The Flag Case

©2013 by John LaTorre

  

When my father, a veteran of World War II, was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in 2005, my family was presented with the flag used in the ceremony.  It was entrusted to the care of my nephew, Bill Rossiter, who has it in his home in Florida.   

My sister Anne called me about a year ago and gave me a suggestion: make a case for the flag as a birthday present to her and Bill (who is her son).  I pointed out that cases could be purchased for around forty dollars, and would probably be better than any I could make with my journeyman woodworking skills. But she eventually convinced me that the personal touch meant everything to her, and I agreed to the project.

I got the measurements I needed and went shopping for wood at our local hardwood emporium, and that’s where I hit my first snag. There were a lot of choices, ranging from walnut to exotic woods with names like cocobolo and zebrawood. Red oak seemed a good choice at first, but I felt that my sister would want something a little more traditional, like walnut or cherry. I found myself asking, “What kind of a man was my father? What would he have liked? Was he a walnut sort of fellow, or an oak guy, or a cherry guy?” The answer was obvious. He was a cheap wood guy. If he’d made that case, he would have used pine or poplar, or even plywood scraps left over from another project. But Anne would have hit the roof if I’d used those. That was my first epiphany: I wasn’t making the case for my father, but for my family. So plywood was out.

I rooted through the bins and came up with a piece of walnut with a good grain and no bends or twist to it, a sign that the wood was stable and would probably stay that way for a long time. Walnut is an honest wood, not very expensive and capable of a warm finish. Dad wouldn’t have minded that. So the board went home with me.

My second epiphany came when I began sawing and machining the pieces into shape. I have to explain at this point that when my father undertook projects like this, the results were always functional but sometimes not very pretty. Our house was full of little gadgets like this. They were ugly, but they worked, and that was all that counted with my father. My brother Joe coined the perfect term for these curious artifacts. We called them “daddifacts.”

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that the daddifacts were an outward expression of his philosophy of life, derived from the only sport that he pursued throughout most of his adult life. Dad was a golfer, and tried to teach me the game, but it really wasn’t my sort of game. But I did learn the golfer’s Prime Directive: Play It As It Lays. Any golf shot results in the ball resting in a specific location, seldom an optimum location. You can’t improve the lie of the ball, or move it a few feet to one side or another (except in special circumstances), without incurring a penalty, and the point is not to try to. Instead, you got out of your predicament by, say, hitting the ball back onto the fairway where you have a chance of salvaging your score with a clean shot to the pin.

The same principle applied to his craftsmanship. If a piece came out a little wrong – lopsided, or slightly cracked or splintered – but it didn’t interfere with the utility of the finished object, he let it slide. If it needed paint, he’d use some of the stuff he already had on his shelf, regardless of the color, rather than go out to the store to buy more. If it broke, but a bit of glue put it back in operation, he made no effort to hide the glue line. Every daddifact told the story: “This is what you’ve got. It will work. Accept it.”

Nowhere did my father illustrate that philosophy better than his recovery after a devastating stroke he suffered in 2003. Dad loved to walk, and it took away his sense of balance. He loved to talk, and it took his speech. He loved to eat, and it impaired his ability to swallow. And he loved to read, and it damaged the part of his brain that processed the written word.

Dad would certainly have been entitled to be bitter at this fate, but he never showed it. Instead, he applied himself to regaining enough of his strength and balance to graduate from a wheelchair to a walker. After months of speech therapy, he was able to make himself understood even to strangers. After a year, he trained himself to eat solid food and drink unthickened liquids without choking. And, most important to him, he learned to read again, training a different portion of his brain to substitute for the damaged areas. And he did all this at the age of eighty-eight. If a second, even more destructive stroke hadn’t hit him a month before his eighty-ninth birthday and rendered him brain-dead, I’m sure he would have continued to improve. I still dream about him, and in my dreams, he’s walking again, unsteadily but confidently, waving my arm away.

I realize now that he was applying his golf philosophy to his recovery. He resigned himself to what he had lost, discovered what he had left, and figured out how to use it to get back into the game. He was playing it as it lay, one shot at a time.

So when I built the flag case, I wasn’t too worried about how it turned out.  As it happened, it went together pretty well and doesn’t look bad. But if you look closely enough, you’ll spot an imperfection here and there. I could have worked to eliminate it, or simply started over with more wood, but somehow I felt that my father’s memory would be better honored if I just soldiered through, accepted the flaw, and kept plugging along … in other words, if I just played it as it lay.