I work at a large telecommunications company, but my true love is woodworking. I’ve built desks and jewelry boxes for my wife and a doll-clothes armoire for my daughter.
Yes, woodworking and family have always seemed like a natural pair to me. I first became fascinated with this hobby as a kid, in the basement of my Uncle Frankie’s huge white house in Detroit.
Uncle Frankie was a rough-and-tumble unpredictable ex-Marine, tough but fair, whose military disposition required perfection but was relaxed from time to time in the company of good friends and family. At my young age, Uncle Frankie was larger than life.
His knotty pine basement was my favorite room in the house. It was complete with a kitchen table, a small black-and-white television and an old coal-burning stove. The basement was home to my uncle’s woodshop.
It was in this woodshop that my Uncle Frankie took on a project of magnificent proportions, a dining room cabinet that was to be his crowning achievement. For months, my family would troop down to the basement and gaze in awe on his masterpiece-in-progress. He had designed it himself, drawing up a pile of sketches and tweaking them for weeks. He would test our math skills by asking us to calculate the number of hinges needed, or he would ask what type of wood we thought would look best.
He’d say, “What wood should I use?” and if you said cherry, he’d respond, “Well, cherry is nice, but would that really match the dining room?” He would keep asking questions until you finally deduced the right answer, which was oak.
The cabinet became the epicenter of Uncle Frankie’s household. If we wanted to visit him on a rainy weekend, our parents would say, “Oh no! Uncle Frankie is in the workshop with the cabinet for sure, so we can’t disturb him.” Uncle Frankie was a great cook, but he was so engrossed in his project, we sometimes had to bring dinner to his place.
Finally, Thanksgiving and the completion of Uncle Frankie’s cabinet were to culminate in a feast at his house, where the men of the family could assist in carrying the heavy cabinet up to the dining room. We arrived to the aroma of the turkey, stuffing and potatoes that Uncle Frankie had spent the last night preparing to perfection. We gathered in the dining room all dressed up, with several cameras at the ready to capture the debut of the cabinet as well as the holiday festivities.
But there was a big problem: the cabinet would not fit up the stairway.
You could have heard a pin drop. Everyone was waiting, still as death, to see what Uncle Frankie would do. Uncharacteristically, he burst into laughter, and we all nervously joined him. He insisted on disassembling the cabinet right there on the spot, and the entire family helped to bring the fragments up the steps, watching as he put the pieces back together in the dining room.
We were all so focused on Frankie’s mishap that we didn’t even smell the turkey drying out and shriveling up, or the potatoes burning to the dish, or the stuffing turning into croutons. Someone suddenly said, “What about the turkey?” and a frazzled Uncle Frankie dashed into the kitchen. A cloud of gray smoke wafted out of the oven door.
There was nothing to do but laugh, and eat dried turkey and cranberry sauce while admiring the cabinet and ribbing Uncle Frankie about the day’s double fiasco. That cabinet made it the best Thanksgiving I can remember. Every year at this time, I think about my departed uncle and his lovingly crafted cabinet. And when I come home from the hardware store with the wrong hinges or a crack appears in one of my own projects, I laughingly remind myself: at least it’s not Uncle Frankie’s cabinet.
Steve Prokopowicz, a technician for Comcast, lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia with his wife, two children and two dogs. His own workshop is on the ground floor.
