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Table-Tied

Memory Lame.  


I had not intended to write "Lame", but it is more appropriate than "Lane".  I wanted to let our trusty old trailer see the scene of the crime:  Belle Plaine (or some such thing, on the Kansas Turnpike).


At least ten years ago, while doing almost exactly what I was doing again--that is to say, pulling the empty trailer back to the Midwest after hauling furniture to Tucson--when a woman from Texas, cell phone in hand, rear-ended the trailer just as I started to exit to a service area, and almost caused me to become religious, ripping the trailer off the pickup hitch, and sending it, like a chariot bound for glory, up past the pickup and into a Kansas Turnpike light pole, taking the pole down, and giving the trailer a permanent front-end wrinkle.  


Keeping a keen eye for Texas license plates, I eased into the same exit ramp.  


The years have not been kind to the replacement light pole.  It is mottled with rust.  The trailer is ugly, too, but it looks better than the light pole.  It is lame but, like me, still doing what it was designed by God to do:  drag things around.  


Speaking of dragging things around!  Our dining table is ten feet long; constructed from what had been a work bench in the back room of a bakery in Decorah, Iowa.  The Health Inspector (it is reported) closed the bakery for good cause, so the bakery was closed, and the tables sold.  I built new trestles for the two tables, and somehow managed to get them into our house.  



The tables, too, are experienced travelers, having moved (in that trailer) from Iowa, to Tucson, Minneapolis, and now to Tucson a second time:  perhaps 5000 miles.  


It is brutally heavy.  Michael, Shad, and I managed to get it from the trailer to the garage, but no further.  Then Stan drove up, with Mark, and a hare-brained scheme to balance the table on edge, on the edge of the . . . of the universe, I think . . . or maybe it was two furniture dollies.  Mari cut a desert rose, and fashioned a vase from a water bottle and a cup, and we tiptoed from the room, giving the table time to get used to standing in a new place.  The remainder of the captain's chairs will come on the next trip.


There are continuities.  Gathering about that table is one of our continuities.  There are finer tables, grander tables, and--perhaps--heavier tables.  We are anchored to this one, and the anchor holds.  

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