Bringing Home the Duncan Phyfe: Epilogue

How Things Turned Out

"Romance is hope in story form...the thread that darns the gap between what is and what we dreamt would be." T.K.

When Duncan Phyfe was making his furniture in the early 19th Century, embroidery was a craft enjoyed by women who lived in homes suited for his style of furniture. This etching suggests a life of leisurely homemaking and the fact that somewhere beyond this room, there were servants doing the harder work.
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There was another type of needle craft practiced (but perhaps not enjoyed) by women of that day: darning socks. Very few people darn socks anymore. Even back in 1951 my mom had never darned a sock in her life... until she married Dad. "Why throw out a whole sock when only the heel has a hole," he'd say. So Mom, of course, learned to darn socks in her "spare time" as one, two, three, four, and eventually five children were added to her life of leisurely homemaking.
[Dad would have considered sock darning more practical than embroidery, but there's a place for both in life. By the way, if my mom had taken up embroidery, like the lady in the picture above, Dad would not have sat and watched (and he most surely would not have crossed his legs like that).]

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When I was a kid, Mom still darned our socks, and though I now appreciate that labor of love, back then I hated wearing those darned socks. I could always feel the mend down there in my shoe. But Mom did another kind of darning--a kind done so skillfully I didn't know it at the time--she filled all sorts of gaps in our lives through the years.

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Eventually, Mom quit darning socks, but the other sort of darning never stopped. She kept our home happy whenever life "wore through." Call it hope; call it romance; but Mom made us feel blessed to be exactly where we were in time and space even when times were hard and space was cramped. She knew enough about darning to know that the secret is not pulling the gap shut--it's filling it in with newly woven threads. Romance is hope in story form... the thread that darns the gap between what is and what we dreamt would be.

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Like any good story, family life is rich in character, setting, theme, and, yes, conflict—both seen and unseen.
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My Mom is a romantic—I got a double portion from her. My Dad was more of a realist (and a bit of a pragmatist when it came to problem solving)—I have plenty of that in me, too. Being a blend of both has made life interesting, and for that I am forever indebted to them both. I think it has been easier to be a blend of Mom and Dad’s traits than it was for them to manage the purer traits alone. Until recently, I never thought of my parents' marriage as an endearing and enduring clash of romance and realism. Take the Duncan Phyfe for example.

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Mom wanted the table in hopes of bringing a hint of the romantic past to her home. If not the long past of the 19th Century… then the near past (and security) of her childhood home. She knew the feeling she wanted the table to bring to their apartment but did not give much thought to the actual task of getting it there. Dad, on the other hand, wanted to make Mom happy, but was immediately faced with reality. To him, the table did not represent a feeling. It was an object. It had weight and dimensions that were in conflict with both their small apartment and the trunk of his car. From the start, the table presented a problem to be solved, and solving such problems was very satisfying to Dad. Problems are challenges—dragons if you will—and slaying dragons is what husbands do (even those so romantically challenged that they would never phrase it in such terms).
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This Duncan Phyfe tale was the story of my parents’ life before my siblings and I became a part of it. Having said that, I’ll briefly tell about the days and years that followed with us and the Duncan Phyfe, because to whatever extent this felt like a story, those reading it may wish to know how things turned out.

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Before I proceed with this epilogue, however, we must look closely at the above print of the embroidering. If we could look at the bottom of the lady's tapestry, we’d see the shapes and colors roughly in place. We’d probably “get the picture,” but we’d also see the awkward knots and frustrated tangles and a hundred loose ends.

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When it comes time to frame and display the finished work, we tend to put the good side out. Is that hypocritical? No more than combing your hair in the morning. Need I say that this story of my parents’ first year has been something like that? I’ve spun the yarn and chosen which side of the fabric to show, but I know—we all know—life is far from perfect, my parents’ marriage was far from perfect, our home was far from perfect—and the same is true for all their descendents. It hasn't always been a pretty picture. Sometimes it was more darned than decorative, but the fabric held together. There's something to be said for that.

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It’s good sometimes to look at the back of the embroidery, to remember all the work and imperfections and knots and loose ends that are just below the surface of our better days. But it’s also good to cherish those better days and to smile upon the picture as it was meant to be seen from above.

And now on to those loose ends...


Part I: Flipping Houses to get a Home

Virg Palmer and my Dad were more than friends. They became business partners. They were both hard-working, hands-on, can-do home builders in disguise as telephone repairmen. One day over lunch came up this idea:
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“I’ll help you build your house. You help me build mine. Agreed? Deal.” Handshake.
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Virg owned a vacant neighborhood lot. Dad had been “saving up” for a dream and had a few thousand dollars at the credit union. Pooling their cash and collateral, the two men built a spec-house together and sold it—each more than doubled their investment in a year’s time. They worked well together, and purchased two “fixer-upper” houses to “flip. That’s how Dad got enough money to buy the house on Lapeer Avenue, which had an upstairs apartment that they rented out. In no time at all Mom and Dad went from being tenants to being landlords. But Lapeer was just a house to live in while Dad built their “dream house.”

