Running for the Hills

For three decades I dwelled in a suburban town contentedly working for the town and rearing my Daughter. The suburban setting never appealed to me but it was ideal for a custodial parent and an independent child. She could safely wander the neighborhood, ride her bike "downtown" or take the local bus to the Mall. As she became a teen my concerns of her being out at night were not new urban panic but more in line with mid-century boys with cars.

Before I settled in the burbs I had lived and worked in Manhattan. Working with multiply-disabled in a residential /training facility taught me more than I taught the clients. After a classic Ivory Tower education and a degree in Philosophy, I needed to learn about the real essence of  humanity. My clients had none of the intellectual graces or social refinements which I'd been told were the hallmarks of character. Oh, they were characters! They were interesting unique people, full of individuality, often possessing great personal charm and in some cases really good company. One fellow would take the subway uptown to watch ballgames and play cards with my Husband. He won most of his hands, too.

My specializations in working with clients became designing behavior modification and language acquisition programs and assisting with recreational and occupation therapy. My clients were admittedly difficult personalities and forget rational discussions about moderate behavior. The behavior modification techniques I learned to work with my clients also worked very well with your more standard issue children. Normal bouncy children need to be on-task and goal-oriented too. Relatives would comment that my Daughter had no chance, no chance at all of breaking bad. [She did, I can assure you, but she was never really BAD.]  Furthermore, dealing with the more adversarial and unbalanced clients prepared me for government work. After many years of small-town politics I can only state that politicians have better social skills but are no more rational than the residents of Manhattan Development Centers.
 
Lastly, I learned patience. When you spend days training someone how to hold a button or restraining them from bashing themselves into a cinder block wall, live is put into perspective and you begin to experience each moment on it's own. A tenet of Judaic philosophy is that each day should be like a pearl, your life like a string of pearls. Acceptance of the passage of time is embodied here. The patience I learned from the intellectually stunted helped me pass 30 years in the suburbs. To pass my time I practiced occupational and recreational therapy on myself, teaching myself one handcraft after another. While my nerves were fraying, my hands were becoming adept. Recognizing that the bustle of the city was no longer the best place for me, I found a cottage in the mountains, just a train ride from my home town. Here I shall stay patiently refining my artisan skills, designing and making crafts.  

The Eidos of Table, part one

A century ago when I was in school studying the great books and pondering the nature of Western civilization, there were long Socratic seminars about the perfect forms or eidos. While Plato intended the concept to indicate the perfect good or virtue, we always ended up talking about the perfect form and virtue of a table, making grand gestures over the conference tables around which we sat. When I first saw the life-edge tables made by George Nakashima, my thought was these are truly the eidos of table. The matched slabs of tree with the voids retained are a perfect combination of woodworking technique and practical function while maintaining a clear lineage to the original tree. Throughout my adult life I have yearned to have and use a Nakashima table. His furniture is highly sought and highly valued, not within my reach or in my price range.

When I became involved with and ultimately married a skilled woodworker, I would respond to Holiday and birthday wish lists with "a Nakashima table". This was a running joke for decades. Eventually we found a cabin in the mountains and he built a nice workshop. If we could find a good old-fashioned lumber yard, perhaps we could find the kind of interesting book-matched lumber similar to that which Nakashima used. At the local town hall we ran across a booklet promoting local wood products, in the booklet one name, Aldenville Log and Lumber, occurred in every category. We set our GPS to the rural location and set off for a day trip to nowhere. After an hour of driving as we passed the center of a large reservoir, the GPS instructed us to turn here! Not quite, we decided to try past the reservoir and in doing so found our destination. If you appreciate the natural beauty of  wood, the skill of turning logs into lumber or the methods of ecological manufacturing you will appreciate Aldenville Log and Lumber. [http://www.avlumber.com/] The owner, Dan Droppa, was in and proudly gave us a tour of his facilities. Three drying barns were in service and they were in the process of building an experimental drying facility. Raw lumber came from his own and local forests. When he had bought the Mill, lumber was cured using oil heat. He had switched the kilns to using sawdust by-products rather than imported fuel. This was a facility with which you wanted to do business.

As we toured the kilns, marveling at stacked Walnut slabs 4 inches thick and three feet wide, we explained that we were more or less looking for live-edge boards, book matched in Cherry. He said he thought there could be a few such boards in another kiln. As we walked into the last kiln, I saw a stack of sliced tree with an interesting branch void at one end. Hmm, "What's this? - - Oh, forgot about that one."  It was a 10 foot long, foot and a half wide Cherry log, sawn into eight 2" thick sequential slices. The two center book-matched slices featured a void where a branch joint had been. The contour of the log would make a perfect table with a classic Nakashima gap along the join. We obtained four slices of that tree, the two center cuts for the table top and two more for future matching accessory pieces. For the butterflies to stabilize the top, Bird's Eye Maple and for the stringers to stabilize the bottom, more Cherry.  Dan's staff dropped everything they were doing to trim, finish and load our lumber. Aldenville Log and Lumber treated like important clients not a couple of craftsmen on a weekend junket.