Tag: family

The Table

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a crack down the middle of my kitchen table. You can’t see it anymore. You can feel it if you know where to run your hand — a faint seam under the finish, right where the two halves of the top were pulled back together.

The table is somewhere around a hundred and fifteen years old. Built, best we can tell, between 1910 and 1915, with fold-down sides so it could shrink against a wall when it wasn’t needed and open up when company came. It isn’t fancy. It’s a farm table, the kind that got built to be used rather than looked at, and it’s where we eat breakfast, where we eat lunch, and where most weekend mornings I set my iPad down with a cup of coffee and think about the day before the day starts.

We didn’t go looking for it. We go looking for old things in general — estate sales, garage sales, antique stores, the kind of Saturday where you drive around with no plan and a little cash and see what somebody’s ready to let go of. My wife and I have done that for a long time. Some people collect a thing. We collect the habit of looking.

A few years ago we pulled up to a garage sale and realized we knew the people.

The table was sitting out there with the rest of what they were selling, and it had a problem. The top was split right down the center and they didn’t know what to do about it. It had been in their family the whole time, as far as they knew — more than a century of it — and now it was cracked and they were moving things on.

We stood in that driveway a long while before any money came out. Where it had come from. How long they’d had it. What it had been to them. They told us and we listened, and then we paid them a fair price and put it in the truck.

My father-in-law is a carpenter and a very good one. He’s shown up here before.

We took him the table and he repaired the top, closed the split, made the two halves one piece again. I did the rest, which was mostly getting the fold-out sides to swing up and hold the way they were supposed to instead of sagging. Nothing about it was hard for him. It took me a couple of tries.

Now we sit at it every day.

I like to think about who else has. A hundred and some years is a lot of breakfasts.

Somebody sat at it at two in the morning with a cup of coffee going cold, trying to decide something. There were arguments at that table and there were the mornings after the arguments. And there were a hundred meals nobody remembers, because they were Tuesday.

I don’t know any of that for a fact. But I know tables, and I know families, and a piece of furniture doesn’t make it to a hundred and fifteen without sitting at the center of a great deal of ordinary life.

We’re careful with our things, so I expect it will outlast us.

But what I keep coming back to is that it had a family before it had us. It wasn’t ours to find. It was theirs to let go of, and they let it go to people who stood in a driveway and asked about it first.

That’s a handoff more than a purchase.

So we look after it. We’ve added a few years to the count.

This morning it held my coffee.

Fifty Pounds

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a photograph of me from Christmas 2004. I’m twenty-six, grinning at the camera, holding a fifty-pound punching bag my wife had just given me.

Two weeks before that picture I’d had surgery to remove a tumor. The doctor’s instruction was that I was not to lift anything over ten pounds.

I don’t remember deciding to pick it up. That’s the part that gets me now. There was no moment of defiance. I reached over and lifted the heavy thing, because that is what I did, because that is what I was.

I watched Trouble with the Curve the other night for the first time.

Clint Eastwood plays an old baseball scout who is going blind and telling nobody. His whole life runs on his eyes — he evaluates players by watching them and by the sound of a ball coming off a bat — and the the most important tool the whole thing depends on is failing, and his response is to keep driving at night and say nothing.

The title refers to a hitter in the film who can’t handle a curveball. If you don’t follow baseball, the problem with a curve is almost always that the hitter commits too early. He’s looking for the fastball. His hands start moving before the ball has finished doing what it’s going to do, so he swings at the place he expected it to be rather than where it went.

The old man’s version of that isn’t baseball. He lost his wife when his daughter was six, and he responded by gripping the one thing he still knew how to do, which was the work. He swung at the pitch he’d already committed to years earlier, and his daughter grew up on the other side of that swing.

I had committed to a pitch too, and I’d done it long before 2004.

I was the strong one. In my house the man who lifts heavy things. I had never once in my life been the one being carried and I had no framework for it, no plan for it, and no intention of finding out.

So when they told me I had cancer, my whole approach was that I’d muscle through it. Same as everything else. That is not a strategy — it’s a reflex — and it worked right up until March, when the chemo treatment started and took the strength first.

