Grandpa’s Wooden Candle Holders

My grandfather used to always make wooden candle holders. Most wood carvers make a variety of different things. I know a lot of people who will carve bears and other animals, candle holders, sculptures, bookends, and anything else they can think of. Not grandfather. He would come up with the same wooden candle holder over and over again. The design would only vary slightly. Soon, we were crawling in wood candle holders.

I just remember feeling a little bit disappointed with grandfather. When I first saw a wooden candle holder he had carved, I was impressed by it, but when I realized that all of his designs were almost exactly the same, I start to feel a little bit bored with them. I remember sitting by the wood rack that held the fireplace wood, watching him carving and hoping against hope that he would come up with something different to do. Maybe he would carve a face into one of the wooden candle holders, or maybe at the last moment it would turn into a small goblet of some sort. It never did, however. It was always the same thing.

For a while, I stopped hanging out with him when he would make the wooden candle holders. If I was there, I would be doing something else. I would read a book or watch TV or something. Then one day, I looked up from my book and saw grandfather with a look in his eye that I’ve never seen before. It was this slight smile, almost as if he had some secret that he wanted me to guess.

At first, I didn’t notice anything. He had another block of wood in his hand, and was making small cuts in it. I could tell from where I was standing that it was almost finished, but I could not see the detail because of the angle I was sitting at. Then, all of a sudden, he was finished with it. He walked over to the table slowly my grandfather walked everywhere slowly and put it down. He didn’t say anything, and didn’t wait for a reaction. He just walked out of the room. When I looked at it, I could see that it was absolutely perfect. The design that he had been working on for so long had finally been finished. All of those other wooden candle holders had been his early attempts to get it right. Now it was perfect.