My oak table

When I was growing up, my house had in it all manner of oak furniture and paneling. Perhaps this is why I never recognized that type of wood when I was an adult — wood that was neither blandly pale like pine, or dark and shiny. I thought of this while looking at the oaken table upon which I did my homework every school-night from first grade up until I grew into a moody teenager and retreated to a room in the attic.

Etched onto the surface of that oaken table is a cigarette burn, which appeared mysteriously after one or another of my parents’ parties. Its edges are worn smooth by my having gouged away at all of the brittle parts of the burn when I was supposed to be working on my algebra homework. Trying to etch a design in it also got my parents angry. At least they were handy, though. My oaken homework table and wooden chair were located in the narrow bar-room that my father had had furnished in the style of a bar from the 1700’s, including a wooden grille that could, theoretically, be pulled down over the bar and locked up at night. It came complete with an antique lock which my father once assured me could actually lock. On one side of the bar-room was the hallway; the opposite door led into the den, where the TV was, and the huge shallow fireplace, and where all of our family life, such as it was, was lived in between the time I got home from school and my bed-time.

My father sat in his easy chair watching television in the evenings, quite visible to me at my table, available to me for help on math. He had gotten me through arithmetic, and even quite adept at that. Later on, I went to him once with a question about algebra. He couldn’t understand the problem, but refused to let go of it. After a while, I began to protest that I could do it myself, let me have another try at it. He wouldn’t let go of it. Shortly after that, I started regularly doing my homework in my own room.