I couldn’t eat. I started to lose weight. The one attribute I’d built an identity on was the exact thing that went, and it went early.

My wife took care of me.

I want to be careful with that phrase because people use it loosely. What I mean is that she waited on me hand and foot for months, and I am sure I was not an easy patient. I’m no good at being sick. I had a very fixed idea of what I was for in that house and none of it involved my young bride giving me my medicine.

She’s told me since that it was very hard on her, and I believe her. She was trying everything she knew to comfort me and most of it didn’t land, and I’ve spent years since wondering how much of that was the illness and how much of it was me not letting it work.

But here’s the thing she never said out loud and demonstrated for months.

She was more than equal to it. She carried the whole house and she carried me, and she did it in such a way that a man who wasn’t supposed to lift ten pounds never once felt like less of a man in his own home.

I didn’t understand at twenty-six what an achievement that was. I began to understand it more at forty.

The hit wasn’t the day my strength came back. It did come back, eventually, and I’ve got more of it now at forty-eight than I had then.

The hit was being carried, and letting it count.

I picked up a fifty-pound bag two weeks after surgery and I took it, because I could not yet imagine a version of myself who put it down. It took a woman I love four months and considerably more strength than I had to teach me otherwise.

Halftime

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I turned forty-eight today and spent almost all of it in my own house.

My son made waffles. My family gave me cards, and the things written in them were better than the presents (and the presents were awesome too!), which is a thing you can say honestly at forty-eight and mean it.

Then we went grocery shopping. All three of us, because the house needed food, and we talked and laughed our way through a store for an hour doing something completely ordinary that I don’t get to do on a workday. They picked up what they needed to make me a pineapple cheesecake, which is one of my favorite desserts I haven’t eaten in forever.

Pizza for lunch. A nap. Kung Fu Panda, which I hadn’t seen in years. Then hamburgers and Trouble with the Curve, which I’d never seen and which is a whole separate post.

That was the day. Waffles, groceries, a nap, two movies, and cheesecake.

It’s the best birthday I’ve had in a long time.

We were out earlier and my son ran into some friends at a coffee shop. One of the girls wished me happy birthday and asked if I’d gotten everything I wanted.

I told her I’m getting to be a little bit of an old man, and that the older you get the less you want — you mostly just want to be around the people you love, and I was doing exactly that.

I said it to be friendly. Then I thought about it and realized I’d told her the truth.

There were more than sixty messages by the end of the day. Some of them were the auto-generated kind and that’s fine. A lot of them weren’t. People from a long way back who wanted me to know they were still out there and still thought well of me.

My wife got me a couple of bottles of wine we’d had on the cruise a few weeks ago. She knew I liked them but wouldn’t likely get around to getting them. She was just paying attention, the way she does, and bought them without saying a word.

My son’s gift is that he’s taking me out to eat and paying for it himself. An experience instead of an object, which is an awesome present. Time with him and good food? That’s a win.

I’m in better shape at forty-eight than I was at forty. Stronger, lifting more, and considerably better at my job. More patient than I used to be, and steadier.

What I’ve lost is the not thinking about it. When I was young the future was theoretical. It sat out there somewhere and I never once did math on it. Now it’s close enough to see and I do the math without meaning to.

That’s a strange thing to say for a man who has had cancer twice and should have lost that feeling at twenty-six. But that sense of being invincible is stubborn, and it does eventually go.

Here’s the part I’ve been turning over.

I’ve always thought of fifty as halftime. It’s a comfortable frame — I’d be genuinely grateful for another fifty, and it lets you feel like the second half hasn’t started.

If I’m honest, I’m in the third quarter. And I’ve got some ground to make up.

The thing I don’t want to carry into forty-nine is the inability to act. That, and the assumption that a thing won’t be well received before anybody’s had the chance to receive it. Neither of those has ever been true and both have cost me.

The wine is still in the house, unopened. I am saving it for some special occasion down the road.

I’ve got no idea yet what the occasion is. But I’m counting on there being one. A random Tuesday may work too.

Flowering Herbs

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There was a Bath & Body Works fragrance in the nineties called Flowering Herbs.

