Lost and found

In the bottom of a red plastic box lay the abandoned tools of people. My eye rested on a dark piece of wood with a narrow lip along it, so I lifted it from the rest and said to John, "A dovetail template!" I tumbled it between the fingers and thumbs of my two hands and recorded the name of my maker by speaking out his name, "J C Durbridge!" It was a declaration. I knew that. It had meant something at one time, to the man, I mean. The man that made it. It had meaning!

It was the thinness and the length of it that seemed to me a significant thing. But then too I saw a certain precision to the maker's hand, a crispness to his output that's needed for a piece like this, you know, a layout tool. The sign on the red box, written with a large Sharpie on white paper, said two pounds per item and I took three pieces to the counter and the lady said, "Two pounds." This was nearer the fairer price for the three things I supposed, but I felt that the dovetail template, while of historical significance, antiquity, and such, was worth the two pounds to me. Whereas I didn't altogether want to pay two pounds for it, I did so anyway, rather than see it remain in the bottom of a red plastic box with no one knowing what it was.

So now you have it. It's mine, for a season at any rate, this rarer find of almost discarded wood. These oft abandoned, nameless orphans seldom find a home nor ongoing use. You don't find dovetail templates very often, even, I can say, in a whole lifetime of working wood. Especially do you not find the well-used ones with the name of a maker stamped in and that's because the family most likely have no idea what they're dad, granddad or great granddad used it for. Most children and grandchildren have no clue of their father's craft in terms of how they did it, where they worked, things like that. He's usually a man that leaves around seven in the morning and remains unseen until six or seven each day. So I look at this well-worn, man-made thing and think of Mr. J C Durbridge marking out his thousandth dovetails with a pencil freshly sharpened. How he lifts his dovetail saw to cut to the angled lines dead-square across and lines his eye up to the saw plate, squints a little to focus, and then slice-cuts parallel to his lines. Really, it's the kind of thing I'd keep if it was my dad's. Even if I didn't know what it did.

I can't recall the last one I found. I didn't really need another today, but there it was looking for a home from its abandoned state in a red plastic box in a secondhand shop. My own dovetail template is the best yet and especially my newest and very latest iteration of it that just came back from an engineer friend who fabricated some prototypes to my specs. One day it will be available because I think it is such a nice one to use. This mahogany one I found will join my dozen or so others and I will enjoy using it from time to time, maybe.

Really, such found things are true treasures to a man- and a woman-maker because the treasure in its use becomes a treasured thought where a man like me enjoys his isolated thinking at the bench where he works in his own silence and mostly alone in his own isolation where he thinks expansively.