My sword broke last winter, and so I went to replace it at the only smith I could find: a vast American hall called The Home Depot.
A young man in an orange apron asked if I needed help. He was perhaps twenty. To carry the burden of an entire armory at twenty, he must have trained since boyhood. I bowed deeply. He said "no worries man" and bowed back, which I found very correct of him.
I told him I sought a blade. A real one. He led me, without hesitation, to an entire wall of them.
I have never seen such a forge. Hundreds of blades, hanging in rows, each wrapped and labeled. This boy guarded more steel than my entire province.
I took down a long one. The label read "machete." A foreign school, perhaps. I ran my thumb along it the way my father taught me, feeling for the soul of the steel.
"You can get the cover for that too," he said, "keeps the rust off."
A scabbard, sold separately. Sensible. I nodded as one nods to a wiser man.
I asked him which blade he would carry into battle. He thought about it seriously. This is the mark of a real craftsman, that he does not answer quickly. Then he pointed to a curved one and said "honestly that one's great for clearing brush."
Clearing brush. A code, surely. The brush being one's enemies. I understood him completely. Two warriors, speaking plainly at last.
I selected three. He helped me carry them to the front. He even asked if I had found everything I was looking for, the way a host asks before you leave his home. I told him he had served his clan with honor.
Then a woman at the counter asked for forty dollars, and for my membership number.
I do not have a membership number. I have a family name, eight hundred years old.
I gave her that instead.
She typed it in. She said it was not coming up.
So tell me honestly, because that boy was the finest swordsmith I have met in this country.
How do I become a member of his clan?
I would be proud to serve under that orange banner.
There is a larger cultural difference between a guy from Miami and a guy from Appalachia than there is between a guy from Germany and a guy from Belgium.