the site of somebody's family dinners.

My kitchen table is old. It's old and dirty and grimy. It wobbles when it stands up at all, which hasn't been very often lately, considering two of the four legs haven't been attached. Somehow when I was living in downtown Boone, one of the legs decided not to hang on to the table anymore. I blame Krystal, mostly because she was the only one who knew it was even broken for months. The leg was just wedged under the table, and somehow it stayed up.

But all that aside, I love that table. It's over 50 years old, one of those kitschy dinette sets everyone used to have. I bought it at a yard sale with six matching chairs for $15. The guy who used to own it said it had been in his grandmother's kitchen since the 50s. And yeah, it showed its age, but, man, that table was cool.

For the entire month that I've lived in Lewisville, my table has been lying on its side against the kitchen wall, as much out of the way as possible. My family tried to get me to throw it out when we were moving it. It's true that it's given me at least $15 worth of service and that it's barely functional. During the move, another leg came loose. But I couldn't bear to let this table go. This table has a history! Family dinners were held there. Not my family, but somebody's family!

I decided to fix it. This was kind of a problem. I couldn't just screw the legs back on because the table top is made of that old table material that you only find anymore in places called Mel's or The Silver Dollar Diner or Eats. The underside was very old corkboard, reduced with age until it looked more like cardboard. The old screwholes were wide and eaten and unusable. What a dilemma.

But I fixed my table last night. I bought some boards at Lowes (actually just one board that the nice man at Lowes cut for me into eight little boards), and then attached the legs to the boards. Then I attached the boards to the table. This engineering idea came from my brother, whose other engineering idea was to throw the stupid thing out. And my table stands again. It wobbles, and it's a lot higher than it used to be, but it stands and it works. In this course of this project, I got some splinters in my fingers, broke a 3/32 drill bit, and almost spoiled a gallon of milk (I forgot to put it away before I left to go buy screws). But I fixed my poor $15 table. And now it's my $20 table when I add the $4 for the boards and the $1 for the screws.

See? The value of this table has gone up already. And you were going to let me throw it out.