In my childhood home there were not two matching pieces of furniture. There was a random assortment of straight back wooden chairs and shapeless overstuffed chairs covered with large floral patterns. There was a stout table of dark wood joined to an under shelf with narrow uprights like a picket fence on three sides. It had been made by my grandfather, Henry Newyears Norris. This table stood inside the tiny cloakroom of the old Anetta Schoolhouse in which we lived. We grandly called the table The Library. There were less than ten books on the lower shelf. One was With the Indians in the Rockies by J W Schultz. Another was Two Little Savages by Ernest Thomson Seton and there was a coverless guide to mammals of the world with great etched plates. I spent many hours playing on that lower shelf under the sheltering canopy built by my grandfather studying pictures of sea lions and lynx. An undying love of libraries was born here.
I recall exploring my grandfather’s tool chest when I was young. It was the size of a large trunk with a domed roof like an old barn, covered with a thin sheet of zinc. It was packed with tools for every purpose: saws and chisels in graduated sizes and hand planes to pare wood smooth and to carve molding. The year 1870 and his initials HNYN were written in bright colored chalk on the inside of the lid. Today I have my grandfather’s tool chest. Somewhere along the years the tools all disappeared but the date and initials are as bright as the day they were written.
Our oldest son was planning his marriage years ago. It would be at our little Mexican home by the sea at sunset with family and friends gathered round. After the service the bride would be borne on a stretcher to the ocean’s edge by the best men and the stretcher would be incorporated into a raft to sail up-coast to the lovely secluded Crystal Cove. Sue was teaching at Flagstaff High School then and she described to the metal shop teacher what she needed. A few days before the wedding he delivered a stretcher constructed from two inch steel pipe with a metal mesh carrying surface that was eight foot long and four foot wide and weighed one hundred and fifty pounds. The wedding was lovely and the sunset was a Technicolor stunner. The petite bride added little to the weight of the conveyance but the narrow trail to the beach proved too great a challenge for the best men and they abandoned it. For several years the metal litter leaned against the back of the cabin. Many times I tried to figure a use for it until one day I imagined the extended arms bent like the legs of a spider and I saw a table. Shortly after that a bandito removed the metal grill covering one of my windows so he could take my propane lantern and some canned goods. I had a welder come out with his portable equipment to make repairs. When he finished that chore he followed my instructions and cut off the extended arms of the steel stretcher at a 45 degree angle and rotated them, welding them in place for legs and creating a durable picnic table.
A miscalculation resulted in one leg being a little shorter than the rest. Ever since I have sought the right piece of wood, flat stone or paperback book to shim the table to stop the rocking. Here on the porch I take my morning coffee while the sun rises over the cove. I look past the old man cactus as the pelicanos pump, dip and glide down coast in precise formation and the pongas head out for the days fishing. I watch while hummingbirds stitch the scarlet bougainvillea at my shoulder and an osprey parades by talons filled with a silver fish.
I wonder about the persistence of the creative impulse. Where was grandpa when he built his table? What thoughts occupied his mind as he measured, marked, sawed, planed and fitted the pieces? Did he think that his table would still be around today? On January 1, 2014 my grandfather would have been 169.
My table rocks on its short leg and coffee splashes on my James Lee Burke novel. I look up as a sea lion lolls on its side in the surf. With one flipper it waves at me.
