Grandpa’s Workbench, by C.L.S. Sandoval

Photo by Carter Yocham on Unsplash

What I remember perhaps most about Grandpa’s workbench was the vise he had attached to a wooden plank sticking out from the work area. I remember spinning the knob on that vise, round and round and round and watching the vise tighten or loosen around the air. There were pieces of leather neatly stacked. Most of those swatches had flowers or geometric shapes, stamped or whittled into them. Grandpa had made our stools and tables at that workbench. There was a wall of hooks that he had fashioned perfectly spaced apart and customized for the tools that he had. As the years passed, his glasses got thicker and thicker, and eventually he couldn’t work at that bench any longer. As he was dying from cancer, morphine was his only relief. His hands would raise in the familiar motion of leather work, just above his belly.

When he and Grandma eventually went to live at the nursing home, he gave me a handmade wooden box, filled with those custom leather pieces, the bandana he always used as a hanky, and the Folgers jar with the label scraped off, full of marbles.

Years after he died, I took a stagecraft class and learned to use a saber saw and a jigsaw. I carved the names of my fellow speech and debate team members out of wood. With each slide of the wood against the saw, I smelled the familiar sawdust, heard the familiar low buzz, and felt the slight vibration as the planks shaped into the name of a teammate or coach. Somehow, for a moment, I felt Grandpa might just approach my workbench and pat my shoulder one last time.

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CLS Sandoval, PhD (she/her) is a pushcart nominated writer and communication professor with accolades in film, academia, and creative writing who speaks, signs, acts, publishes, sings, performs, writes, paints, teaches and rarely relaxes.  She has presented over 50 times at communication conferences, published 15 academic articles, two academic books, three full-length literary collections: God Bless Paul, Soup Stories: A Reconstructed Memoir, and Writing Our Love Story, and three chapbooks: The Way We Were, Tumbleweed:  Against All Odds, and The Villain Wore a Hero’s Face.  She is raising her daughter and dog with her husband in Alhambra, CA.