Popular Woodworking 2008-11 № 172, страница 60

■ Out of the Woodwork ■

BY RICHARD MALLARD

Pink Lemonade

An old piece of MDF brings back happy memories.

"Happiness isn't some thing you experience; it's somethingyou remember."

— Oscar Levant

I

hat quote knocked around in my head for days. You know ihe feeling. A little voice is screaming the answer to a question from the basement of your brain and it takes a good night's sleep or some distraction to hear it clearly. To a large extent woodworking serves this function. Concentrating on the repetitive strokes of a plane iron on a sharpening stone leaves a lot of brain power to do other things.

So what else is it about woodworkingthat makes us happy? One weekend the answer came to me toward the end of a month-long project. Several years ago my wife and .1 decided to take advantage of the housing-price bubble in California and build an addition toourhome. She needed an office. Our teenag- I ers needed a recreation room. Out aging parents might someday need I an eldercare room that could double as a guest room for now. And 1 wanted a shop. We love our neighborhood and didn't want to move, so we built on.

At first, the shop became a combo faux-officeand paint room. The garage continued to serve as a weekend woodshop. Every th i ng on wheels and both cars back in by Sunday night wasthe promise. That worked well until a woodworking uncle got senile and I became the recipient of a 20" planer, an 18" band saw and a big dust collector. My car lost out for a year. Meanwhile, the hand-tool drumbeat of Christopher Schwarz, Adam Cherubini, Rob Cosman and others advocating safer, dust-reduced and less noisy shop practices finally got to me - it was time for a change.

The paint shop part of my faux-office was a 7' x 11' space. With a clever plan thisspace transformed duringa month into a hand-tool shop. A newly cut-in window, tonguc-and-groovc knotty pine paneling made with 19th-century moulding planes purchased off the Internet,and my Brazilian hammockhanging between two hooks for the occasional nap, made the room finally habitable.

It also smells good.

Now we come to the happiness part. One of the last things was tackling the accumulation of wood left over from past projects. You know, t he corner of i he garage t hat has cut-offends that are too big to just throw away. Over the

years, this pile has taken on a life of its own. We call it Fred. It was time for Fred lo lose some weight. So one Sunday, with strains of Bach and Handel playingin the background, I began to do something about Fred.

As I worked through a warm August afternoon, sorting Fred intouseablesand throw-aways, I came to a good-sized piece of M DF and reached down and pulled it out of the pile as a probable useable. Turning it over, however. my throat got a lump and I just stared at the piece. In large felt-pen letters was the word "Lemonade." Nailed across the top was a remnant of a chessboard made long ago. In a flood of memories, I recalled that my daugh

ter had made the sign when she was 8 years old. She had left it as a legacy for me to enjoy years later.

"A&M's Pink Lemonade" stand lasted only-one summer's afternoon. Two little girls had the time of their lives using Dad's tools and materials to hammer, draw and imagine all of the money they were going to make. After all. Pink Lemonade at 25 cents, Candy only a "peny," and free ice would be a real deal for all of the thirsty commuters traveling past our front yard.

My daughter has always had an entrepreneurial bent. Her preschool resume includes collecting trash from around the house tosell to people who didn't have any ; ' goingaround the neighborhood offering to draw pictures for ₍ people for cash; and (i nal ly her , desi re to be a country-western , singer with the stage name Gin-, ger Ale. You haven't lived until

you have a daughter, i 1 ler handmade sign became , he finishing touch for my lit-, :le faux-office shop. Someday, maybe I'll sell it fora million dollars on eBay. That is what those memories are worth to me.

And, nowl know Oscar was right. Happiness is something you remember. And that is a reason to love woodworking. You can make somethi ng for others ihat really evokes hap-piness. Perhaps someday, my daughter will find some little thing her ol' Dad made that will fetch her as many happy memories as that "Lemonade" sign brings me. PW

Richard is a businessman, educator and former flight instructor. Seven years ago, he rediscovered woodworking, more than five decades removed from his 8th-grade woodshop classes.

96 ■ Popular Woodworking November 2008

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