Popular Woodworking 2000-02 № 113, страница 68

Out of the Woodwork

I

Coffin Confession

You'd think that building coffins would be a profession with steady business. My descent into the industry almost put me six feet under.

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In a woodworking magazine last year I saw an ad which I'll paraphrase, "Looking for plans for a coffin. Have you any?" The actual phrasing was not so prim and Cotswoldean. It was more Pennsylvanian. Specifically, "Bensalem-esque." I've got a grand ear for the printed word.

I wrote to the guy and asked, "Why the heck do you want to build a coffin?" He wrote back, and sure enough his response had been shuttled through the Bensalem, Penn., post office. The respondent's name was Irvin. (I knew at once that the writer was an old fellow, otherwise his name would have been "Hunter" or "Branch.") He told me that he made wooden objets d'art (this is the only French expression I know, and it means, curiously enough, "objects of art") that he sold in the crafts shop owned by his lady friend, Babs. Irv told me that he and she were kind of up in years (I'm a hard one to surprise), and that Babs had such an affinity for his woodworking that she had asked him to construct a coffin for her, the one she would actually be buried in.

By the time I'd written Irv, some helpful soul had mailed him plans for a simple pine coffin.

When Irv forwarded me a copy of these plans, why, my eyes were filled with dollar signs. I immediately decided to found

the McCormick Coffin Co. and to get rich quick by selling modest, inexpensive pine coffins to extremely mortal, chintzy people like me. People who might employ their coffins as blanket chests or bookcases until the Angel of Death reveals his or her or its stale breath and bony finger to them.

I describe myself as "extremely mortal" because I'm sick much too often and am only about four years from being 50, the age when my father died. His mother told me that our line of McCormick men almost always croak in their 50s, and boy oh boy that really sucks a thumb or two.

I also worry a lot about everything, which isn't good. And I smoke like a chimney. And in my middle age, given to various work and life mistrials to date, I am an apprentice bricklayer as well. Most bricklayer apprentices are about 20 and built like tanks. I am a gray-templed old endomorph. The work is so rough sometimes that even my hallowed teacher in Local 1's brickie school steered his sons away from the trade. And the day before last Thanksgiving, what did I do but fall off a 13' scaffold and land flat on my back. I spent a miserable day in a stupid hospital. Extremely mortal, I'm telling you.

Back to coffins.

I built me a prototype, and I made the mistake of telling the kid at the lumber-

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yard what I was making out of the pine I so carefully selected. He asked if I were a mortician, and I noticed he kind of kept his distance.

Ready for my orders to pour in, I placed ads in three newspapers and rented a post office box. For this effort I received but one inquiry, and nary an order. So I gave up. I'm not much of a businessman.

Yet in the basement sits the box I'll probably be buried in, and I like the looks of the thing — even if its detractors call it an "extended cedar chest." It's well made (although with an interior dimension of 6' it's a little tight for me with shoes on) and therefore, by law, no funeral home in the state can refuse to admit it. Ha-ha.

The manila rope handles look especially humble, but unfortunately they're quite adequate. I've been thinking about razoring through them halfway for some prospective funereal fun. Frankly, I'm too staid for such nonsense.

So here's to good long lives for decent people, and to their modest coffins which shall not be underground anytime soon. pw

John McCormick of Detroit, Mich., recently gave up bricklaying to begin his own concrete business, which we understand is far more successful than his woodworking business. John is a regular contributor of illustrations to this magazine.