“THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME” by Laura Dave

“I turn wood. That’s what I do for work. 

People usually make a face when I tell them this is my job (however I try to describe it), images of their high school woodshop class coming to mind. Being a woodturner is a little like that, and nothing like that.
I like to describe it as sculpting, but instead of sculpting clay, I sculpt wood.

I come by the profession naturally.
My grandfather was a woodturner–an excelent one, at that–and his work was at the center of my life for as far back as I can remember. He was at the center of my life for as far back as I can remember, having raised me mostly on his own.”

“My grandfather was stable and kind and he made me dinner every night and waited for me to finish dinner before he announced it was time to get up and read me stories before we went to sleep. And he always let me watch him work.

I loved watching him work. 
He’d start with an impossibly enormous piece of wood, moving it over a lathe, turning into something magical. Or, if it was less than magical, he would figure out how to start over again.
That was probably my favorite part of watching him work: when he would throw up his hands and say, <<Well, we’ve got to do this different, don’t we?>>. Then he’d go about finding a new way into what he wanted to create.

I’m guessing any psychologist worth her salt would say that it must have given me hope–that I must have thought my grandfather would help me do the same thing for myself. To start again.

But, if anything, I think I took comfort in the opposite.

Watching my grandfather work taught me that not everything was fluid. There were certain things that you hit from different angles, but you never gave up on. You did the work that was needed, wherever that work took you.”

Kindle, 2022