Wagon Wheel

As I approach both my 30th birthday and the 10-year anniversary of my Paw Paw’s passing, it has occurred to me that I’ve lived 1/3 of my life without him.

My grandpa, Dudley Baxter, was an incredible carpenter who built houses, furniture, and household items. While the majority of these things were incredibly functional, he also made a slew of creative novelties. Among them were a goose puppet that served a no purpose but to play, an “oven squirrel” that adds some whimsy to pulling trays out of the oven, and a wobbly fisherman decoration who teeters back and forth while managing to defy gravity.

When Marissa and I moved into our new apartment this fall, we brought our share of his work with us: a bed frame, two chests, a shelf I’ve had in my bedroom since I was a kid, some fun kitchen items, etc. Decades after their production, they’re still plenty useful, and they all have fun stories behind them.

One of my favorite things he constructed was a particularly unique coffee table. The story: Back in the late 70s, my grandpa purchased a 1920s-era covered wagon that included four wheels and a spare. He turned them into five glass-covered coffee tables that he gave to various friends and family members. We don’t know what became of all of them, but we do know that sometime after my parents got married, he gave one to my dad.

My parents had it in their apartment in Kansas in the late 80s, and in the basement of our first home in Eureka, Illinois, in the early to mid-90s. When I was about 5, however, one of my particularly destructive childhood friends accidentally shattered the glass.

My parents didn’t have money to fix it, so it sat unused in a storage closet for years. The table made the move across town to my parents’ new house in 2009, but it remained broken and mostly forgotten.

In 2015, before I moved to Iowa to begin a career in journalism, my dad passed the table down to me. But, like my parents nearly 20 years earlier, I couldn’t afford to fix it, either. So, it collected dust in a closet for two years in Iowa, then in a closet for two years in Omaha, and then in a storage unit for over a year and a half in Eureka. The years rolled on, and all the while, the guilt that I hadn’t gotten it taken care of ate away at me.

From August to December 2020, it was propped up on its side, leaning next to a wall in the living room of our apartment, and every time I looked at it, I said “soon.” Then, on one of the first days of my holiday break, I said “today.”

It took a couple hundred dollars, some help from a generous family friend to fix the cylindrical base that connects to the stand, glass cutting from the fine folks at Kelly Glass in Peoria, and my dad’s truck to transport it, but our living room finally feels complete.

I can’t think of a more fitting tribute to the man who made it. Nearly 10 years after his death, our table is just one way that his legacy lives on.