The Table

We spent the entire afternoon putting together the dining room table. I’d been waiting for weeks for it to arrive. For months, I’d been playing with the vision of our new dining room in my mind. I’d hung a hurricane lantern with a burgundy candle inside above the spot where the table would go. Below the lantern was a one inch ply circular burgundy rug which would serve as the perfect backdrop to the solid oak round dining room table. This was the first time I’d ever given so much thought to a piece of furniture, after all, it was just a table. But this was not just any table. This was the very first dining room table we would have as a married couple. When I considered the fact that I would be looking across this piece of furniture at my husband for the rest of my life, I wanted to make sure that the table would live up to certain expectations. No longer was the table just a table. It needed to have some important qualities. I began to wonder if the table would have longevity. Would it be able to hold up through countless dinners, family get-togethers? Would it be cozy enough for romantic dinners and yet large enough to provide necessary space during disagreements? After months of perusing the Ikea catalogue, we decided upon the Ikea Ingatorp. The roundness of the table made it look softer and not as angular, while the solid wood gave the table strength. To me it looked like the perfect marriage between utility and beauty. In our modest but cozy dining room, the table fit right in.

We wanted the store to deliver and assemble the table but were told that assembly wasn’t an option with online orders. So, here we were with nuts, bolts, Allen wrenches, dowels and furniture pieces strewn across the living room floor. They say that first time travel is a true test of the strength and validity of a relationship, but perhaps putting together furniture should be added to the list. We are what people consider “newlyweds,” married almost six months. During this time I learned more about my husband’s quirks and attitudes which were unexpectedly, worlds away from my own. For example, I could watch the Food Network for hours and I have a creative streak that runs deep. My husband, on the other hand can’t for the life of him understand why people take cooking so seriously. He prefers political shows and reading news stories online. I looked at the different pieces of the table on the floor. The pieces were of different sizes and shapes. Lying juxtaposed on the floor they looked oddly sad and macabre. How this would ever come together to make a stable table was beyond me.

            Thankfully, both my husband and I are ‘follow the instructions’ type of people. Every time I assemble anything, I remember an uncle of mine who thought following the instructions that came in the boxes was of the devil. He simply refused to look at them, no matter what screws were left over or how hard he had to jam pieces together to make them fit. Working with him, I learned that having similar assembly philosophy is essential when assembling furniture with another person. You can’t build anything with another person without a similar view on whatever it is you’re building, whether it’s a table or a life.

“Pass me the booklet honey,” my husband said in his calm, quiet voice.  I complied, but not before looking at the figures in the booklet and laughing at the crudely drawn figure of a person putting together the table.  “Well, these books weren’t made for the art love,” he reminded me. But in my mind it wouldn’t have hurt to add a little bit of artistry to the booklets. At least the drawing didn’t have to be quite so ugly. I was reminded that my husband approached these things from the angle of function, while I wanted function and aesthetics. I watched my husband as he screwed in the screws and I handed him his tools and positioned parts. “You’re quite handy even though you don’t like this sort of thing babe.” He just smiled.

I thought the table was coming together nicely and would prove to be both functional and aesthetic. “Since the table’s round, there’s no head of the table love,” I wondered where to place my husband’s chair.   He shrugged his shoulders as if this didn’t matter. His humility showed even here. I looked around the room at the remaining pieces. Things weren’t looking so juxtaposed and we only had a few screws left. The table looked smooth and there were no cracked pieces of wood showing through where pieces had to be jammed together. I realized that reading the instructions took a little more time than just jumping right in. It required patience and humility. I also realized that both qualities were necessary, not only to assemble furniture, but to assemble anything that resulted in longevity and stability.  

I hoped that the table would look like the one in the catalogue. Nothing’s worse than buying something and being disappointed with the end result. Marketers make everything look good on the outside, but when you dig deeper, the item often looks and performs like nothing represented in the pictures on the box. I wondered if the table would wobble at the first sign of trouble. What if the dog ran into it, would it topple over? If there was a fire, I bet it would be the first to go.  After all, nothing in life is actually permanent. I looked at my husband and shivered. Age, health, growing in opposite directions, any of these things would mean the end. I pushed back these thoughts as I pushed another dowel into the table. Love was the only thing that would outlast the tangible things in life. Bodies wear out, buildings crumble, but love remains. Long after a marriage ends in death or divorce, children from a union go on and form their own families and the love goes on.

Underneath the glow of the hurricane lantern, the table stood proudly in the center on the carpet. It was solid, functional and beautiful, the centerpiece of the room. We hadn’t sat down and had a meal on it yet, but we could tell. We could tell by the quality of the wood that it had longevity, and would hold up through countless dinners and family get-togethers. It was cozy enough for romantic dinners, but had an extender piece in the middle that allowed it to stretch and become large enough to provide space during disagreements. I looked down at the living room floor. There wasn’t a nut or bolt leftover. We had used all the pieces, even the ones that looked like they didn’t belong. They were all serving to hold the table upright. Some were more functional, some were purely aesthetic, but both types were necessary for the final product. And, despite its disparate parts, or perhaps because of them, the table was a work of art.