They had other skills.

Over the years, among the things I’ve noticed about my Gillespie ancestors of the last century or so is that they were crappy carpenters.

The evidence is in a goodly number of pieces of furniture which have been handed down through four or five generations. Today, it was a flourish of trim from the antique bed that used to be my grandmother’s, and before that belonged to my father’s uncle and so on. I don’t know which of my forebears attempted to fasten this chunk of wood, which is roughly the size of a cutting board (if a cutting board had two auxiliary pieces of trim fastened to it) back to the bed frame when it cracked clean off, but I can’t believe that even in 1890, or whenever, they didn’t have something better than a couple of half-penny nails and a messy squirt of Elmer’s glue.

To be fair, the fact that I am only compelled to re-fix it now--in 2011--suggests a repair that at least hung in there a bit, but visually the effort was pretty slipshod. Sometime this week or so, I will employ some wood glue and a long clamp, and see if we can’t do it right this time. Fortunately, I have a couple of genes from the Branches--my mother’s side of the family--where carpentry was heard of and skillfully practiced.

Now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure my grandmother and great-grandmother (Gillespie side) made a regular habit of knocking figurines and such off their perches, then cobbling the heads back on with too much glue. Come to think of it further, despite my slightly better grasp of joinery, I didn’t escape that legacy.

One of the wedding presents Jeff and I received in 1984 was a lamp with a capiz shell shade--one of those top heavy things, where the translucent shell panels are held together in a grid of flexible metal. Well, we each did our share and--all in all--we probably tripped over that thing’s electrical cord 5 times before finally declaring the lampshade an irretrievable loss. Also, I clearly remember the time in my teens that I walked by my Mom’s dining room table, snagged the veneer with the hammer loop on my overalls, and ripped off a 1” x 3” strip. I don’t remember who glued it back on, but I’m pretty sure it was not my grandmother Gillespie.