Why - Finally

Warren Zevon once said "We buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them." I think my father bought woodworking supplies for the same reason. He was an optimist. When I first started sorting through the contents of his shop, I don't think I really understood that. The sheer volume of what he owned just seemed so crazy. But now I've been home for 24 hours from this trip, and I've unloaded the truck and started going through all the stuff I just hauled across the country, and I realize that it was only ever about one thing.

The lathe.

In the later years of his life, my father became a serious woodturner. Some would say obsessive. He was passionate about it. He made a lot pens (and bottle stoppers, kaleidoscopes, etc.) as gifts. He also worked hard to refine his technique and get good at making bowls and other larger items by attending seminars, classes, and conferences. I found out about the Philadelphia Wood Turning Center (Now The Center for Art in Wood) and bought him a membership one year. He was so excited about it that the newsletter just wasn't enough. He found excuses to go down there and check it out a couple times.

When I was younger, I'd often go down to the basement and help my dad with various woodworking project. In those days, he was more interested in furniture. We'd refinish antiques he'd picked up, or build things for the house. There's a photo of me somewhere using a sander on what would become the family room wall units. I was about 5. I'm pretty sure I have that sander now too. I'm sure most of time I actually impeded his progress, but he never let me know that. I also learned a lot of what I know about woodworking from him, and I've turned out to be a pretty competent carpenter.

By the time dad took up turning seriously, I was living across the country and had my own adult life to deal with. He and I talked a lot about what he was working on, but I never got to work with him on it. After he died, Ivan and I split a lot of his personal belongings, and each of us took things that meant something, but the shop was an open question. I would use most of it, but really didn't have the space, and getting it out here would have been a fortune. Ivan didn't really have the space either, and I don't think he was all that interested anyway. Over time, mom found good homes for almost everything, including the shop classroom at the local high school. That would have made dad happy.

There was this one lathe though that I decided I had to have. It was the smallest of the three (Yup, three), and seemed manageable. It was also the one that dad used to make most of the stuff he gave people, like pens. It just seemed like a good way to connect with him again, but then it got complicated. In addition to the lathe, I realized that I might as well take all the unfinished kits, pen blanks, tools, and assorted accessories. There was a lot of it. The pile of got pretty big. And it sat there. There just never seemed to be a good way to get that big a pile to California.

Then mom decided to sell the house, and this whole adventure ensued. I did bring a ton of other things across the country. Davia is already enjoying some of my old books, and Spencer dove into my Matchbox cars, but I finally realized that I could have lived without almost all of it. The lathe was always the thing.

So now I have dad's lathe, and an awful lot of kits to make everything from pens to hors d'oeuvre forks. I have to idea how to use any of it, but I'll think of him a lot while I figure it all out, and wish he were here to just explain it. 

Not coincidentally, dad was also a fan of a good road trip. We took a lot of them when I was a kid, including a cross country run. While I didn't appreciate some of them at the time, I seem to talk about them a lot now. I'm sure he would have appreciated how this all came about, and the end result.