With many a sheet of sand paper, varnish, paint, Gorilla glue, hammer, nails, a piano hinge and lots of elbow grease, my husband has recently repaired and restored his dad’s old desk. It took him several weeks to complete this project because salt air has a way of pitting the wood with the same ferocity of a woodpecker.
Today, the once dilapidated fold-top desk takes on a new luster and life. Its sheen invites guests to run their hand over the silky smooth wood surface.
In the late 1940s, my father-in-law bought a decommissioned submarine chaser from the World War II era and converted it to a top-of-the-line shrimp boat. While the wooden Navy vessels, dubbed the ‘Cinderellas of the Fleet’ or the ‘Hunters of Steel Sharks,’ were dwarfed by iron battleships, the Neptune turned out to be one of the larger shrimp boats.
When the government sold off its sub chasers, many of which were constructed in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, it striped away most of equipment including the electronics often crafted in Connecticut. But it left the matching, built-in desks. Whenever my husband looks at the desk now, he can still see his father, sitting at it on the boat, tending to the paperwork involved with any business including shrimping.
His dad removed at least one of the desks from the boat and used it at their house. We don’t know what happened to the matching one. Perhaps it was still aboard when the Neptune sunk while my father-in-law recuperated from injuries incurred in an automobile accident.
After my mother-in-law replaced this old captain’s desk with a fancier, antique one, my husband took the well worn piece of furniture with all the intentions of repairing and restoring it. But for years, we used it as it was, first by the children, then I used it in my office.
Now that it sits in the living room, it desperately needed attention. What started out as a small project soon evolved into a monumental one. More than a half century of neglect had taken its toll, requiring as much rebuilding of the construction as refinishing of the wood surfaces.
However, as my husband worked, memories kept him company. His dad was a carpenter by trade, a craftsman who worked on the restoration of Williamsburg and a genius who could fix all things - motors, plumbing, boats, nets, toys, appliances - from the inside out. He cared little for cosmetics, but he wanted his possessions functional and operational, and he knew how to kept all of the wheels turning.
After my husband applied the last coat of wax to the desk, he turned his attention to a pair of wooden dog bookends that he had made in Industrial Arts in junior high school. Once again, memories surfaced. As if it were yesterday, he recalled the day that his dad took him to the woodshed, not because he was in trouble, but to find the perfect board for this project. From his vast collection of lumber, the man pulled out and rubbed the wood of several boards before he settled on a cedar plank for his son’s project. Perhaps it was that moment my husband's appreciation for all things wooden really began.
Nestled between the bookends are several of Daddy Ralph’s books because he was also an avid reader, mostly westerns. That’s how he passed the long, tedious hours when the crew wasn’t harvesting shrimp or mending nets.
This long overdue project truly turned out to be a labor of love because it prompted my husband not only to use skills he had learned from his dad, but also to revisit long dormant memories of times that they worked and fished together, a strong bond between father and son.
Yann Martel in The Life of Pi is correct. “Memory is an ocean.”
There’s antique furniture and then there’s antique furniture. But give me those, like this desk, with stories to tell, memories to prompt and imaginations to stir.
Happy Father’s Day.
2007
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