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Dad and Virg each bought an acre lot on Atkins Road outside the city limits. Together, they built the Palmer’s house first, and then began ours in 1959. This was the dream house Dad was “saving up” for, and with the help of his friend it was within reach. We lived for one year in that unfinished house. [It was this house on Atkins where the boy woke in "Kept."]

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Part II: The Duncan Phyfe in Roseville, Michigan
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Our family's journey took a dramatic turn in 1961 when Dad took a promotion at Bell that relocated us to the suburbs of Detroit. Roseville to be exact (just a few blocks from Gratiot Avenue). This was to be a temporary address until Dad could find some land on which to build “Dream House II,” but in fact we lived there 14 years.

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(I wrote about some of these years in a story called "Mixed Milk.") Mom loved the burbs. There were lots of neighbors to talk to over the back yard-fence or on the porch. A borrowed cup of sugar or loaf of bread was just a few steps away. It was very much like Forest and Riverview. Dad, however, felt fenced in and never took his eye from their once-shared dream of raising the five of us in the country. In 1968 he bought 14 acres on 23 Mile Road [a few miles east of Gratiot Avenue]. We called it “the property,” it took several years to develop before we could build the home of our final move.)
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During those fourteen years in Roseville, we ate at the Formica table in the kitchen. The Duncan Phyfe was down in the rec-room basement just outside the laundry room. It stayed in that spot for over ten years. When we had Thanksgiving at our house, the cousins ate there, but the rest of the time it was used to sort laundry, or cleared off to play board games or make large puzzles. We built science and art projects on it through the years.

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But the most fun thing we did with the Duncan Phyfe was making "tents." Sometimes my brothers and I (Kathy may have joined in, too) along with some of the neighborhood boys would get that crazy urge to build a huge tent in the basement. None of the other moms would allow it to happen in their house, but our mom was always cool about spontaneous creative "bubBENtures." [She always called our childhood adventures "bubBENtures" because that's the way my brother Paul used to say the word when he was little.]
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We'd open both of the drop-leafs of the Duncan Phyfe, drape blankets all around it, and then add all the other card tables and blankets we could find until it was a sprawling Bedouin labyrinth. It was while spending hours under the Duncan Phyfe, that I became familiar with the unique design of the pedestal and characteristic wooden "banana peel" legs. They were not ideal for the "tent" because they took up the center of the biggest "room," but we worked around them as best we could. Then we'd drag in our sleeping bags to spend the night in our home within our home. Mom would come downstairs and crawl in one end until she found us. Then she'd embarrass us by chirping, "Isn't this cozy!"

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Cozy is exactly what it was of course, but no boy would be caught dead using the word cozy-- at least not in front of his friends. Cozy is a Mom word. In fact, I believe that the feeling of coziness stems from our pre-natal state. It is a remnant of fetal feng shui. Mom was the Queen of Cozy. She could make anything cozy--a blanket on the beach, an umbrella on a rainy day, a camping tent in the woods, the whole family on the couch during a scary movie. Things became officially cozy by proclamation of Mom. When she said it, it was true, and with her help it was true of every place we ever called home.

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Part III: How Things Turned Out for the Duncan Phyfe

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Eventually the Duncan Phyfe was marred and scratched and scrolled on by us kids, but the most interesting scar was a large water stain that we did not make. Mom heard that if she kept her Christmas poinsettia in a dark basement until the following winter, it would bloom again. All she had to do was keep it watered. So for a few months Mom kept watering the thing down in the basement.

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The quietest demands of life are sometimes forgotten, and it’s easy to forget a poinsettia in June. One summer day, Mom saw the leafless dried poinsettia wrapped in bright red foil behind a pile of dirty clothes. She felt bad to have abandoned it and worse when she lifted the lifeless pot and saw the white blotch tattooed into the mahogany. Twenty years before, she may have cried, but now forty-something she sighed and shrugged it off, having learned long ago that elegance is over-rated, and life is far more life-like than our dreams.

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No matter really. By then the Duncan Phyfe was little more than a horizontal surface. One day soon after, in fact, the weight of all the piled up board games and puzzles and laundry was just too much. No one remembers exactly how it happened… but the table was found toppled with one of the wooden banana peel legs broken right off.

