Preterition

The weather – with the winter’s wretched snow and winds and this past waterlogged weekend – has finally broken. It’s supposed to be up to 60 degrees and sunny tomorrow, which means that when I get home from campus, I’ll have the chance to take M.R.’s old wooden swivel chair out on the back deck and begin the pleasant tactile labor of refinishing.

M.R. was my dad’s dad. I don’t remember him at all: he died when I was a year old. His initials are my dad’s and my own, but he never used his full name, Montgomery Roger. (I like the tradition of those initials and the common middle name, and I hope I might extend that tradition – “Morgan,” I think, has a nice sound to it, plus that added gender-indeterminacy factor.) In fact, when M.R. was dating my grandmother, she finally told him that she wouldn’t marry any man she couldn’t refer to by name – so he told her to call him “Pete.” In family folklore, he’s still M.R.; when the house he built where my cousins Zach and Toby now live creaks and settles at night, Zach says it’s “Old M.R. walkin around.” I do see him as restless: as a child, he witnessed the murder of his own father in an alcohol-fueled fight over a woman, and from most accounts, he was a man with a lot of troubles on his mind. They’re troubles I’d hope to distance from my own personal history, but it’s a funny thing about family and history that you can’t distance yourself too much, since it’s that history that informs who you are, that grounds you. So I want to keep those things close, as well.

Hence the chair. It’s a heavy, beautifully dark and curved and simple old thing, from when he gave up farming and set up a tag and title business. Tomorrow I’ll take mineral spirits and fine 000 steel wool and clean it up, working (gently) down to the original finish. Then it’s softer superfine 0000 to apply a couple coats of the BriWax red-tinted combination of beeswax and carnauba, polishing with the grain in small circles, and finally using a clean scrap of flannel wrapped around index and middle fingers to buff it out to a deep gloss.