyring to which I have anchored a thick lanyard. I used to tie the lanyard to a belt loop on my jeans when carrying the knife in my pocket, but no more.
The knife, with the lanyard, now rides in the bottom of the pouch on the back of my pack sack with a flashlight, radio, chopsticks, bronchodilator spray, and a zillion other things that will come in handy when the Big One comes, the train derails, and I have to break my way out of the wreckage and hoof it through the urban and suburban rubble and ford a couple of rivers and cross fields and hills back to what remains of my home, where a one-month supply of All Bran, trail mix, and bottled water awaits me.
One time, on my way in Narita airport to board a Malaysia Airlines flight to Los Angeles, the Swiss Army knife, in the pack sack where I had carried it on a number of previous flights, caused a commotion among the security staff. The man in charge decided I could not carry the knife on board. Someone put it in a bag, filled out a form, gave me a copy, said I could pick up the knife in LA, and advised that in the future I put it in my check-in baggage.
That was a decade before 9/11. Now it's hard to carry even yourself on board.
My pocket knives have been only marginally legal in Japan. Possessing them is not a problem. Their longest blades slightly exceed the legal length limit for double-edged blades, but they are single-edged.
The problem is carrying them around in public, unless you are going fishing or hiking. And you don't want to argue finer points of law, even with your local koban officers, however friendly, however well they may know you from previous offenses like roadside pissing and grinning to yourself.
My son also has a Swiss Army knife and he, too, is careful not to carry his in public. He is thinking of buying one of the new gadgets that has all manner of foldout tools but nothing that would cut or pierce. It too would be illegal on a plane but he could carry it around and flash it at the cops.
One time, when I was teaching, I brought my double-blade Case to school. We were having an outing that day in a nearby park. Everyone had to do a show-and-tell, and mine was about the knife. I said I had brought it because there were snakes, and when the girls stop shrieking, I showed them how to do mumbly peg.
That day on a spot of grass, the sun flashing on parts that had not rusted, I put my trusty Case through its paces. I showed them all the feats I could remember of the game I had played countless afternoons on neighborhood lawns in the Sunset District of San Francisco.
They were more amused by my shouts of joy when the blade stuck at least two fingers off the grass, than by my flips of the knife. They could not believe that I and most of my friends had carried pocket knives from the time we were in elementary school, when many of us were Cub Scouts. To class. In the play yard.
Human civilization lost its innocence many millennia ago. But children, boys and girls, have lost their innocence within my lifetime -- at least regarding knives.
The main complaint of older adults in Japan is that children no longer learn to shave pencils and skin apples. My complaint is that no one is learning to play mumbly peg.
1 September 2009
