It’s been an introspective week here at TMTF. The last few days have been full of insights and epiphanies and moments when I threw up my hands and shouted “Eureka!”

Although I had initially planned to post another reflection about faith today, I decided against it because spiritual meditations are best taken a little at a time. Rather than overwhelm my dear readers with too much introspection, I’ve decided instead to save it for another day and write about That Time I Was a Blacksmith.

As the spring 2010 semester drew to a close at Bethel College, I made plans to work as a painter for the college’s maintenance department over the summer. I’d worked there during the previous two summers and felt confident I’d be hired. I was wrong. The maintenance department didn’t hire any student workers due to budget issues. I had four months before me and no job, no salary and no plans.

Then my sister-in-law’s parents contacted me. Her father is a blacksmith—a genuine, honest-to-goodness professional blacksmith, one of those mighty men who craft things out of iron and steel. They had heard from their daughter that I was looking for a job. Would I be interested in working for them over the summer?

Heck yeah.

I packed up my things and moved into their home for about two and half months. (I spent the last month of that summer teaching English in South Korea, but that’s another story for another post.) When I went to stay with my sister-in-law’s parents, I didn’t know much about blacksmithing. Here are a few of the things I learned.

Blacksmithing is tough

Blacksmithing requires considerable physical fitness and strength. Whatever else I may be, I’m not physically fit or strong. I generally used the smallest hammer in the shop. My brother calls it “the girly hammer” because it was the tool his wife and her sisters used when they worked as blacksmiths. It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but they were all much better blacksmiths than me.

Making swords is very, very difficult

When I began working as a blacksmith, I had great ambitions to make an epic sword. It didn’t have to be a Buster Sword or even an Andúril. I simply happen to have a passion for sharp objects and wanted to make a sword that was uniquely mine. I was disappointed to learn that crafting swords is a career of its own. Which brings us to the next thing I learned.

There are different kinds of blacksmiths

I had just assumed blacksmiths made everything. Only after I began working did I realize there are knifesmiths, who make knives; swordsmiths, who make swords; farriers, who make horseshoes; and standard blacksmiths, who make miscellaneous items such as candlesticks and tent pegs and barbecue grills. My boss fit into the last category.

Blacksmithing requires a ton of mathematics

I would never have guessed it, but there’s much more to being a blacksmith than whacking things with hammers. A blacksmith must figure out how many two-and-three-quarter-inch lengths can be cut from a twenty-foot steel rod, and how many corresponding one-and-a-half inch lengths must be cut from a fifteen-foot steel bar. There are angles to be calculated and numbers to be added. This was a problem for me. I’m an English major, you see. Having assumed the math skills I picked up in high school were mostly useless, it was quite a shock to realize mathematics does have practical applications after all.

Many modern blacksmiths use machines

In the movies you see old-fashioned smiths banging away with hammers and pumping air into coal fires. In these high-tech days blacksmiths use propane-fueled forges, power hammers and electric saws. It was quite a surprise to walk into the shop and find antique anvils (my boss has anvils that are centuries old) sharing space with heavy machinery.

Apart from working in the shop, I also had the opportunity to accompany my boss to several rendezvous—reenactments of early nineteenth-century America. We set up a tent full of merchandise and spent whole weekends forging and selling items. My boss did the forging, hammering red-hot metal in front of a blazing coal fire in the summer heat for hours on end. It never seemed to bother him. I had the easy job of sitting on a stool and taking our customers’ money, and I still felt tired at the end of the day.

I met a lot of neat people at those rendezvous. A man who looked like a homeless person with a greasy beard and stained T-shirt turned out to be a professional swordsmith with multiple university degrees. Another man was the exact image of Benjamin Franklin. And at my first rendezvous, my boss and I stood in line for supper with folks dressed like people from different epochs of Earth’s history: ancient Romans, medieval knights, French noblemen and American colonialists. We did not merely stand in a line that night. We stood in a timeline.

I don’t plan on ever becoming a blacksmith again, but it was a very good experience. My boss and his wife were ridiculously kind, generous and hospitable. My boss was also very patient. A lesser man would probably have lost his temper and bashed in my head with a hammer, but he was always tolerant of my mistakes.

My only real regret is that I wasn’t able to make that sword.

The inaugural post of a blog is a great and sacred thing. It sets the standards and expectations for all of the posts to come. I gave considerable thought to this all-important first post. Perhaps, I mused, I should share some beautiful spiritual reflection, or a profound literary insight, or some glorious commentary on the meaning of life.

I decided instead to write about That Time I Was Attacked by a Tomato.

To be fair, the attack wasn’t unprovoked. I suppose it could even be called self-defense. During my time at Bethel College in Indiana, I’ve worked at a sandwich restaurant called the Acorn. It was my morning shift and I was slicing tomatoes without any suspicion that one of them might resist.

Workers at the Acorn use a slicer that shoves tomatoes through a frame of razor-sharp blades. The blades divide the tomatoes into even slices, which are stored in plastic containers and eventually put on sandwiches. Every now and then a tomato will be too mushy to be sliced neatly by the blades. Such tomatoes generally split open and send forth little jets of juice.

On the day of the incident, I tried to slice a tomato and it exploded.

I wasn’t expecting any of the tomatoes to go off like grenades, so I was rather stunned. One of my fellow workers described the scene thus: “I looked over at you, and there was juice and seeds dripping from your face!” Another worker just hopped up and down and exclaimed, “Eww! Eww! Eww!”

Tomatoes aren’t the only things that have attacked me at the Acorn. I never considered making sandwiches a dangerous job, yet my time at the Acorn has been fraught with violence.

For example, a friend whom I’ll call Socrates made a point of pretending to tear out my heart every time we worked together. He would then pretend either to take a bite out of the still-beating heart or to squeeze it into his drink.

Socrates once recruited another worker to assault me with crumpled-up papers as I was taking my supper break. A volley of paper balls pelted me as I sat innocently eating a sandwich, and I looked up to see Socrates and his accomplice preparing the next barrage of artillery. With only the table for cover, there wasn’t much I could do to defend myself.

I was also jumped by a raccoon. When I say jumped, I mean it both literally and figuratively. I was taking a stack of cardboard out to the recyclables dumpster when something like a furry gray basketball launched itself at me from an open hatch in the dumpster’s side. It landed at my feet and I realized it was a raccoon. It paused for a moment, peering up at me and presumably wondering whether I was worth the trouble of biting, and then sauntered away.

Why do things attack me at the Acorn? Why is making sandwiches so perilous?

I have no idea.