The Woodpecker So I've finally gotten around to creating a Flickr set of my father's woodworking projects.

→[More:]This really isn't any comprehensive photo collection as he's made a LOT of items over the years, but just photos of things he's made for me, some photos I got off the net of stuff he's entered in competitions and shows, and a few photos I got off my niece's Facebook page. I hope to add more as time goes by. His work is all the more impressive when one considers the fact that he's working around a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis. He is limited in some of the things he can make. Some items such as jewelry would be what he calls "too fiddly" for him to make, and it slows him down, but otherwise it's not holding him back much. He designs almost all of his own work except for the occasional custom-made piece, and his work has a definite mid-century modern aesthetic. But what can one expect from a man who thought the fifties were the best decade ever and who doesn't like any music made after 1980 or so.

My father's woodworking activities are incredibly important to him. He's obsessed with wood. Whenever he and my mother travel anywhere he brings back some samples of wood, such as some pieces of old whiskey barrels from Scotland. He can discourse on wood and trees for hours on end if he can find someone who will listen that long (usually, he can't, at least among his family, and can you blame us).

And although he is normally a very easygoing, unassuming man, he's a total prima donna about his woodworking. He just loves to get compliments on it, and stews over any perceived slight. One time he entered five pieces of his work in to the Woodstock Wood Show here in Ontario. Four of the items won first place ribbons, but the fifth didn't place at all. He sulked about it, saying, "Nobody likes it. Well, I do!"

He also affects a faux modesty about his work that fools no one. He likes to say he's not a real woodworker, but a woodpecker. One time he asked me if I wanted one of the wooden checkerboards he'd recently made. Of course I did, so he offered me the choice of a number he'd made, and then suggested I pick out a second for a good friend of mine, adding, "But only if you think she wants it. She might not want it. Oh, you think she'll want it? You're really sure? I don't know. She might not want it. Bring it back if she doesn't want it."

When I went to my friend's house and proffered the checkerboard to her with a heavily ironic, "My dad sent you this, but you should only take it if you're sure you like it. He doesn't want to burden you with stuff you don't want." My friend said, in the same tone, "Oh, I will try to live with it," meanwhile looking overjoyed and as though she could barely restrain herself from lunging at me and grabbing the board.

Dad also tends to get upset over work he's produced and doesn't like. One time he insisted on taking back an hourglass he'd made for me, offering me in its place my choice of a number of others he'd more recently made. He took apart the original one and remade it, though I thought it was fine, but he claimed he could no longer stand the sight of it when he visited me. I have a games table that he made that serves as my kitchen table, and he absolutely hates it now, says I'm not supposed to tell anyone it was his work.

The one thing he made that he is most upset about is a coffee table he made for the family back sometime in the 1960s. It wasn't really a woodworked piece (he only really began to acquire the high level of skill he has now in his late fifties). It had a plain rectangular top overlaid with faux wood formica and with pre-made wooden legs attached. One day when I was about four I was running through the house and fell and hit my head on the edge of this table. I gashed open my temple just above my left eyebrow. I consider myself lucky as the same blow an inch below or to the left would have destroyed my left eye or killed me. I had to get stitches, and now I have a very faint, hairline white scar there that's maybe an inch or so long. No one has ever noticed it of their own accord, and even I forget it's there 99% of the time. But Dad has never gotten over it, and that table is The Table That Must Not Be Named. (Incidentally, IKEA is The Company That Must Not Be Named. Total four-letter word.)

Dad felt those formica edges were too sharp to be safe, especially with children around, and that he should have known better, and he's never forgiven himself for making it. Which is uncalled for. My mother never blamed him, nor did I. I didn't even know he made the table until I casually mentioned it one day a few years ago and he freaked out. There were eight of us who grew up with that table, and there was just that one accident.

Last summer, at my parents' 50th wedding anniversary celebration, he and I were watching a video slide show of family pics (which, by the way, made us all look as though we did nothing but open presents at Chrismastime and have birthday parties and play in the snow in winter). A photo of our old living room appeared featuring a bunch of us piled on the couch, and Dad suddenly snarled, "There's that table."

Dad has always hoped someone else in the Swan family would get into woodworking so he'd have someone to talk shop with, but although we are very much a family of people who enjoy working with our hands, no one else has taken up that particular medium. I've always considered it a bonus whenever someone I was dating was into woodworking. My dad has never been friendly to anyone I've brought home, but if I bring home a woodworker he might not be able to fight the feeling.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy your look at my father's work.