Stepping out with your snappy walking stick on a night filled with stars . . . : Walkin’ My Baby Back Home
Iam not the kind of person who has hobbies. I do not take pictures, save stamps, watch birds, carve wood, collect coins, grow roses, gaze at stars or otherwise fill my vacant hours with interesting and useful activities.
The closest I ever came to acquiring a hobby was when I was a kid and Louie Fernandes and I went to the dump on Sundays and shot rats with his BB gun. I really loved shooting rats.
We did this for maybe half a summer one year, but it ended when we brought a dead rat home to stuff and mount as a trophy. We had not gotten halfway up the porch when my mother spotted us and chased us down again with a broom.
I remember her screaming that we would all get the bucolic plague, and it wasn’t until I was 16 that I realized it was the bubonic plague, not the bucolic plague. It killed you rather than transported you to a sunny rural hillside where cows grazed.
My stepfather, whose name was Harry and who never thought I would amount to much, felt that killing rats at least displayed a form of enterprise that went beyond playing kick the can hour after hour, which is what I usually did on Sunday.
My mother, however, would have none of it. She told Louie’s mother what we were doing and Louie’s mom instantly confiscated the gun, equally determined that her son not come down with the bucolic plague. East Oakland was not loaded with semanticists in those days.
I tried collecting beer caps and matchbook covers after that, but they held far less appeal than shooting rats. Rats had spunk. I remember them scurrying through the garbage and then lifting their little heads over some melon rinds and staring at us as we sighted in and blam!
Louie turned religious shortly after we were barred from the killing fields and used to say he could hear the souls of the dead rats crying in his room at night. What a nut.
Anyhow, that was a hobby I really enjoyed and had nothing to replace it with until a few years ago when I began collecting walking sticks. What happened was I broke a bone in my foot one day and a friend gave me a cane as a joke.
Later on, I bought a shepherd’s staff at the Renaissance Faire to beat back beer-drinking teen-agers and then I bought a walking stick on vacation in Rome to protect me from mobs of peace activists who were running up and down the Via del Corso shouting anti-American slogans.
My wife liked the idea of a walking stick and encouraged me thereafter to buy one wherever we went, excited by the prospect that at last I was doing something normal.
At first I balked at the idea, but then she said, “Picture yourself on the Champs Elysees stepping out with your snappy walking stick on a night filled with stars, walking your baby back home after sipping champagne on the Seine. . . . bearing in mind, of course, that I would be the baby you’d be walking back home.”
That sounded pretty good to me, so I began collecting walking sticks, which leads me to the point of this column. I have discovered a place in North Hollywood called the House of Canes and Walking Sticks that specializes in my hobby.
Mark Fontaine and his wife Kay own the business and make most of the canes, which come in a variety of woods and handles, from ordinary birch and plastic to sterling silver and ebony. The prices range from $10 to $500, except for the antique canes that go for three or four thousand.
Mark was a welder and something of a metal sculptor before he undertook an apprenticeship in cane-making from the store’s original owner. When the owner died, Mark and Kay bought the business and went into cane-making full time.
The day I dropped by Mark was in his back shop creating a cane for a 500-pound man. A 500-pound man, he explained, needs a longer (and obviously stronger) cane because of his girth.
Mark went on to say that the customer was so fat his arms were thrust almost straight out on either side and a normal-sized cane wouldn’t even reach the ground. Mark illustrated by puffing himself up as much as possible and holding his arms out and away from his side, as though he weighed 500 pounds.
Even more unusual was the cane he made for a chiropractor who wandered in one day with a human thigh bone and wanted it fashioned into a handle for a walking stick. Mark was a little surprised by the request but shrugged and did the job for $50. He had no idea where the chiropractor got the bone and didn’t ask.
There were hundreds of canes in the store, and I finally bought one to add to my collection. It’s made of birch and has a kind of medieval bronze head for a handle that Mark designed and made himself.
I now own nine walking sticks. Whenever I hike on the back trails of Topanga State Park I take a cane with me, not for walking assistance but for protection, or maybe sport. If a mad dog comes charging after me, he’ll get a good bash on the head with a polished piece of birch.
That would be almost as much fun as shooting rats at the dump, though never as bucolic.
