When I was 9, my dad broke a promise. He’d truly wanted to be a family man, but just couldn’t follow-through. I thought about all this as I obsessively re-finished an oak table — a piece “normal” people would have tossed to the curb — to be our family’s dining table.
Just as I started fourth grade, my dad gave me an upright fixer-upper piano with an old, cracked dark cherry finish and in dire need of tuning. He promised to re-make it into a beautiful instrument, so I could start piano lessons.
He’d work on it Saturday mornings at the half-duplex where I lived with my mom. By then, my parents had been divorced six years, and I visited my dad and stepmother’s house every other weekend.
I missed him. A lot. Being with he and my mom under one roof felt precious and rare.
On the first Saturday morning, sunlight streamed through the kitchen window into the dining room, where the piano awaited. I cooked dad’s favorite French toast for breakfast.
He worked hard, stripping the dark finish away with harsh chemicals. Almost four decades later, I can still see him lying on the old pine dining room floor, with his tongue hooked around the corner of his mouth, just like his father would lie on the grass alongside his tomato plants on a hot summer afternoon to pull weeds and check the fruit.
Dad was charming, funny, smart — and strong, in his early 30s then. With his elbow grease, the finish melted off, leaving behind streaks of dark burgundy and dusky rose with bare, pinkish wood.
He returned once, maybe twice.
Then he stopped coming over—who-knows-why.
The abandoned piano sat idle, out of tune, an ugly reminder of a broken promise. That Christmas my mom found a way, as she always did, and bought a beautiful new chestnut piano so I could start lessons. She had the old, half-stripped rose-streaked piano hauled away.
My mind rooted through this memory last summer as I obsessively worked the old dark finish off an oak pedestal dining table most people would have abandoned long ago.
But it reminds me of my dad in so many ways that I simply could not let it go. As I wandered through past moments, I only dug deeper into the task at hand.
~~~
I am my father’s daughter. We have the gift of vision, and can work hard on something. We get excited about revealing hidden beauty.
But my dad had a lot of trouble finishing things. Something or someone else — often a woman — would tug on his attention. He’d break his focus, his rhythm, and abandon a project, a commitment, a family.
He’d cheated on both his wives, who became his ex-wives — first my mom, then my stepmother — and had left them both with the heavy lifting of raising his daughters. I was angry at him for a long time.
But my dad never gave up, and in my mid-20s we began to rebuild. We had the good fortune to enjoy more than a decade of a pretty rich, real and beautiful relationship before he died.
~~~
Like him, I collect projects and fixer-uppers. When they pile up, unfinished, I worry I am too much like my dad.
I had something to prove to myself with that table.
On my hands and knees on a muggy August afternoon, I scraped rubbery, dark slime from its round top. I rubbed coarse sandpaper over the stubborn, sticky layer until decades of varnish and dirt finally yielded.
I caught enough glimpses of the bare beauty of the striped tiger oak and the swirled grain upon luscious curves of its pedestal base and carved paws to keep going.
That old finish took its revenge and re-settled itself upon my skin, mixing with my salty sweat, coating the lenses of my glasses and working its way into my nostrils.
In my mind’s eye, I could see its lovely oval shape and solid base in the kitchen of our 1860s home, short end nestled below a wall of family pictures and long end along the picture window. I looked ahead to our family dinners around it. My husband, my two stepsons, their girlfriends.
And I looked back.
To the Thanksgiving when dad and Stephanie, his longtime girlfriend, came to my 1900 folk Victorian house for the first Thanksgiving dinner I hosted. They had all helped me through several sad months. I could not follow-through on my marriage and had to let go.
As I grieved that marriage, I worked on the house to make it my own. To host that dinner, I bought that cheap, fixer-upper oak pedestal table, and draped it in a borrowed cream damask cloth.
Then a surprise: I’d met a wonderful man out of the blue. We’d shared two dinners and talked until people at the restaurant started closing up around us, and planned to get together Thanksgiving evening.
Maybe.
As the turkey cooked for a late afternoon dinner, dad and I hung pictures on the walls. I caught him looking at me, charmed and curious. He had seen me so sad for so long, comforted me with visits and pep talks — even wisely said nothing and simply hugged me as I sobbed.
“You look really happy,” he said.
“I am, dad. I’m good.” I smiled. I had a secret.
That evening, when dishes were cleared and all my guests including dad had departed, the kind and handsome man who is now my husband first visited my home, a beautiful scene of white linen, candles, flowers against rich burnt-orange walls. Mike and I relaxed on the couch, sipping wine, talking and enjoying getting to know each other.
~~~
The next year, 2012, brought the deepest sorrow and richest bliss of my life as I lost my dad, and gained the love of my life and his sons — now our family. That Thanksgiving was dad’s last happy one. By the next November, hopeless chemo treatments had left him weak and ashen.
So that rustic, sturdy oak table to me is a bridge between my family-of-origin, and our family that is a dream come true. It connects people most dear to me who only barely, briefly met.
~~~
Finally, the bare beauty of that grain came through in soft reds and golds, honey, and gentle browns. A wash with wood bleach lightened the wood and removed old stains.
Now, that swirly, striped oak oval atop its curving, carved base sits in front of our kitchen window. I left some rough patches, and sealed it with beeswax and citrus oil. It still wobbles, but we can fix that. Nothing is ever perfect.
~~~
In so many ways, my dad’s life was unfinished. We always want more time.
He never got to know my husband or stepsons or to watch them play baseball or football. Sometimes I imagine him whistling at their games.
He never got to visit our family and help us re-make this old house of ours. He has no seat at the table of our big family dinners.
But every day, I take some comfort in that table in the heart of our family home, and pride in finishing that labor.
I know he’d love it, and know a piece of him is here with us.
I am my father’s daughter, and have much still to finish.
~ Lisa Duchene is a writer, essayist, blogger and communications pro in central Pennsylvania. Lisaduchene.com
Copyright 2019 by Lisa Duchene
