Deke's Table, Eight Years Later

Deke retired from the shop last month after something like thirty one years, and there was a sheet cake in the break room and a card everybody signed, and I stood there trying to figure out how to say what I actually wanted to say without it turning into a speech nobody asked for. So I didn’t say it there. I said it two weeks later over beers at his place, which felt more honest anyway.

He kept a folding table by the parts counter back when I started, going on eight years ago now, and on slow afternoons between calls he’d set out whatever game he’d picked up that month and rope in whoever was around. I was new to the trade, still mostly scared of the senior guys, and Deke was the one who didn’t make me feel stupid for not knowing a socket wrench from a torx bit yet. The games were just something he did while he waited for the next call to come in. I didn’t clock at the time that it was going to become the actual center of my life outside work.

I told him that, more or less, at his place, that the basement downstairs at my house exists because of a folding table he probably doesn’t even remember specific games from anymore. He laughed and said he mostly just didn’t want to sit around doing nothing between calls, which is fair, that’s a real reason on its own, but it doesn’t undo what it turned into for me. He asked what I was playing lately and I told him about Brass, and he made a face like I’d said something in a language he didn’t speak, which tracks, Deke was strictly a Risk and Yahtzee guy back then, never got into the heavier stuff even after I did.

We didn’t resolve anything profound over those beers, mostly just talked shop gossip and how the new guy at the counter can’t find his way around a wiring diagram yet, the same conversations we’ve been having for years. But he did say he’d come by sometime and see the basement setup, and I believe he actually will, which is more than I expected walking in. Some people who got you started on something stay in your life as an active presence and some just fade into being a fact about your past, a name attached to an origin story you tell without really thinking about the person anymore. I’d rather Deke stay the first kind, and it sounds like that’s still on the table, folding or otherwise.