This won't mean much to the unsentimental and to tell you the truth I'm not sure what it means to me and how I'm going to deal with it. It has to do with my family dinner table constructed in 1960 with rock maple by the Vilas company.

It's been part of my life since I can remember. It's hard smooth surface was perfect for my mom to roll out pie shells or stamp out a couple of dozen biscuits. I did most of my homework at that table and Dad usually nodded off to sleep reading his paper while the old cat slumbered over the head lines.


After we moved to Ottawa, my father nodded off and lit a portion of the table on fire with his cigarette. He was dying of cancer sixteen ways to hell, but he read the paper while smoking his Export A with Maxi the 25lb cat covering the headlines. The fire was put out, my dad died and I took my old cat to the humane society to be put out of it's misery. Yet, that table remained, and followed me since.


My mother refinished it using brown paint to hide the burn marks, but in later years I stripped it and tried to bring out that natural maple glow. I found the blackened burn marks and removed about 90% of the damage but left just a bit of where my father would nod off to sleep. 


At the time I had little knowledge of furniture refinishing and brought that table to a  sanded 600 grit finish before lacquering it with five coats.  The wood was so shiny that no finish would stick to it. I spent many hours refinishing it and now it remains a white elephant in my home because eBaum's sucks so bad when I posted the story, after thoughtfully putting it together, it  got deleted.