Communing with My Grandfathers

By Bobby Neal Winters

I want to make a wooden chair from two-by-fours, and I’ve started.  

I can see it in my head.  Getting from that mental picture and some eight foot long two by fours to the chairs is the task at hand.

The main barrier in the path is a process I’ve heard called, “Scooping out the butt.”

If you’ve ever sat for long on a perfectly flat piece of wood, you know that it becomes unpleasant after about five minutes.  I once attended a two-hour concert in the city of Irkutsk, Siberia at a Polish Catholic that had perfectly flat pews.  I have to believe that the God-hating communists were behind it.

In any case, in order to make a wooden seat comfortable, it is customary to make some sort of an accommodation for the tailbone.  If you look at a lot of wooden chairs, they have a pair of butt-cheeks carved right in them.

So, if I want to make a wooden chair, it follows that I am going to have to learn how “to scoop out the butt.”

My mother’s father, J.T. (not Knoll by the way), was a carpenter and my father’s father, Sam, carved.  

J.T. built houses.  He built the house I grew up in.  He did this when he was 70 years old.  I was always told that he never drew a thing, never put a thing on paper. He planned it all out in his head.  He ordered the wood, and, when he was done, he only had enough left over to make a picnic table.  It is arguable that he wanted to make the picnic table from the beginning.

As he lay dying in the nursing home, he was still building houses.  He was in that state into which the dying sometimes drift, reliving their past lives in a dream.  I remember having heard him call out, “Fourteen feet...you can’t sh*t me!”

And I am sure you couldn’t’ve.

Sam carved.  He whittled and he carved.  One whittles to pass the time.  One whittles to hone your skill.  One carves to make something.

Sam carved toys for my brother and me.  Whimsical creatures, dinosaurs, things that had only ever seen reality after he realized them in wood.  He would also carve himself fishing lures.

I used to whittle when I was a boy.  I had to stop because I was becoming a danger to myself.  I have a tendency to go off on reveries, to wander different places in my mind.  This is not a good trait in a whittler.

On one occasion, I looked down and I had cut up the right thigh of my brand new dress jeans.  On another occasion, I’d done the same, but this time I’d cut an inch-long incision in my own right thigh.  I probably should’ve gotten stitches, but I didn’t.  It’s been fifty years, and I still have the scar.

As I continue on my way down the rabbit hole of woodworking, I learn there is a continuum of those who work with wood.  The carpenter and the carver are two points on that continuum. To me, it seems that the furniture maker is at a sweet spot between the two points, and the chair I am working on proves that point perfectly.

To scoop out the butt, I’ve had to get some different tools, some different sorts of knives.

When I was a boy, I used a pocket knife to do my whittling. That 10-dollar pocket knife cut up two 30-dollar pairs of jeans.  Sam had had a pocket knife too, but some of my older cousins had bought him a woodcarving set that consisted of scalpel-like, which he did use for some of his more delicate work.  (He castrated an overly amorous dog on one occasion.)

I’ve obtained a tool called a gouge.  Think of it as a thin chisel that is curved around its longitudinal axis.  It is sharp.  The one I bought was shipped with two Band-Aids. It is a knife in the same way a chisel is a knife.

I am also using a box plane.  A plane, if you think about it a certain way, is just a knife that is held at a fixed, controlled angle. And I have a spokeshave.  A spokeshave is a plane that has a short base.  I’d never heard of one before the new year, and now I own two of them.  If I’d had one when I was a boy, I’d never have given up whittling. 

I’ve worked on the seat a couple or three nights this week, and I’ve about got the butt scooped.  

In stages I will put the legs together and then the back.  Along the way, I will be communing with both of my grandfathers.  And I hope to have a chair when it is done.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )