Is This You?

Mumbley Peg and the Lost Art of Sharpening

The Tomboy in me learned to play Mumbley Peg before I learned how to play Jacks. A skill I pull out every so often because I like to throw knives at my friend's feet. Oh Boy! 

We played it by standing face to face, and one at a time, we threw a pocket knife at the other player's foot, getting it as close as we could. Then, that person would have to put their foot over the spot where the knife landed. You then picked up the knife and threw it at your opponent's foot. Then they had to move their foot out to where the knife landed, and so it went. Pretty soon, you were doing this by throwing a knife, sharp as a tin can lid, at a foot while you tried to balance yourself with legs further and further apart. It was a blast. Oh, and to add to the thrill, there were maybe twenty-five different ways to throw the knife. Hey, this was no sissy girl game. No sir.  During really intense games, you had to throw the same way the other guy threw their knife. You got ahead if your opponent's knife didn't stick in the ground. It had to stick and stand, too. There was no falling over, even partway. When you threw, you threw hard. Of course, we always played on the lawn, where it had been recently watered and was soft and squishy. Yes, that was the Mumbley Peg game of the era.

I read recently that Mumbley Peg was a game played in the 1800's. Man, they were tough kids. There was not a lot of soft ground then, especially out west. The ground was prairie or just plain, hard, scrabbled ground. Playing Mumbley Peg on that type of ground would really test your skills, and you would have to sharpen your knife.  

And that's where I am going today. Knife sharpening.

The art of sharpening a knife is not something to shake a stick at. Either you have the ability, or you don't. You can learn it, sure. But. Yes, a knife-edged "but." It takes plenty of years and lots of knives to get that edge so sharp that you could split hairs. 

Every week, my other half would take great pride in sharpening my kitchen knives. I never had to worry about pushing down too hard on a tomato because the knife wouldn't cut it. Or that I would cut myself with a dull knife. I learned long ago that a cook would cut themselves so easily with a dull knife. I have always had good-quality knives in my kitchen. So, this past week, when I pulled out four big ole butcher, vegetable, and boning knives to get one sharp enough to cut up a chicken, finding that I would have been better off just gnawing on the dead slippery chicken, I knew it was time to do the deed. 

I have sharpened knives before. Several times. But to just take time and do a whole pile? Not on my bucket list. I usually pull one out and run it over my diamond steel, just enough to get the cucumber peeled and sliced. This was different. Every knife I ran my finger over the edge of was dull as reading Shakespeare. Now that's dull.

There are many ways and stages of knife sharpening. He used several different gritted sharpening stones, the ever-important 3-in-One oil, a few different lengths of sharpening steels, and some pieces of paper to test the blade. At the very, very end of the process, he would lick his forearm and shave the hair off to prove the sharpness of the blades. I know. I know. Yuck. But I did wash every knife vigorously when he was done.

Laid out before me on a towel were five knives, sharpening steel, and a piece of paper. I do not do the shaving part. That just made me squirm every time I watched it. I was not going to partake in that ritual. 

I picked up the first one. The one I go after first every time I need a knife. Not a butcher, not a big veggie knife, or a little paring knife. Just a medium-sized one that held an edge longer than Meat Loaf held that note in his song "Bat Out of Hell." Yes, that long. The sharpening all went pretty quickly and I might add, professionally. I never did cut the paper. For some reason, that knife-through-paper sound just set my teeth on edge, too. I just flicked at the edge until I could see I was dangerously close to losing a finger and figured that was good-n-sharp enough.

Trina lives in Diamond Valley, north of Eureka, Nevada. She loves to hear from readers. Email her at [email protected]

Really!