The Altar

Standing at my Grandfather’s workbench has the same effect on me as when I bury my face deep into my dog’s fur. Lost in a moment of comfort and bliss.

We go back a long way, that bench and I.

It was Grandpa’s altar. He a supplicant. Worshiping for many hours daily, to the Gods of creative woodcraft. As an older, retired guy, he became a box, bench, and chair artist par excellence, and a prolific producer of creative wood art.

I can still hear the pitch of his router. The timbre now high and intense. The smell of my childhood wood-burning kit grown up mixed with that of fresh cut wood blowing out of his shop in clouds of sawdust. You would think he had a logging crew in there felling trees. He guided his router over hand drawn outlines on Teak or Mahogany, cutting in the initial rough patterns. They were designs he had first seen in Mexico as a boy growing up in San Antonio and traveling South across the Rio Grande with his family. The patterns he copied have been decorating Mexican chests, boxes, and massive wood church doors since the Spanish conquers brought them from Europe.

He was in his world in that shop and I was in mine outside. Running lose on 325 acres of woods that I knew so well. At that time, I was the only human in the world who could be airdropped anywhere on that land, and I would immediately know exactly where I was. My days were spent with a 22 rifle and a fishing pole, down at the pond, in the rowboat, on the dock…hiking up to Picnic Rock, a place to stop and rest the horses 100 years before, along the side of an old stagecoach road. Wagon wheels had cut deep ruts through the woods from Pennsylvania to Tennessee and beyond.

I thought maybe God had used his own router to cut those parallel lines.

Late in the day, coming full circle, I could hear that router screaming even before the crowded trees stepped back to let me pass. Encircling an area of the main house, cottage, garages and Grandpa’s shop, tall oaks and poplars stood guard.

As was our routine, I announced myself with loud banging on the open garage door, breaking him out of a noisy concentration. Grandpa would stop and put his tools down. Hands waving at the wood smoke still hovering in the air, we spoke of my day, the discoveries and wonder, a huge soft-shell turtle in the lake and the wildcats born in Charles’s deserted barn.

He showed me his wood panels, experimental pieces. Prototypes for the sides of box and bench that were yet to be brought out of the wood behind him.

He knew that his pieces, when finished, would be his legacy, every bit as much as I was myself, standing there, weighing my own responsibility.

I marveled at his creations, pieces that would ride with me throughout my life, and beyond. No one would remember or care about his years as a chemist with Standard Oil, or as a professor, teaching at The University of Virginia. No, it was the work he was creating when half blind in his mid-eighties that would outlast us all.

That’s how he built everything, to last.

I’ve toured and sung in most of the major cathedrals of England, touched their altars and felt the decorative carved panels. None affected me more deeply, more spiritually, than when I lay my hands on his workbench today. I feel the rough grain, my hands slipping devoutly over his.

He built that workbench first. His altar. He laid hands on it with reverence, a supplicant, just as I do today.