The wire spool table

by DRM

bowl of cereal.jpg

The table was made out of an old wire spool.  We cut the top off, pulled the slats out and made a tri­an­gu­lar base from heavy maple.  I don’t know how many yards of wire the spool held, but it must have been a lot, because we could fit the eight of us around the table with room to spare for the fly­ing fists and sprawl­ing elbows that marked every meal.

Like most things in our home, there was an artistry and idiocy about the man­u­fac­tur­ing of the table.  For one, the spool top had a big hole in the mid­dle.  For another, the spool was made of soft pine, with wide gaps where the pine pan­els met, and pock marks, sta­ple stabs and div­ots from its work­ing days.  My dad’s solu­tion was to cut maple inlays, fit them in the grooves and paste every­thing over with big gobs of plas­tic wood and wood glue.  The effect was a lit­tle like an early mosaic, minus the holy image, the flecks of semi-precious stone and the over­all artis­tic intent.  We slathered a glossy fin­ish on top.

The fact that we never came up with a solu­tion for the hole in the mid­dle of the table should have been a sign that the rest of our con­struc­tive design wasn’t durable.  In the first win­ter, when the wood dried out, the gaps widened and the mix­ture of wood inlay, wood glue and plas­tic wood came loose and spilled out onto the floor in grainy clus­ters, the wire spool expressed its essen­tial nature, trap­ping all man­ners of gunk and food crud and liq­uid residue in the deep cracks.

My father would sit at the table with a din­ner knife and exca­vate the residue that got caught in the cracks.  It didn’t mat­ter who was there:  vis­it­ing priests, fam­ily, stu­dents, guests, old friends, artists who were at my mom’s life draw­ing class.  There my dad would sit, dig­ging away at the gunk, rolling bits between his fin­ger and stack­ing them in lit­tle piles beside him.  They looked like minia­ture can­non­balls in a grade school diorama.

In the morn­ing with the milk jug beside my bowl, I’d eat my cereal and peer in the cracks.  The table had begun to splin­ter.  We wouldn’t get another.  I promised myself I wouldn’t dig at the gunk.  Then I’d take the end of my spoon and pull it along the thread of the crack.  The clean wood under­neath, glimpsed for a moment, was an irre­sistable lure.