August 8, 2010
The Bakers Table
I have a theory about social class that goes like this: No matter how much money you make, you are upper class if you spend less than you earn, and you are lower class if you spend more than you earn. And if you spend exactly what you earn, give or take a hundred bucks or so a month, then you are anxious class.
Have I since become a famous furniture designer with merchandise for sale at Skymall.com? Not quite. But those tables taught me something. I realized that by designing them I had turned impoverishment into enterprise. I had transcended my own inhibiting academic world and briefly explored the material presences of daily life. I had freed my eyes and hands to converse with varieties of shape and substance. I had engaged my little world and changed it. For these reasons, there is something special for me about the practice of design.
That’s where Bill and Duffy Baker came in. They lived very near us in a big red house which, with its equally imposing red barn, sprawled over two acres at ridge top. They owned a few retail businesses in the campus village, including Duffy’s, the saloon of choice for fraternities and varsity athletes. Bill had a thing about furniture. His house was crowded with antiques and handmade pieces, including a classy four-poster bed. His barn was full of old stuff in various stages of restoration or decay.
A gala garage sale at the Baker barn in the late 1970s coincided, as it happened, with my peaking anxious-class frustration and semiannual lust to start making mischief with a piece of wood. When I told Bill that I needed a good dining table but could not pay much, he said, “Bob, I’ve got just the thing for you!” and led me back into the darkly stacked reaches of the Baker Barn, on the way trying to sell me his spare four-poster bed. A ray of sunlight in back caught the object of Bill’s search, and soon I stood looking at the massive oak table that would become, more than I thought possible for an inanimate object, our family icon for the next quarter-century.
The table was a daunting prospect. Most of the original finish was missing, exposing wood that was alternately dried out or stained; patches of foggy shellac still clung to other areas. The five spiral-turned heavy legs (one to hold up extra leaves in the middle) looked solid enough but would require hours of cleaning up and staining. There were no extra leaves, and one of the dowels, which was supposed to slide into holes as the table was closed, was broken off. But worst of all was the veneer tabletop. Thumbnail-sized bits were missing altogether. Large areas of veneer, frayed at the edges and completely desiccated, had parted from the surface and curled inches into the air, as though in defiance of anyone brash enough to attempt a repair.
“Piece of cake, Bob. I’ll talk you through it,” he said, taking my hundred dollars.
For the next two months the table stood in my garage, getting attention. After much advice from Baker, my friend Bill Rockett, and others, I turned to the job of compelling the rampant veneer to sit down where it belonged. I moisturized the ancient sheet of wood until it was pliant but not soaked. Then I wiped off the liquid residue and pressed the veneer down in place on a bed of glue. I stabilized it with plywood, braced the job with a large cinder block, and left it overnight. This worked. When I removed the block and plywood the next morning, the thing in the garage looked like a table again.
It was at this glass-covered table, my legs dangling from the seat of a claw-foot chair, that I first took note of design and invention, when my grandfather Julius Carlson announced to me, in his high-pitched monotone, that he had invented the adjustable cap. He explained to me that he was a hat designer, told me what a hat designer did, and said that he worked for a hat factory and that there was some question about whether the factory owned rights to the invention or whether he did. Over the years that followed, Julius lost out in the legal wrangling, but until his death at ninety-one he had not the slightest doubt that he had been in the right, and for some years after hearing his story I could not look at an adjustable cap without a mixture of pride and regret.
What finally became of my grandfather’s glass-topped cherry-wood table? As I stroked on a second coat of shellac, I supposed that I could track it down, but to what good? Restoring my own table had brought me to see it with the eyes of the past, as only a child can see it, and now that image would be mine forever.
A few days later, when the finish had cured out, we carried Bill Baker’s table out of the garage and set it down in the dining area, which looked east toward the kitchen counter and west toward a stand of Douglas firs. It was splendid. It completed the house as a family domain. And it stood in that spot for the next twenty-five years offering food and cheer as three boys grew up and three cycles of dogs, stretched out on a nearby carpet, listened to our friendly chatter as soothing music or were troubled by sudden stridencies. In my journal I describe a scene from the mid-1980s, when Ted, our youngest, was four years old and sitting at the oak table:
4/23/87. . . Troubles with A & N vanished in the magic of the 15th & Onyx parting,but T opened a new canto by refusing to go to his daycare. “Boring.” Idragged him there via indirect routes, including an elevator. I bet he’s right.At his frenetic pace of growth, he has outgrown himself and needs somenew challenge. After squabble #1 this morning, he asked me over the Creamof Wheat, “What is the future? Can I see it?” Told him only his mind couldsee it, that he had to close his eyes. So he did, and I began trying to drumup Anthony as a big man, Nick as a big man, Teddy as paterfamilias withkids and beloved wife.
My adventures with furniture did not end when we sold the Eugene house and began dividing our time between Hawaii and Portland in the late 1990s. I almost killed myself during our move in 1998, when the dining-room chair I was trying to throw into the city dump bounced off a guard cable and klopped me on the head. Later that year I scoured the country shops of Multnomah and Clackamas Counties for more comfortable chairs, restoring and refinishing each that I found.
In 2004 we left the Portland house, and now, after a few years in storage, the Bakers’ table sits in our dining room in Berkeley. Almost thirty-five years down the line, it still carries with it, and is ready to re-create in memory, the life and times of a young family.
Observed
View all
Observed
By Robert Grudin
Related Posts
Equity Observer
L’Oreal Thompson Payton|Essays
‘Misogynoir is a distraction’: Moya Bailey on why Kamala Harris (or any U.S. president) is not going to save us
Equity Observer
Ellen McGirt|Essays
I’m looking for a dad in finance
She the People
Aimee Allison|Audio
She the People with Aimee Allison, a new podcast from Design Observer
Equity Observer
Kevin Bethune|Essays
Oh My, AI
Recent Posts
Make a Plan to Vote ft. Genny Castillo, Danielle Atkinson of Mothering Justice Black balled and white walled: Interiority in Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance”L’Oreal Thompson Payton|Essays
‘Misogynoir is a distraction’: Moya Bailey on why Kamala Harris (or any U.S. president) is not going to save us New kids on the bloc?Related Posts
Equity Observer
L’Oreal Thompson Payton|Essays
‘Misogynoir is a distraction’: Moya Bailey on why Kamala Harris (or any U.S. president) is not going to save us
Equity Observer
Ellen McGirt|Essays
I’m looking for a dad in finance
She the People
Aimee Allison|Audio
She the People with Aimee Allison, a new podcast from Design Observer
Equity Observer
Kevin Bethune|Essays