In 11th-grade shop class, I worked all fall on a dining room table. It would be a Christmas present for my parents and a great surprise.
My teacher offered me the project based on something he had seen in a woodworking design book — a butcher-block table 5 feet in diameter. It was the biggest shop project I had ever done.
Week after week, during the two periods before history class, I worked away, sawing 2-inch thick pine boards into square strips, laminating them into 12-inch sections, joining the sections, then cutting a circle out of the large square blank. After weeks of sanding the round top, I had a heavy, smooth wafer. I applied coat after coat of oil and finish, and I buffed it to a golden luster. Then I built a solid base. It was not quite a Shaker reproduction, but it was constructed with similar affection. “Hands to work, hearts to God,” as they said. Done.
Almost. It weighed a ton. My plan was to move it by car under the cover of darkness and sneak it into the house on Christmas Eve. Though I did not yet have my driver’s license when I began the project, I scheduled my road test at the registry of motor vehicles just a week before Christmas. I had one shot at getting my license in time for my delivery date. I did. That was good because Plan B would have risked arrest.
After school one day, I moved the table to a friend’s barn as my staging area, and at midnight on Christmas Eve, I wrapped it in blankets and strapped it to the roof of our old Volvo station wagon, drove it across town and eased up our driveway with the headlights off. With great stealth, my brother and I rolled it through the front door and into the dining room, set it on its pedestal base and covered it with a sheet.
In the morning, I unveiled it. Mom cried. Dad was impressed. My pleasure in making it and giving it away was far greater than any pleasure I remember from receiving gifts — that year or any year. We ate Christmas dinner on my table.
As I look back, it feels as if I was setting the table for so much more. Many years later, the table came to my house where, by then, a series of infants had joined the dinnertime conversation. Five new Nelsons — in a new family that I couldn’t have imagined in 11th-grade — spent many a meal laughing and talking and spilling juice before that table was finally relieved of duty and sent to Table Valhalla.
These memories returned when I recently read Matthew Crawford’s book “Shop Class as Soulcraft.” “Shared memories attach to the material souvenirs of our lives,” Crawford writes, “and producing them is a kind of communion, with others and with the future.”
He built a mahogany table at a time when he “had no immediate prospect of becoming a father, yet … imagined a child who would form indelible impressions of this table and know that it was his father’s work.”
I like a table as a metaphor for all the ways in which we gather ourselves together. Aren’t we always setting the table and inviting one another to dine, in one sense or another? Be it a class, a school, a home, a community, we gather at the table of learning, friendship, sustainability, mirth, ritual, civility and spilling juice. If we can see ourselves as sharing a table, we can see one another in a very accurate and true sense. We can share. We can pass the bread.
Most teachers would recognize the feelings of table maker and host, fashioning sturdy lives that they cannot quite predict out of vocabulary lessons and the multiplication tables. We share a few “meals” and move on to the next sitting, to take place in a myriad places and times of evolving lives. Our children will, we hope, think back on the shop projects we’ve shared, a multigenerational gathering of makers and hosts.
“I imagined the table fading into the background of a future life,” Crawford writes, “the defects in its execution as well as inevitable stains and scars becoming a surface texture enough that memory and sentiment might cling to it, in unnoticed accretions.”
We abandon our shiny shop work to the wear and tear of experience, children and life, allowing it to acquire the burnishing and patina of use and rugged care. My big round table had countless lovely scratches, burns and bangs that made it all the more valuable.
Today, we gather at an old architectural drafting board-turned-table. It came from my wife’s father, Lowell Brody, and it bears the pinholes, grooves and scribbles of his early draftsmanship, back when architects used pencils and rulers instead of computer-assisted design programs. “Move door to left” or “Window goes here” still can be discerned in the impressions that he routed in the wood, vestiges of clients and projects lost to memory but preserved beneath the blueprint by the pressure of sharp lead bearing down to write instructions for the builder.
And now children and grandchildren that the young architect couldn’t have imagined sit and re-imagine him, working back in time thanks to the “stains and scars” on a humble few planks of dark, storied wood.
Todd Nelson is principal of the Brooksville Elementary School.