If I had known that bonsai required me to learn about, use, care for, repair, sharpen and know the difference between a concave pruner and a wire cutter, I'd probably never have gone into the art. In my looney dreams-fantastic-view of reality, I thought to grow a bonsai demanded only the plant be in a pot and it would miraculously be transformed from, say, a pine that looked like antlers with the felt dripping off in shaggy sheets, to a groomed, sculptured, every-needle-in-place gem of oriental culture. No, it took tools.

If anyone read my diatribe last issue, that reader will know your not-so-humble writer can never do anything easily, or right. My analyst said I've simmered up from a "dysfunctional" family. Naturally therefore, I went to my brother to see if he could help me, somehow, adapt existing tools to look like the Japanese ones, since I felt that if they looked like the proper tools, they would shape the tree into an enchanted state. As was his way, my brother concocted at least a dozen reasons for not making the tools. I railed against his criminal sloth, and finally he did succeed in making me some long nosed scissors which I still use every day.

The tool saga is of course long and even sordid. Yes, it is a parody: "What I Did For Tools." The anecdotes concerning what I've gone through to get tools are legion, dreary and always frustrating. One of my apprentices made up her mind that in a city so hallowed in steel annals as Pittsburgh, someone could make truly fine bonsai tools; and indeed such skills exist. The question is, would they make such esoteric devices? If I guaranteed 100,000 pieces, they would get right on the job. Such numbers, even regarding money stagger me. I went to backyard, basement, out of the way hideaway craftsmen who could but wouldn't make what I wanted. Like my brother, they had suggestions. have you tried knifemakers, farriers, blacksmiths, gun makers? One particularly pickled metalworker suggested I get a fingernail clipper manufacturer to make a huge lever cutter two or three times large than a toe nail cutter. Let's visualize how such an outrage would look in a cartoon, for example.

But, back in the creaky recesses of my memory, I recall other events concerning tools. In 1960 I had an occasion to work for a bonsai man whose attitudes toward tools have never been really dealt with. He had several prejudices about tools: Any sharpened edge was designed to cut indiscriminately everything from balsa wood to titanium; another was that the size of the tool had no connection with the size of the object being cut, or in his case, attacked; a corollary to this was that if the tool or scissors didn't cut, put handle extensions on to increase lever force. If the tool had moving jaws or blades using a pin or fulcrum, the tool could be twisted, bent, sprung and then discarded. I was then given the job of repairing these tools which was good for me because I learned what and what not to do with good bonsai tools.

Deciding to visit a bonsai grower whose name had come up at a convention just completed, and finding any excuse to get off the freeway, I dropped by his operation. As I pulled in the lane, I saw where he had obviously been working some time before. Around a snack table lay heaps of juniper bows now brown, having been cut days or weeks previously. However, this produces my sole prejudice: my attitude toward people who don't take care of tools. On the snack tray lay a casual assortment of Masakuni bonsai tools. I was incensed; I was hostile. How could any real bonsai man treat expensive tools in such a cavalier way? Disguising my ire, I conducted my visit with cool aplomb. Ice cream would not have melted in my mouth. However, the following spring I had to stop back at the same man's house. Why was I not surprised to see the tools still lying on the snack tray, the rust terrible? The pruned juniper branches had been swept up, thus giving credence to the old bromide, "knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing."

I spent a few days with another well-known bonsai grower some years back and over the doldrum years some of the old time growers discovered I could repair cutting tools. I found my friend had seventy-eight pairs of concave pruners in disgusting condition. I snapped into action: armed with WD40, steel wool in three sizes, garnet paper, emery cloth, a pair of slip joint pliers, and channel lock wrench, a vice and ball peen hammer, I attacked the wayward tools. I ground, pounded, twisted and cussed and finally sharpened all the misused cutters, save one. It was reported to have been used to cut a live 220 volt electric line. Half of the concave had melted and the veiled report was the man who was using the concave to cut the wire was tossed across the room along with the melted concave. I don't know why anyone would wish to cut a 220 line, but if it was to get copper wire to wire a tree, I can suggest easier and safer methods. But as the satirist has said, "Nothing should tamper with natural ignorance."