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.

Today is Thanksgiving. There were just three of us, which did not stop me from making a roast plus six sides and two desserts.  My fondness for cooking is probably rooted in it's novelty. My Grannie was an enthusiastic but questionable cook and her Daughter, my Mom, was a uniquely ghastly cook. She had a creative way of combining ingredients without regard for the finished product. Her classic meal was the black and blue steak (burnt outside, raw inside) with mostly-done baked potato, lettuce and tomato salad. [Ya'know those uniform Styrofoam tomatoes that came three in row in a little plastic box? No cooked vegetable ever appeared on our dinner table through my entire childhood.  This from a woman whose Father was a produce wholesaler. Her alternate classic was brisket of beef cooked until the bottom adhered itself to the pan and my Father would have to serve to the meat by cutting horizontal slices or more accurately shreds. She went through several pans until she started lining them with foil. After that she would just dispose of the lower third of the brisket along with the foil. Very tidy.

Mom once decided to make a real stove-top pot roast in honor of her Father-in-Law coming to visit. It was an electric stove with a knob that turned 360 degrees. She thought she was turning the stove knob to low but actually turned it all the way around to high. Off she went to town in her big Thunderbird, with my Sister and I in the back seat. The pot roast boiled away in it's closed container, quickly turning into a lump of coal in a puddle of suet. Black greasy smoke oozing out, spreading through the house.

Grand-dad was a sweet man, he lived in Miami taking care of his three Sisters. It was an overnight bus up to Washington DC to meet his Son, my Dad, at Dad's office for the one-hour ride back to the suburbs. He deserved a nice quiet meal and a rest in the bosom of his loving family after that trek. Unfortunately it was not to be. When they arrived and Dad opened the house door, an acrid black miasma eddied out.

The house was full of smoke they couldn't see a hand in front of their faces. Dad was the kind of guy who always had a cotton handkerchief in his pocket. It came in handy that evening as he wet it at the hose bib, wrapped it over his face and checked the beds. He was relieved that we weren't home; he had been afraid we might have been overcome by the fumes.

Standing by the kitchen door through the dense blackness, he then noticed a little glow in the direction of the stove. He couldn't see what was there but went over and swung out with his hand to fan the air, or lack thereof. His action knocked the lid off the pot roast pot. In the covered pot the tallow had rendered from the pot roast, smoldering into a superheated puddle of fat. With the lid off, whoosh, the influx of air hit the grease which ignited with a bang! A column of fire shot up from the stove, clarifying the situation for my Father, as clearly as that column of fire in the desert had lead the Israelites. The flame shot as high as it could, making a perfect circle on the kitchen ceiling and singed off Dad's eyebrows along the way.

When Mom drove up to the house a half-hour or so later, from the driveway we saw, as silhouettes on the kitchen porch against the setting sun, the large Buddha-like shape of Dad,  the smaller but even more Buddha-like bulk of his Dad and a column of black smoke billowing out of the kitchen door. Mom quietly said "Oh, Dear”, I said "Oh, S#1t!" and Sis said "We're DEAD!". but Dad just said “Honey, you should have just told me you wanted to go out to eat.”