 I am a third-generation stone carver and calligrapher. My company, the John Stevens Shop, was founded in 1705, and there were six generations of the Stevens family before my grandfather bought the business in 1927. So I continue on that long lineage of stone carving. Gravestones are sort of the bread and butter of our work at the John Stevens Shop, and those involve small 8x10 sketches of the work, and then we do a full-size layout with a broad-edge brush, which is the way the Romans did it. They produced a letter form with a broad-edge brush and then carved with a mallet chisel. So we lay that out on brown paper. I use the same brush to lay out the ornamental work that I use to make the letter form, and then we transfer those layouts onto the stone and then you carve away with a mallet chisel. Now, in a situation like this, where you have a large civic memorial with quite a bit of lettering on it, I've designed this letter form from the ground up and it's designed by hand. I digitize my drawings of all these letter forms, put them in the computer, and then turn this lettering into a workable typeface. Then we make full-size rag paper overlays, which are sort of outline drawings of the lettering that we put down on the stone. We transfer them with carbon paper. So you put carbon paper underneath that. You use a stylus, and then you transfer all of the letters onto the wall. Then we hop on it with the mallet and chisels and get with it. And in this case, we actually had to use pneumatic hammers, which a pneumatic hammer is sort of like a little jack hammer that has a piston in it, and you put the chisel in the end and the piston drives the tool. It requires all the same skill that hand carving does, and so people think, oh, well, the tool does all of the work. Well, the tool does the work, but if you're not driving the chisel correctly, you're going to be in a world of hurt. So you've got to be careful. You have to have an awful lot of drive and really aspire to sort of greatness to take on something like this business. And my grandfather and my father set the bar ridiculously high. I look at their work, and it's so inspiring, and it gets me so cranked up that I really, really want to bring my A game to every single piece I approach. And like any perfectionist, whenever I'm done with any piece of work, I kind of hem and haul a little bit and say, hey, it's okay. It's okay. I'd like to have tweaked it this way or that way. And I don't ever feel as though, yes, I am the master. I've reached my pinnacle. I will never reach my pinnacle. Someone was saying to me recently that they're retiring after 30 years of work doing so-and-so, and I've been working at this for 30 years, and I keep thinking, I just started yesterday. I haven't even begun. I still have so much to do. They'll be carrying me out feet first, so it's just the way it is.