CW22

(This is something I wrote to read at my book release at Looky Here last Friday. 💕)

I don’t remember how old I was, but my guess is four or five, making it sometime around 1980. My brother was really little, and my sister wasn’t born yet—that’s my guess. We lived in a beautiful old house in Dover, New Hampshire, built in 1848, one year after the U.S. Post Office Department issued the first postage stamps, invented ten years earlier in Great Britain by an English teacher named Rowland Hill, who was later knighted for it. (Imagine being able to say, I invented stamps.) There was a steep hill in the backyard with a stone staircase, quite possibly as old as the house, leading up to an enormous cemetery, parts of which were even older—creepy wafer-thin slate gravestones, writing faded or wholly washed away.

We had lots of non-snobby toys—plenty that were plastic, warlike, die-cast, painted or decaled with bright, shiny colors. But we also had these almost-Platonic wooden blocks. They were blonde, unfinished wood with the edges sanded, nearly white. Maybe they were a gift. My memory is that they were “ours,” not “mine,” whatever that means. They were different shapes. I can’t remember ever playing with just the blocks. I see them awash in other clutter. Maybe one got scribbles on it, maybe a Star Wars guy stood on one, its smooth minimalism passing for a spaceship’s floor. They were raw goods, bulk material. The one I remember best was a rectangle, maybe two and a half inches by five, an inch thick.

*

I’m gonna pivot out to another story, but I’ll come back. Years later, in Durham, the next town over, my mom made shortbread for Christmas. The kids were grown and moved out—it was probably the 2000s. I don’t remember if Grandpa had passed away yet, but my mom mailed shortbread to Granny, my father’s mother, in Mason, Ohio.

Now the next part is delicate because it’s easy to misread. It’s important to me that Granny, who is gone now, does not come off as mean or senile. She would later develop dementia, and even if this story is somehow an indicator of what was to come, it’s not about that for me. When I retell it, I am fully my mom and fully Granny, neither is objectified or secondary. It’s also important to express that when my mother told me the story, probably at Christmas that year, there wasn’t even a modicum of negativity. She was laughing. It wasn’t at Granny’s expense. This was something else—poetry, almost a koan.

My mom and dad are both from Mason, Ohio. My mom knew Granny before she dated my dad—she was friends with Lyn, one of his sisters. My mom is extremely nice and friendly. She’s the kind of person who randomly befriends old people in whatever neighborhood she lives in—she did this back in Dover, and she does it today—and then visits them regularly, bringing them homemade cookies and pies. She is selfless and joyful and genuinely wholesome.

Granny was also extremely kind and thoughtful, but in a different way. She was a fascinating eccentric. As an adolescent, visiting Ohio in the summers, I had some very deep, philosophical conversations with her, out on that incredible wrap-around porch in the center of town (another near-mystical old house). She could talk to me at that age like very few adults could. I knew who I was by about thirteen. I knew I was an artist; I knew what I was going to do and what I wasn’t going to do. She, in ways too multifaceted and complex to fit neatly into any stereotype I know about, was also a nonconformist. She modified her clothes, sewed extra pockets on everything. (She once knit a scarf for my sister that had pockets sewn on either end “for storage.”) She painted rocks, took us fossil hunting at the creek. She played an electric organ but wouldn’t let anyone hear—her sister Polly, by all accounts, had a freakish musical gift and could play anything at the keyboard by ear (she specialized in extemporized ragtime and boogie)—Granny’s reticence around music probably had to do with that. She had the largest collection of romance paperbacks I’ve ever seen. She had an entire duck-themed room, which had something to do with a joke with a friend, a joke which had been taken very far. She was addicted to Coca-Cola (Diet, later on) and crushed the cans flat in her basement with an antique tool. In the 60s, her kids’ friends were welcome in her house to all hours, her—a night owl who slept very little—deep in conversation with them. She was a devout Christian in a conservative part of the country, but she was also, I like to think, one of those Greatest Generation freethinkers that helped the 60s, as we know it, bloom. She was an individual, and she explicitly empowered me to be one too. She spoke clearly and firmly (and often loudly so my hearing-aid-averse Grandpa could hear). Her exterior could be sharp, but she was too good, in my experience, to be mean.

So my mom sent her the shortbread. Maybe they were stamped with decoration, or maybe they were plain. In any case, they were perfect. (For someone so warm, my mother has a perhaps-unusual devotion to detail and excellence.) They were the size of little dense candy bars, that same blonde that’s nearly white.

A few days after my mom mailed them, the phone rang. It was Granny, and she was confused and flustered, eager for clarification. She said, “What am I supposed to do with these bricks?” My mom, telling me the story, almost whispered, her eyes twinkling with laughter, “She was kind of upset.”

What am I supposed to do with these bricks? Ever since, probably my favorite sentence in the English language. A true perennial, always a new occasion for its ready use.

*

Back to 1980-ish. I was a child, making important new connections. Seeing new rhymes in the world around me. I also knew about the drawer with the postage stamps in it.

When my mom found what I had done, she called me in, laughing. It was a warm, sunny day and we were in the kitchen. It was that same laughter, but this was a woman in her late twenties. “Chris, did you do this?” A stamp was placed precisely and carefully in the upper-right corner of the otherwise-blank wooden block, as if it were an envelope, a letter. Still laughing, she kindly explained that stamps cost money and weren’t toys, and I ran back outside, through the mudroom, to play more.

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I’m fascinated by TI-TE-DO cadences.