My friend Josh Stauffer and I had a little book club of our own over a well-researched and cogent book called Garden Spot: Lancaster County, the Old Order Amish, and the Selling of Rural America.
The author, David Walbert, was gracious enough to meet us for coffee two years ago. We talked German culture, smart-growth development, and county history.
I met up with David yesterday while he as visiting his mother in Quarryville. He currently lives in Raleigh, NC.
We met up at my fave spot, Square One, and he described his chair making, a fine compliment to his work of writing.
David was OK with me snapping a picture. I always feel a bit imposing when I ask people to pose, and so I rush the shoots. You can see that David is a jolly soul by his laughing smile, but I might have done him the favor of capturing his eyes open.
He confesses to living in the 1850’s, a time in which he is setting a novel that he’s been working on over the years. It’s also about the time frame when people made chairs by hand, as he does, as evidenced by his work on Instagram profile: theneighborhoodjoiner.
Did you know why hand-made chairs were painted? I thought it was just because summer camp counselors needed something to do with energized children.
Actually, those chairs (and his) are constructed with wood pieces that match the particular part’s purpose.
For instance, some woods are more easily bent, others are more suitable for bearing weight. Don’t ask me which. It has something to do with hard and soft woods?
Without the paint, the chairs would look cobbled together, not uniform.
The itinerary of my study leave feels a bit like a cobbled together chair in the making.
At the moment, the year stretching out before me looks more like the “aircraft carrier” my brothers nailed together out of scraps of wood in our basement. As a five year old, I was impressed to see it coming together.
I have a good friend in Raleigh, where David now lives, and said I’d hook them up. David and Ben seem like they’d hit it off. Both are literate, humorous, and thoughtful, and have a background in campus lawn games such as Frisbee.
I rode my scooter back home to commence work on my next Road Show email called “Why, Nashville?”
As I was typing, I got an unexpected call from Ben in Raleigh. 🧐
I confessed that I had just been gossiping about him to David and they perhaps they could meet up a craft fair in a town called Fuquay-Varina. That’s a cobbled name, right there, if you ask me.
Ben and I discussed my tentative visit to Raleigh in late October, and by the time I hung up, it was no longer so tentative.
He’s eager to throw me into the lion’s den: A gathering of hungry thinkers and artists to discuss my book (he has 12 copies), a possible sermon in his small church, and hopefully a public Forum to show what The Row House does.
That’ll be a lot of fun, but only if Ben keeps his promise to cheer me on from the sidelines, pom-poms and all. Who does he think I am? He’s the one with the PhD! I may be setting picks for him to take some jump shots.
I take heart in these connections of friends-new-and-old as something more than sociological bugs in the system. They may well be that, on one level, but what if they are also signs of a providential Craftsman?
Right now, the chair is under construction. I’m doing a lot of envisioning, bending, gluing, nailing, re-nailing, waiting, cussing, removing, placing, and waiting some more as it comes together.
Yet so much is out of my control, thankfully.
I’m not sure how the paint fits in this analogy, so I’ll stop for now and get back to work.