Places I Remember

The first in a sporadic series, I envision...

This evening, when I was putting Lily to bed on the late side, she said, "I know it's too late for a book, but can I have--"

"A story about when I was a little girl," I finished for her. She'd had new blood all day--a friend of mine had been the object of the inquisition for an hour-long car ride out of Manhattan, and somehow I thought I'd been given a free pass. No such luck. I looked around the room, a bit desperately. I was tired, too. My eyes settled on a little leather pouch full of marbles she'd been given, and which I'd stowed on a bookshelf to keep Annika from snacking on them.

Suddenly, I was eight years old in my grandfather's shop, the front part that had been the garage, where a chipped coffee can--Maxwell House--full of marbles was stored on a shelf against one wall. The Shop. Have I written about the Shop here? I don't think so. The best poem I have ever written was about the Shop, which loomed so large for so many years and then quite literally decayed and subsequently, not so literally, faded away. It still exists--a falling-down white structure on my grandmother's property at the top of her driveway--but I really need to channel all my powers of concentration and memory to recall it in its heyday: the vibrancy, the buzz of activity, voices and machinery, the smells of oil and the thick industrial soap gel in the never-finished bathroom, the tiny metal shavings that stuck to the bottoms of my summer-toughened feet.

My grandfather--and his son, and my uncle's sons--was a machinist, and the Shop was where they worked when my grandfather was still alive. The house was the women's territory: my grandmother at the stove, my mother and aunts laughing over crackers and cheese, a passel of children around the table, orange juice and gingerale "cocktails," the low drawer with the crayons and coloring books. The Shop was the men: my white-haired, blue-eyed grandfather, who was somehow small yet the strongest man I knew--I always thought of him like Popeye, who made him laugh, my tall, intense uncle, who put up with no nonsense but showed unforgettable flashes of kindness, my cousins, whom I loved like brothers.

I always loved the Shop: its chests of tiny drawers filled with tiny metal whorls and rods, the constant humming and whirring of the machines, which seemed alive to me--huge and incomprehensible but never frightening, its constant sense of purpose and activity. Even at night, on the few times when I was sent to retrieve something there or went on my own for some reason, it quietly buzzed, lying in wait, never completely at rest. Occasionally I was allowed to "work," to help, although I see now that largely I was useless. The one job I remember doing more than once, besides sweeping, was making threaded rods. Even then, I liked the routine of it, its finite nature; press, whir, remove, done. No ambiguity, enough risk and danger, completion, satisfaction. And the sense of being a part of something: a part of this, of their world, to be able to move between the two--home and work--with the bridge of the driveway. This I remember, along with the coffee can of marbles, my grandfather's marbles, the feel of the metal shavings underneath my feet, the smell of the soap, my grandfather's voice, his shock of white, white hair, the sound of the dinner bell, the way it felt to close the door behind me and know what lay behind it.

How's that, Lily? I remember.