In the summer of 1968, my thirty-something parents bought a 48-inch-diameter round oak pedestal table from an antique furniture dealer in Union, N.J. The moment the table assumed its new position in the kitchen of Solomon and Sylvia’s Victorian home in nearby South Orange, it asserted itself as the center of gravity of the house.
A half-century earlier, master artisans in Hastings, Michigan, built the table with four curvaceous, lion-pawed legs extending from its pedestal’s bottom. They quartersawed the wood to produce a tight “tiger oak” grain pattern and fumed it with ammonia to darken the finish. To Sol, my dad, oak was one of nature’s finest gifts to civilization. Adding to his adoration was the table’s lock-and-release mechanism for inserting and removing leaves. With every swivel of the mechanism’s handle, a reverberant metallic clack advertised a marriage of steel, wood, and good design.
My father’s mother died when he was four. His father, an émigré from the Aegean island of Rhodes, suffered from deafness and diabetes and was unable to care for his three sons. Sol grew up in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum in New York City and then under a series of foster parents. Solidity. Stability. Safety. All of these were absent for young Solomon, but they were all embodied in the table.
One of my favorite things about my usual writing beat (living things) is that we humans never stop learning new things about animals. We’re even still discovering species that are new to science. (Check out the glorious 
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