A Fond Farewell to a Friend
No, this post has nothing to do with the wonderful, heart-tugging song by Elliott Smith.
The long Thanksgiving weekend (yes, I'm plowing through that back-blog) was mostly spent at my mom's house helping her do a little "spring cleaning". It was the first time, in several decades, that the house was given such focused maintenance-attention. Why so long? It's difficult to find a time when all three of her children were in a "throw-it-all-away" mood at once. What is certain is that we are all pack-rats. I'm a little surprised that I didn't find belly-button lint from when I was four tucked away in some dresser drawer.
My sentimentality is usually centered on small things: essays written in high school, or drawings from an art class. I have even kept a few favorite textbooks from gradeschool. I rarely feel a particular connection to something larger, like furniture. But, there was one thing in the house that I had a connection to: the red-felt pool table in the "bar room" in the basement.
My dad purchased the pool table from a pool hall and I played on it since before I could remember (longer, even, given the sad state of my memory). There was a time when I was frighteningly good at pool -- virtually unbeatable on an 8ft table. When I was too small to play for real I would roll the balls with my hand. In high school I could play pool for hours. My uncle Ralph, a pool shark in his own right, would teach me quite a bit, too. Often, and most happily, I played by myself on that pool table for hours at a time.
Some might remember, in college, I started up a pool club. I loved billiards and my "first love" was that pool table.
And this large thing was "slated" (no pun intended) for destruction this past Thanksgiving weekend. Now, it is easy to romanticize this past. The present reality was the pool table was a mess. It had also become my favorite workbench and had its share of battle scars from countless projects. Running my hand over the felt I could feel every wax stain, nick, felt-cut, and glue dollop. The table leaned slightly to the left. The ball return stuck on occaision and, at times, the ball collection bin would fall off the table entirely. It wasn't a bad decision to get rid of the pool table -- the thing was garbage. It was, however, a surprisingly sad one.
My sister had hired some haulers to come over and take away several large items from the basement... the pool table, a broken refridgerator, a broken freezer, and several old and not-sentimentally-valuable pieces of furniture. They had agreed that they could disassemble the pool table. For some odd reason, I wasn't comfortable with that thought. Under the guise of "saving money" I offered to break down the table myself (with the help of my sisters). If anyone was going to tear apart my table, it should be me.
After about 20 minutes the pool table was transformed into a mess of slate, MDF, and felt. When the haulers got there, I helped them carry it upstairs. The basement room seems much larger without the hulking mass in its center. I am sure, many years hence, the house will fetch a prettier penny because of the work we did on those days.
While everyone, not the least of which my mom, was very excited by the modernization and clean-up of her basement there was a part of me that recognized the effort as something else, something additional. It was a partial purging of my emotional investment in the house. The basement I grew up in, the basement where I had spent so much of my childhood, is no more.
Clearly this new basement will give to others a similar joy - but that is what it is now, a thing for others.
My sisters and I had a quick picture taken of the three of us with the pool table before it was destroyed. I'd post it here but we were all looking pretty ratty that day and I was told to publicly publish it only under pain of immediate death.
-Ed
The long Thanksgiving weekend (yes, I'm plowing through that back-blog) was mostly spent at my mom's house helping her do a little "spring cleaning". It was the first time, in several decades, that the house was given such focused maintenance-attention. Why so long? It's difficult to find a time when all three of her children were in a "throw-it-all-away" mood at once. What is certain is that we are all pack-rats. I'm a little surprised that I didn't find belly-button lint from when I was four tucked away in some dresser drawer.
My sentimentality is usually centered on small things: essays written in high school, or drawings from an art class. I have even kept a few favorite textbooks from gradeschool. I rarely feel a particular connection to something larger, like furniture. But, there was one thing in the house that I had a connection to: the red-felt pool table in the "bar room" in the basement.
My dad purchased the pool table from a pool hall and I played on it since before I could remember (longer, even, given the sad state of my memory). There was a time when I was frighteningly good at pool -- virtually unbeatable on an 8ft table. When I was too small to play for real I would roll the balls with my hand. In high school I could play pool for hours. My uncle Ralph, a pool shark in his own right, would teach me quite a bit, too. Often, and most happily, I played by myself on that pool table for hours at a time.
Some might remember, in college, I started up a pool club. I loved billiards and my "first love" was that pool table.
And this large thing was "slated" (no pun intended) for destruction this past Thanksgiving weekend. Now, it is easy to romanticize this past. The present reality was the pool table was a mess. It had also become my favorite workbench and had its share of battle scars from countless projects. Running my hand over the felt I could feel every wax stain, nick, felt-cut, and glue dollop. The table leaned slightly to the left. The ball return stuck on occaision and, at times, the ball collection bin would fall off the table entirely. It wasn't a bad decision to get rid of the pool table -- the thing was garbage. It was, however, a surprisingly sad one.
My sister had hired some haulers to come over and take away several large items from the basement... the pool table, a broken refridgerator, a broken freezer, and several old and not-sentimentally-valuable pieces of furniture. They had agreed that they could disassemble the pool table. For some odd reason, I wasn't comfortable with that thought. Under the guise of "saving money" I offered to break down the table myself (with the help of my sisters). If anyone was going to tear apart my table, it should be me.
After about 20 minutes the pool table was transformed into a mess of slate, MDF, and felt. When the haulers got there, I helped them carry it upstairs. The basement room seems much larger without the hulking mass in its center. I am sure, many years hence, the house will fetch a prettier penny because of the work we did on those days.
While everyone, not the least of which my mom, was very excited by the modernization and clean-up of her basement there was a part of me that recognized the effort as something else, something additional. It was a partial purging of my emotional investment in the house. The basement I grew up in, the basement where I had spent so much of my childhood, is no more.
Clearly this new basement will give to others a similar joy - but that is what it is now, a thing for others.
My sisters and I had a quick picture taken of the three of us with the pool table before it was destroyed. I'd post it here but we were all looking pretty ratty that day and I was told to publicly publish it only under pain of immediate death.
-Ed
posted by Ed at 11:31 PM
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