~by Colleen O’Brien
I sit at my friend’s dining room table waiting for her as she gets ready to go out. In front of me is a pilsner glass of pens and pencils. After staring them down for a while, I choose one very sharp pencil with a never-used eraser.
As if touched by a fairy wand, I am at a familiar table, one I haven’t seen for at least 70 years. Sharpened pencils stand upright before me in a jar. I am in my grandparents’ house at my grandmother’s dining room table. I have just chosen a yellow Number 2 and am reaching for a clean white sheet of paper.
Gramma sits at the head of the table, paper and pencils handy. Behind her, the red Depression bowl in the china cabinet glints above her dull gray hair like rubies in a crown. She is busy writing; crossing out, musing blankly into space, writing again: she is a poet. Her worktable is covered with piles of magazines, newspapers and books, plus two perfectly neat stacks of paper – one covered with her scrawling script, the other waiting blankly for the same chance.
Directly in front of her is the fancy but chipped cut-glass celery holder with its arms akimbo and its three sturdy legs. It holds a dozen precisely hand-sharpened wooden tools of the trade.
Grampa is someplace, wherever he goes each afternoon, his dog Mickey hanging out the window as they disappear up Maple Street. I never think to ask him where he’s going or if I can go too; he’s always cheery to see me when he returns. Satisfactorily home with Mickey in his lap, he turns on the radio for the ballgame. Gramma by now has walked slowly across the street in her bow-legged way for her daily visit with her friend Maggie.
The first-best part of being at Gramma’s is the half-tidy dining room table with pencils and paper for us, her three granddaughters, to use at will. The rest of the house is seldom dusted or even picked up. My mother calls it “a holy mess.” My father tells me his mother was always like that.
My sisters and I are allowed to play any place we feel like, so we choose what we consider the secret places – the downstairs closets and the roomers’ upstairs bedrooms. I’m not sure Gramma knows where we are or what we’re doing: the second-best part of staying at her house is just that – she pays so little attention to us. We have the run of the place and explore at will. We dress up in stale-powder-scented gauzy dresses we’ve never seen her wear; we run our fingers over coins and cufflinks on the bureaus in the second-floor bedrooms.
I see my 9-year-old self, working laboriously over my next poem at Gramma’s table, moving on to a bedroom closet built over the stairwell to the basement; its angled back wall is a perfect slide. Then lastly to the front porch to read a book where I am hidden from the street by great flopping snowball bushes.
The house is dusty, redolent of bacon grease and Grampa’s cigars. Dust motes float along sun beams through seldom-if-ever-washed windows. Lace curtains hang limp and dingey. The quiet is interrupted only by the periodic scratch of Gramma lost in her work.
I realize that for her, her own house is a habit of being, her way of being – life with pencil; musty, messy rooms a neglected backdrop. For me it is as known as my own house but with no boundaries that I am told about. I know I am ignored, left alone to learn stuff on my own, weird in itself and exactly why I like being there.
It is only as I grow up that I come to fully appreciate how lucky I was to be on my own and not told what to do, let alone what not to do. Freedom is what I knew I liked. But it was Gramma’s sharpened pencils in their chipped antique holder that signified so much – a whole life can depend upon a time and place in childhood.
