How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself by Robert Paul Smith

INTRODUCTION
    Nothing Doing
    I don’t know about you, but I wasted all but about fifteen minutes of my childhood. Those fifteen minutes were spent on a beach in Cornwall busting a nodule of quartz out of a fist-sized chunk of flint; thirty years later, I still have it somewhere in my office, in an old coffee can. Everything else I made during those years—the swords nailed together from pickets, the forest forts that defended nothing from nobody, the poorly assembled Revell model cars with Testors paint smeared lazily on them, the Sherman tanks drawn in near-medieval 2-D perspective—they’re all gone now.

    Come to think of it, I haven’t used the piece of quartz for much either.
    But if I want reminding of where the rest of that time went, I have this book. A step-by-step guide to grinding oyster shells against the front stoop for no reason, to turning buttons and string into buzz saws that won’t cut anything, and to making paper boomerangs that don’t come back, How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself is about what you do when you’re a kid and have neither money nor anyone paying much attention to you, and where your one guiding principle is that you avoid grown-ups and don’t ask for help.
    â€œObjects made of wood by children,” Smith once estimated, “. . . will assay ten percent wood, ninety percent nails.” And if his book’s title also works on the same principle of youthful overengineering, it’s because a belief in efficiency and quality construction is anathema to childhood. Waste rules—and what Smith knows is that if youth is wasted on the young, it’s because an adult would not waste it, and in so doing make it not youth.
    â€œThese days,” he writes, “you see a kid lying on his back and looking blank and you begin to wonder what’s wrong with him. There’s nothing wrong with him, except he’s thinking . . . He is trying to arrive at some conclusion about his thumb.”

    So why not carve monkeys out of peach pits? Why not build a tank out of spools and rubber bands, or a paddle-boat out of cigar boxes? Why not make pussy-willow cats up on the fence?
    â€œIf things were as they should be, another kid would be telling you how to do this,” Smith admits. But Smith was just about the best guide America had to precious arcana like making a game of “killers” out of the horse chestnuts in your backyard. If Jean Shepherd had written The Dangerous Book for Boys instead of A Christmas Story , this book would be it. And like Shepherd, Smith had a history in broadcasting, one that began in Manhattan in the late 1930s as a radio writer at CBS. “This paid the rent,” he recalled, “while I wrote four novels which did not.” After penning bohemian novels about Greenwich Village, and cowriting a play that improbably went on to star Frank Sinatra in the movie version, it was marriage and fatherhood that inspired Smith’s meditation upon the lore of his childhood. The illustrations by his wife, Elinor—an accomplished author herself—makes for a book truly created by the Smith household. It seems fitting that he later wrote a book about “household possessions they don’t make anymore”—old cast-offs like carpet beaters, wooden iceboxes, and hat stands. After all, every kid also wonders about the junk in the attic,
and Smith always remembered what it was like to be a kid.
    That’s why How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself remains timeless. Toys are louder and brighter now—and a good deal safer than Smith’s old games of mumbly-peg—but kids still do nothing the same way. They pick up the random and discarded object of adult life, or the natural debris that no one with a job or a schedule or things to do even notices anyway. Kids will find this stuff, examine it, flip it upside down, throw it, break it, and simply stare at it. Kids