The Practical Art of Walnut Cracking (1989)

The Practical Art of Walnut Cracking by Judy K. Miller "It's all in how you crack 'em," my father says as he hands me a coffee can full of near perfect halves of black walnut kernels. In the freezer are two plastic milk jugs full of more of the samehis proof that he's not a lazy man. We sit beside the fire and talk, eating walnuts as if they are popcorn. When casually I mention the name of a local banjo picker, my father says, "He never was much of a hand to work. If he had to do a hard day's labor for once in his life, it'd kill him." I know better than to mention that here it is, the middle of a workday and neither of us are "hitting a tap at anything," as he would say. It is winter. He is a farmer. This is justification enough for his sitting in the house and shelling walnuts while most people are fighting and scrapping their way to what nas been commonly called a decent living. While my father and I finish snacking on walnuts and start to shell a few more, my mother complains about the space they take up in her freezer. Despite her complaints, he still cracks. Too many walnuts is better than too much idleness. Unlike my mother, however, I am not annoyed by how many he cracks, but by how long he takes in doing it. I have seen him spend as long as an entire minute trying to work an unbroken kernel out of its shell. Whereas I would scrape it into a pulp trying to get it out in a hurry, he carefully prods at the meat until both he and it are ready to turn loose. Like Franz Kafka, he seems to believe 10 11 that laziness and impatience are the "two cardinal sins from which all other, spring." But even more important, I have come to see how his freeing perfect kernels from their shells is his art just as freeing not-so-perfect ideas from minds is mine. To call my father an artist to his face would be more insulting than to call him a sinner. In his eyes artists are worse than sinners, not necessarily because he thinks they're lazy and impatient, but because he thinks they are impractical. After years of trying to reconcile my own artistic drive with my need for paternal approval, I have finally realized that it is not art itself that he finds objectionable . In fact, he can even appreciate some art. But what he will not tolerate is art's exclusion of nature. For better or worse, my father has always lived in a practical world where nature, with man's assistance, is the sole provider. Such a world dictates that a man's survival, as well as that of his family, depends upon his physical skill and ability instead of upon philosophical ruminations. Because my father has been such a good down-to-earth provider, I have been able to experiment with my own life, replacing his practicality with my own esoteric impracticality. Consequently , I have learned that art alone will not feed me, will not clothe me, will not even entertain me. Neither is my intelligence sufficient. In short, I have discovered the futility of "art for art's sake," the uselessness of misapplied or even unapplied intelligence. This discovery has brought me back to where my father has been trying to take me with the example of his life. Art is found in the patient application of knowledge, not in knowledge alone. It is found through respect for nature's contribution to man's survival. Does that not make my father the artist and me the unskilled laborer? Art to the practical man has always been the perfect unbroken kernel. But in this modern impractical society, we have become so far removed from the source of our own survival that some of us may even believe that walnuts don't grow on trees anymore, but come prepackaged in plastic bags at the grocery store. When nature is so excluded from our daily...