Holding On

Today with this newsletter, you see a side chair. It is a chair that is in its middle shape. By this, I mean that it is not in its probable last shape. Right now, it is waiting for a new back design. I was informed at the last festival I attended that the ladder was uncomfortable because of the place it hits most women’s backs.

Doing so, it has hit me right in my tenacity. There are many character traits that participate in good furniture design—at least in my case. They include in part the desire to make a contribution, caring about the truth, a sense of duty, and the above-mentioned tenacity.

Tenacity takes a part in furniture as it does in most endeavors that seek success. U.S. Grant exercised it to great advantage. I heard Shelby Foote, the noted Civil War historian now dead, say that Grant had over 30 plans to take Vicksburg. He did so on the last attempt. He was tenacious. He wrote his autobiography, published posthumously by Samuel Clements while dying with throat cancer, and stayed alive until he had finished. The money made from this effort supported his wife.

Good furniture takes tenacity in my case because I make mistakes, and they need to be fixed. Also, it fulfills the need that all good furniture has to have its processes successfully completed, whether or not these processes have been wrongly used. It is important to keep holding on.