Tom,

I am primarily a long time lurker in this newsgroop. I post only
ocassionaly, but after reading this post and remembering other very
delightful post from you I felt that I wanted to tell you how much your post
have meant to me. Thank you for your post. They are a delight to read and
are very meaningful to me. Hope you will send us additional post in the
future.

Joe Nation


"Tom Watson" wrote in message
...
It had taken a lifetime to come to this point.

Ben's Dad had brought him into the shop on his sixth birthday, nearly
eighty years before, and introduced him to what was to become his life
long passion. The small softwood workbench that greeted him on that
day was now only a childhood memory but the Stanley bit brace still
hung on the wall of the shop and was still taken down and put to work
when the mood was on him.

So too did the Millers Falls block plane that he'd been presented with
so long ago continue to give good service. The edges of the body were
smoothed by almost eight decades of use, as he'd grown from a child's
clumsy grip to the sure and steady strokes of a seasoned craftsman.

Ben's hands were often unsteady these days. Time and the illness that
would soon claim him had turned his handwriting into something
feathery and nearly incomprehensible. But, with a plane in his hand
he steadied down as though his hands remembered and acted according to
their memory, in spite of his condition.



Regards, Tom.
Thomas J. Watson-Cabinetmaker
Gulph Mills, Pennsylvania
http://users.snip.net/~tjwatson