My wife was given a bottle of it in 1994, four years before I met her. She was still wearing it in 1998, the summer we got together — we both turned twenty that year, she’s two and a half months older than me — and every time she came near me that summer she smelled like that.

They discontinued it.

I have spent a substantial part of the last thirty years trying to get more of it.

You can still find bottles on eBay if you’re patient and willing to be unreasonable. I have been both. The last one I bought cost me two hundred dollars.

Sometime in the late 2000s they brought it back as part of a heritage collection. Ten dollars a bottle, sitting on a shelf like it was nothing.

I bought a couple.

I’ve thought about that a lot since. Twenty of them would have covered the rest of her life for two hundred dollars, which is exactly what I later handed a stranger on the internet for one used bottle.

I’ve also just asked.

I’ve stood at the counter in a Bath & Body Works and asked employees how a person goes about ordering custom bottles of a discontinued scent. One woman was genuinely game — said she’d reach out to corporate and see whether they’d sell me some at a reasonable price.

I never heard anything back. I don’t blame them. I imagine that request goes into a system that has no field for it.

I’ll keep checking eBay.

Here’s what I can’t explain properly to anyone who asks why.

It doesn’t smell like a fragrance to me. It smells like being twenty. It smells like a summer where nothing had gone wrong yet and I had just met the most interesting person I’d ever met. It smells like freedom, and like getting away with something, and like my best friend.

Twenty-eight years together and one bottle of it will still put me somewhere no photograph gets me to. I don’t know why smell does that and almost nothing else does.

So if anybody at that company is ever bored and looking for a project.

There’s a man in Oklahoma who would very much like to buy ten bottles of Flowering Herbs at whatever reasonable price you want to name, and he’s been at this a long time, and he isn’t going to stop.

His Hard Hat

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

My grandfather went to work for Mobil Oil in 1946, right out of the war, and stayed until he retired around 1988. Forty-some years, southwest Oklahoma, running routes as a pumper.

He was a slender man. Five-eight, five-nine, not big. And he had some of the strongest hands of anyone I’ve ever known — grip strength that never left him, even as an old man, forty years of field work still sitting in them.

His left ring finger was gone. Taken off by machinery out on a lease somewhere. You noticed it right away as a kid, because it was simply not there.

I asked about it once and got the story, and I don’t remember who told me.

I don’t have a single full conversation with him.

He was quiet. Quiet voice, reserved, not a man who filled a room or wanted to. Every so often he’d roughhouse with me a little and that was about the extent of it. Questions and answers. Nothing you’d call a talk.

Then Alzheimer’s took most of the years when I might have been old enough to ask him something worth asking.

He was at a family retreat a few weeks before he died in 2005. He was there and he did not look good and everyone could see where it was going. I wasn’t in the room at the end.

Two years after that I started working in oil and gas.

I’ve been in it ever since, going on twenty years now, doing data. Not out on a lease — in front of screens, in offices, arguing about how information moves.

But I’ve been out in the field a couple of times. Toured rigs, watched the guys work, stood where the actual thing happens.

Both times I thought about him.

He pumped wells. I make sure the data coming off them mean something. Two completely different jobs inside the same industry, seventy years apart, and the same industry has now paid for two households of my family.

The thing that provided for his family provides for mine.

I have his hard hat.

I have one of his measuring tools, and some tie pins and things the company gave him over four decades of showing up.

My mother tells me she’s proud of me, and she tells me her daddy would have been too — the career, the places I’ve gotten to work, the kind of work I’ve gotten to do. She’s the one who’d know.

I’d like to have heard it from him. But he was never going to be the man who said it out loud, and I’m not sure it would have sounded like much if he had.

If I got ten minutes with him in his right mind, I know what I’d use it on.

I’d tell him thank you. That I know none of it was easy, and that he paved a road I’m still driving on. That I ended up in his industry without either of us planning it, and that I’m proud to be his grandson.

Then I’d probably shake his hand, and I know exactly what that would have felt like, because that grip is the clearest thing I have of him.

Nine fingers and all of it still there.