Gravity

For some months I have been aware that one of my chairs is falling apart. When I would grab the top of it to swing it to a different spot in the room, off would come 4 pieces: the top bar, 2 side poles and a decorative middle which has a gentle curve to it. I asked Richard about repairing the chair. He would ask me to produce some wood glue for him, which of course, I couldn’t.

So I bought some glue last week at Home Depot and decided that it is time for me to learn to repair my own broken furniture. I watched Catherine make repairs at the lake in the summer of 2018. I had lined up jobs from many previous years, some which seemed too complicated to do. Still, I couldn’t throw the old pieces of furniture out. One was a small side table that had a lovely marble insert as a decorative feature. I had brought that back from China and there was no way I could throw that out no matter how damaged it was.

And a small side story.
This is the day the three Johnson children played
Toss the Bean Bag.  By some strange chance
Betty's bean bags always scored points
and the bean bags of the others went "sideways".

This is Betty's victory cheer.

That summer I watched Catherine take wood glue, some clamps and a few bungee chords and just about everything I had lined up in my garage as being impossible to repair, got put back into my house, as good as new. Or at least as good as a repaired object can look, including that darling Chinese side table.

I asked Catherine if she had taken classes to do this. No. Necessity had been the mother of invention, she reported. Stuff falls apart at her house too, and that is where she learned all of her skills, though she did say that having watched Leo a few times at work with her things had given her the initial courage to try it on her own.

Here is the thing with my experiment fixing my chair. What can be that difficult about gluing the equivalent of three sticks into three holes in the seat of a wooden chair. And it wasn’t that hard to fill the holes in the seat of the chairs with glue. Nor to put the sticks in those holes. What I hadn’t counted on is the glue that I put in place in the bar that was to go across the top of the chair. For some reason, I had imagined it had the viscosity of peanut butter, even though that had not been the case with the glue in the lower holes. When I turned the bar upside down on the other three poles, the part gravity played with the glue was over-whelming to me. I had glue everywhere -- all over the seat of the chair, all over my hands, all over the side poles and all over the floor.

I put everything down and walked over to Richard’s house that Saturday morning saying, “I think I need help and I need it now.”

“Come on, Betty, I think we have to stop what we are doing, walk next door and help Grandmother,” he said.

And they did, even down to mopping up the glue on the floor.

Really, it was gravity that licked me.

Arta