Skip to main content

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.  

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames.  We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves.  For instance, some  people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old.  Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old.   That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together.  But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer.  It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more