Sweet!

[Susan Kline]

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At 10:49 PM 7/4/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>What's the best or most unusual "extra" you've been offered.

The dentist's wife gave me a big plastic bowl full of sticky candy! Maybe 
she was trying to drum up business?

Down in Stockton, CA I got a big grocery bag of walnuts in the shell, new 
crop. Delicious, easy to break open. And somebody gave me some elk heart 
and liver once, frozen, luckily. Flowers, big bundles of them. Cookies 
(usually I don't get home with them.) A dozen eggs from her own chickens. 
Plants! Shasta daisies, autumn crocus, iris, etc. One family nearby, on 
land which the lady's grandparents had settled, with 100-year-old giant 
sequoias her grandfather had planted, gave me starts of the local bleeding 
heart (cutleaf, a bucket full of little starts, I had to run home and plant 
them pronto), the native currant with some of the duff from under the 
sequoia to make it feel at home, and a walnut tree bred by a 90-year-old 
local retired prof. They had gotten it at a class they took, and planted it 
a bad place. All this stuff thrived, and the bleeding heart hitched a ride 
with the hostas when I moved them to my new house.

Several customers have given me old tools and supplies from tuner 
relatives, long dead ones. Usually they smelled fusty from damp storage, 
but some are really neat old 19th century stuff. I also found a nice old 
letoff tool under an inch of dust on the floor of an old upright, which I 
was told I was welcome to keep. Rosewood handle, brass ferule, nicely 
shaped so it doesn't bend the eyelet as easily as the new ones.

This isn't a tip from anyone, but after tuning at a big apartment complex, 
I found a beautiful big Japanese beechwood rocking chair just dumped in the 
dumpster. It took me twenty minutes to rearrange my Tercel hatchback enough 
to fit it in. I had to get it foam for cushions, and upholstery fabric, but 
I've used it ever since. Here's Donnie Byrd sitting in it, when she visited 
and we worked on a grand action together.

Grapes. Meyer lemons, by the bag. (delicious, so mild!) I really miss the 
Meyer lemons. If I make a greenhouse, I'll plant one. Apples, also by the 
bag. Plums. A couple of really good nursery catalogs. A video of the life 
of Christ. I gave it to a Sunday School.

Newly arrived in Oregon, way out east in Sweet Home, somebody raided his 
woodpile (He had a cast iron stove), and gave me beautiful big hunks of 
cherry, walnut, maple, and (the real treat!) several big rounds of clear 
Pacific Yew, garnered from slash piles. They were stripping the bark back 
then to make taxol for cancer patients. What a waste! Glad when they 
synthesized the stuff. I called him a couple of years later to see if there 
was any more yew, but it was all gone.

Back when I was just starting in the business, a customer out in the 
country, sort of run-down place, heard me talk about getting tools, and he 
reached down and picked up an old, rusty, bent chisel from the gravel 
driveway (nylon handle, though) and handed it to me. "There! Now you've got 
a chisel." <grin> I took it home, unbent it, ground a new bevel, blasted 
the rust off it, more or less, sharpened it, and have used it more than any 
of the good ones ever since. It was such a wreck I never had to worry about 
what I did with it.

Okay, now, what's the most unusual thing you have _given_ to customers? I 
gave one of mine two Washington hawthorn seedlings, which she says have 
grown well. Another's daughter found a home for two huge miniature rose 
bushes which I was eager to get rid of.

Susan
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