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Dad put the broken table in the back of the old utility van we used as a truck and hauled it to the barn out at “the property.” You may recall from other pages that we built the barn from logs we cleared from that land. It was a cabin of sorts with room for the tractor and tools inside. We sometimes over-nighted there just for fun as we spent weekends improving the land, bridging the creek, digging the well, and building the house.
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Just as it had done in 1951, the Duncan Phyfe presented Dad with a problem to be solved. He knew the pedestal table, as designed, would never bear much weight, so he did what any inventive, realistic, pragmatic back-woodsman-carpenter would do: he amputated the entire pedestal and bolted 2-by-6 boards to each corner. It looked awful, but is was very sturdy. The barn needed a functional table that didn’t take up much space, one that could be opened up to eat a quick lunch or to sharpen the chain saw blades. This was perfect.
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The funny thing is… our family ate more meals at that Duncan Phyfe in the barn than in all our other homes put together. We’d be working hard on some project with Dad, and then about an hour after noon, Mom would show up with a hot meal in a picnic basket. Dad would take a rag and wipe off the saw dust, or the chain saw oil, or metal shavings or whatever debris was left behind from the last odd job on the table. Mom would spread a table cloth—she liked to make things homey…as much as Dad liked to make them sturdy—and we’d sit down, say grace, and dig in.
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There we were among the ladders and axes and wheelbarrows, sitting around the very same table that Dad carted home behind the ’39 Ford back in 1951. In all those eat-and-get-back-to-work meals, I don’t remember the story of the table ever coming up, and I never brought it up. I’d heard the story by then, but the significance of such things had not settled in. There’s a huge difference between knowing something happened and fully understanding the story, the human part, the part that reminds us how it feels to live as life plays out, the part that foreshadows how circumstances come full circle.

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Some may find it sad that after all the table went through it ended up in a barn looking so hard-used, but it makes me smile. The table had served its original purpose—it gave Mom hope when she wondered if she could ever make a house a home. Then after twenty years it was finally in a setting that didn’t require matching chairs.

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The table is a living testament to the romance and reality we call marriage. With or without a table, we're all of us "bringing home the Duncan Phyfe." We're bringing it home each time we see a longing in our loved one's eyes and do our best to meet it; each time we strive to keep the windows of communication open; each time we learn to smile at what frustrates us; each time we make room for things kept beyond their need; each time we salvage what we can from what's been broken. We're bringing home the Duncan Phyfe each time we look back and see that life, perhaps, has not turned out the way we thought it would... but we can embrace the good and bad, the pain and pleasure, the regret and hope... and find joy in living with the way things stand in the end. .

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Post Script: How Things Turned Out For Us

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Still against the idea of a mortgage, and with three kids in college at the same time, Dad had his hands full finishing that last dream house, but we built it ourselves from the foundation to the chimney, learning all the trades from Dad as we went: masonry, electrical, plumbing, roofing—everything. Finally the house was done enough to live in. During the first semester of my sophomore year in college, my family moved in. When I came home for Christmas in 1975, it was to that new house, where Mom still lives today. It was not yet finished. It would not be truly finished for years, but Mom had added her touches, and stepping through the door that cold December night with my suitcase in hand… it already felt like home.

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All through those growing-up years, these places remained an integral part of our lives... my grandma's house, Palmer Park, the beach we walked to under the Fort Gratiot Lighthouse, Blue Water Bridge, and Pine Grove Park. Grandma moved out of the house on Forest and Riverview (just a block from Gratiot) after Grandpa Spencer died in 1975. (My Great Grandfather had died a couple years before.) But Grandma Spencer, my mom's mom, celebrated her 97th birthday last July. We had a big party at Pine Grove Park. It was like old times.

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I can never go there without staring out at the cold blue water of the St. Clair and remembering all the times we swam there and how my father used to swim across and back, and how Mom would meet him downstream. The huge oaks under which they shared summer lunches in ’51 are still there with their spangled shade. They're bigger I suppose by more than 50 rings, Trees are always bigger than before, but with oaks… it’s hard to tell.

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I said at the beginning that on February 10, 1951, my folks began "...the longest journey of their lives. This is the case every time a bride and groom drive away from the place where whispered vows and steeple bells ring true." Marriage itself is not a journey--life is the journey--marriage is the commitment to travel it together 'til death do us part.

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That's Mom and Dad at Pine Grove Park in the summer of 1994, four years after their 40th Wedding Anniversary. He wore that crew cut all his life. That's the Blue Water Bridge spanning the St. Clair River to Canada in the background. (A second bridge was added in 1996.)

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Mom and Dad enjoyed skating and dancing together through the years. On April 1, 1995, they went out for dinner and a dance at the VFW. They both looked as fit as they do in this picture. After an enjoyable evening and one last dance, Dad experienced a heart attack and was gone. A few days later we laid him to rest at Lakeside Cemetery in Port Huron a block from Gratiot Avenue. [Now do you see why I called that avenue they drove their wedding night "the byway of their life"?] From that quiet spot, it's just a short walk to the cold blue water of Lake Huron at the mouth of the St. Clair.

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In 1998, my mom went to the Class of '48's 50th reunion. She had no date so my Uncle Bob, dad's married brother, escorted her for the evening. (He's a year younger but went to the same school and new many of the people there.) That night, Mom met an old friend from the days before this Duncan Phyfe story began. A few years later they married. If you want to read a story about the funny providential twists life sometimes takes, read their story here. Bob is a retired photographer. He helped me with some of the pictures for this story. [For more go here and scroll down to "Visiting Home" April 1, 2006.]
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.......... “The greatest thing you’ll ever learn
.......... Is just to love and be loved in return…”

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