An Overfilled Bookcase
by Larry Brown
Smell
of mold and dust caress my nose as I walk down the wall of books. Each tells a story of love, lack of love, adventures,
thrills and all things of the human experience. My finger touch each one, moving it a fraction of an inch, ust to get a feel
for the content. I want magic to happen, to have the printed knowledge leap through my finger into the recesses of my mind.
Much like an electric shock, but with the result of more knowledge and experience without the boredom of learning or the risk
of doing. One book says little about someone, but an overfilled bookcase lays out the map of a persons mind. What they like,
doesn’t like, won’t read, must read, it’s all there. Given enough books you can look into a human soul and
find who hides there. Books mold our mind, the mind directs the actions, and actions alone tell us more about the reader than
they can themselves. We are what we read. We do what we read. We live as we have read. The small child knows nothing except
what those adults in his or her life choose to tell them. It’s their religion, their culture, their tradition that is
passed on. And their fears. The small child reads and finds there are other ways to think, do, act. And find strength. The
mind grows, new thoughts emerge, life changes, all due to books. The room around me is covered with books. Four walls, each
with seven or eight shelves and each shelf full of books. More books stacked on the floor. Each one selected for its content.
It was not the color of the binding, or the graphics of its cover, but the special information of its contents that made the
buyer pay good money to take it home. Sometimes one page in a book was enough. Another book may have a collection of words
needed by the reader. Searching for something, sometimes not knowing what it was, but with the trust that a book held the
information. Around me is the answer of every question I ever had. And questions that I have never thought to ask. The why
of people, things, and places, and the reason for their existence. I will never know enough. I complete my tour of these overfilled
book cases. My finger is dirty from all the dust I had touched on the binds. Satisfied that I knew the person I wanted to
be, I wipe my finger off on a tissue and open the book of choice. The first page is yellow from age, the print faded. My mind
is open to the information it is about to receive and I am content.
When Grandfather Died
Michael Van Natta
Grandma sits in a wicker rocking chair, mostly oblivious to the throng gathered in the cluttered room. I am all of
six years old and I know my grandfather died three days ago. I am not sure that my grandmother knows this but when I get up
the nerve to say anything to her – when I am gently pushed in front of her – she smiles. Her eyes are blotched
with browns and yellows. I recognize my dad in those eyes. “You’re Michael?” she says and looks at my father.
The room smells of old wood and candle wax. On a shelf above where grandma sits is a guitar. Its smooth lines and giraffe
neck fascinate me. When I ask my dad in whispering tones if I can play with it. He drags it down but instead of handing it
to me, he lays it in grandma’s lap.
Instantly, she is transformed.
Light comes into her eyes. Her mouth, even under its hood of flesh, twitches and that smile comes back. Her eight two year
old teeth are yellow but they are all hers. Grandpa Moses had been a cosmetic dentist.
She sits up and embraces the instrument. Her arthritic hands, like flippers at rest, transform into lobster claws and
somehow she makes a chord. Everyone – my aunts and uncles, the cousins, my mom and dad, stop. Someone turns off the
big radio and the wooden grill on its front that filled the warm summer air with Cajun and Ziedico and static joins
the rest of us in silent anticipation.
“Play it grandma,”
some one says, hootenanny style.
Her hands begin to move, not on
the strings but above them, like a piano player will sometimes do. Her body moves up and back, up and back. Her foot begins
to tap out a rhythm. The sound is muffled, a dusty scratching on the floorboard. The rocker comes alive, creaking. Grandmother
knocks the wood box with her bony wrist. I see Uncle Stanton's head begin to bob.
Somehow I know this scene has been played
out many times before. Her fingers find the strings and a soft tiny cascade of cadenced rings into the room. When I look,
I can’t see how her crooked fingers can do what they’re doing. Her music is not fast but fast enough to get my
own legs hopping. Uncle Earl, his lumbering form, which seems to me incapable of any animation, begins to slap the mantle
in time. My dad has found the tambourine and with one finger, plays a jangle. Soon, everyone, even my little brother, is doing
a fine dance. It seems no one can help themselves.
The music sounds like the fields we passed in the Blue ’59 Chevy Impala driving down
from Iowa through the south, cotton swirls dancing amid a tangle of twisted greenery stretching for miles in both directions.
I hear the shimmering heat over the red soil and the sweat that stood out on the black man’s brow who sold us the sodas
at the grimy gas station. It sounds like the music my dad likes to listen to on the Victrola.
It stops, the music. Not all of a
sudden, but grandma has stopped playing and the strings ring on into the room. The swaying and tapping and clanging and even
grandma’s wrist drumming goes on; only the picking stops. I look and she is changing chords, her old eyes intense, focusing
on her left hand.
It is as if each segment of each finger must be willed into position. Her hands transfigure from one clawed form
to another. Her long finger has three jags, goes in three different directions. It is shorter that its two neighbors but somehow
she finds a way to press a string. Her fingernails, unlike the gnarly witch-like claws on her picking hand, are cut short.
I see that guitar playing is what grandma does.
As if she hadn’t stopped at all, she sails right into a new chord, what I will later
know to be a G major. It is as if the pause was part of the song, as if the hollow silence was configured in grandma’s
mind to call to our minds growing up in the great depression, in the dust bowl, in the middle of world war. But no one stops
their accompaniment, no one lets the song die. They’ve done this before, my family. I see the picture of grandpa on
the wall, the smiling picture of grandpa when he was all of twenty years old. He is not swaying in the picture, not moving,
but he is smiling. It will be how I forever know my grandpa.
The strings ring out, a picking back and
forth, low note, high note, midrange note, da-de-da-de. Do. Da-de-da-de.
“Play it grandma,” my Uncle says again.
She does, on and on,
as if there is no time to quit, no time to be finished. More pauses come as she changes chords, letting us reflect on life
in the south again. And then she stops because the song is over. She just stops. Her body comes to rest. Her hands drop to
her lap, her eyes glaze over. Someone takes the guitar from her, stands it on the ground like a rifle at parade rest and we
all wait. Inside, grandma is seeing something none of us see. She smiles then.
Everyone claps and shouts. I am clapping, too. Glasses of dark
amber liquid clink together. Someone hands me a ginger ale. The glass bottle is cold and wet with condensation. I know my
grandma is one great lady. It is the first time I’ve ever met her and it will turn out to be the last. But her life
and its riches and the life my dad knew growing up - became clear to me that day. When my grandfather died.
