Landing Pads
“We have a big family,” he said more than once as he and his teenage son loaded the back of the truck.
She stood watching, sobbing, though she had offered and was glad to see her dining table go. The eight-foot mahogany classic with beveled edges that gracefully curved at the corners had done all it could do. In her home anyway. It and its eight matching chairs, tastefully upholstered in textured beige, were headed for new life. She needed the space, and hadn’t needed the table in a very, very long time.
The father with a house full of children never dreamed he would receive such a gift. “We have a BIG family,” he kept repeating, as a point of pride and simultaneously a salve for her raw edges, the kind that don’t tear clean despite the timely intersection of want and need.
The table held her family’s triumphs and disasters. Their almosts and their not-quites, their “good-to-meet-yous” and their “hope-to-see-you-agains.” Decisions that changed the course of things had been made around it. As it rode away toward a new adventure, the recently retired widow on the cusp of seasonal change found herself standing in the front yard gasping for air in a deluge of happy-sad.
“Stuff is only stuff,” she said aloud to no one listening. And yet some “stuff” becomes like family if it lives with you long enough.
We have a coffee table (Really? We don’t even drink coffee.) in our fun room (a space designed to mimic what we call it) that has anchored our family for over twenty years. The table, that requires a hefty couch simply to balance it, is a two-piece job weighing in at somewhere close to three-hundred pounds. We found it one summer at a roadside antique store in nowhere Arkansas on our way home from Greers Ferry Lake.
I spotted the top—three wide planks of hand-scraped teak connected by hidden dowels, framed with the same rugged wood-- laying out back behind the store across a pallet. After a good bit of digging and searching, we uncovered a base that had clearly been fashioned to hold it. The table was enormous. Ludicrously heavy. Scuffed, weathered, and actually labeled “damaged” because of a couple of splits between the planks caused by the shrinkage of too green wood. Where the sellers saw a defect, I spied a beauty mark.
It was the most perfectly imperfect piece of furniture I had ever seen.
We bought it for less than $200, and it took four grown men to hoist it into the hull of our boat which was the only way we could get it home. Twenty-six years later, that table knows us better than we know ourselves.
The giant teakwood anchor is our landing pad. It’s where we toss our mail and eat our meals. It’s where we prop our feet and bang our fists and perch our little ones when they need tending to. Birthdays happen here, as well as Christmases. It holds game-day snacks and “family dinner” before-and-after treats. Teenage boys have stood upon it in post-game celebration . . . we have laid on it and wept . . . it’s where I sit sometimes when trying to decide what I should or shouldn’t do.
This table holds our heartbreaks, our confusions, our discoveries, our gaffes.
Sturdy and forgiving, proud and capable, it is a thing that has a life.
And will go on to live another. And another. And another . . . when passed on to the right hands.
P.S. The Things