putterings       587   <   588   >   589       index

 
The Art of Puttering
      “The art of puttering,” someone has said, “consists of doing for yourself, slowly and inefficiently, what you can pay some one else to do for you quickly and well.”
      I was fooling about the front yard — puttering I suppose I might better say — for I run the lawn mower “slowly and inefficiently” — when a young fellow came along and stopped on the walk, watching me in an interested way. “I could do that a lot better than you are doing it,” he said finally in a very pleasant and not in any way insolent tone, “and I’m looking for work.”
      I stopped my inefficient labors and gave the tools into his hands. There were other things which needed doing and which I do better and more profitably, and I addressed myself to these. I came back later to find the yard in perfect shape, the borders all carefully edged, the lawn smoothly cut, and the litter cleared away. Gus did the work for the next four years and did it well. He didn’t putter.
      Mrs. Canter has no skill as a seamstress and is under no necessity to exhibit any. She has an adequate allowance to meet all her needs and so could very well have her own clothes and the children’s made by some one who is rapid and efficient. She prefers, however, to putter. She has had a blouse lying about for weeks trying to grow into something presentable under her hands, but she works slowly and awkwardly, and if she ever does succeed in getting the garment completed it will very likely be out of style. She does, or attempts to do, the children’s clothes in the same way. She doesn’t like sewing, she doesn’t do it well, nor does she do it rapidly, so she just wastes her time puttering.
      We all do it and make hard work out of something that we might better leave to some one else who will do it quickly and well.
      I never run a lawn mower.
            (c. 1927, Western Newspaper Union.)

from the syndicated column “Along Life’s Trail” by Thomas Arkle Clark, Dean of Men, University of Illinois, in The Urbana Daily Courier (Saturday, October 1, 1927)
Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections : link

—

Thomas Arkle Clark (1862-1932)
academic (rhetoric, and administrator, U Illinois), writer
wikipedia : link
 

10 February 2026