wooden models – Christine M. Grote

I thought it would be easy to just slap up a photo or two of Italy. Gee-mah-nee- Christmas. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I feel like the wizard of Oz when Toto opens the curtain and he is frantically pulling levers and switches—clicking through photo folders, leafing through photo albums, paging through travel guides.

My problem is I can’t do anything simply. I can’t just slap up one photo of Italy. I’ve got to recreate an entire 10-day trip in photo images and descriptions. At least the Florence, Siena, Tuscany and San Gimignano photos were labeled chronologically in albums. Not the case for Rome.

The Rome photos spread out over my dining room table got shoved into a box around Christmas of ’09 and haven’t seen the light of day since. Another, as yet, unfinished project, like the pre-digital-camera family photo albums that I’m scanning. Right now there is a rather large gap in our digital photo albums between the years 1986 (where I paused in my scanning) and 1996 (where all our photos were digital). According to my computer files, Joe doesn’t make an appearance in our family until he’s five. I’m going to get to that someday.

I think I’m just going to give up altogether on the counted cross-stitch render of the Last Supper I started when Michael went to kindergarten in 1987. I got Jesus’ and all the disciples’ heads and upper bodies done and then lost my inspiration to continue. I’m not even sure where that is anymore.

When my dad and I were working on the wooden model of a military cruiser on Tuesday I had a moment of panic. We’re not going to be able to finish this,” I thought. “It’s going to be a failure.”

The hull had gone together fairly easily the first two times we worked on it, but now we were faced with four zip-lock bags full of small wooden pieces with little more than numbers ranging from the 40s to 110 to guide us and directions that said, “Match the numbers.”

The piece I wanted to add next wasn’t fitting. “Shoot,” I said, “We put this piece in the wrong way.”

We had been gluing the pieces together because although they were intended to snap into place, they really didn’t. Now there was a rather large piece, stuck in the wrong place right smack in the center of the would-be military cruiser. If that wrong piece was stuck permanently we were out of luck.

But wait, we hadn’t glued it in place. (Thank you, God.) After Dad did a little trimming with an exacto knife (we didn’t really need that tab anyway), and watched me as I did some pushing and pulling, the problem was solved.

On Wednesday I assembled the final little guns and added them to the decks while Dad nodded, asleep in his chair beside me at the dining room table.

A finished project!

One small victory for the daughter who loves the man with Alzheimers.