Thursday, December 12, 2024

Engineered Retreat

The best time of the day when I was a toddler was storytime, before nap or before bed, Dr. Seuss or Maurice Sendak or a favorite scratch-and-sniff Christmas book that I think came from Hallmark. One Sunday after church when I was three, I pestered my parents to read to me, endlessly revisiting the question, despite being told no or later, we’re busy. Fed up, I sat down with Where the Wild Things Are, using my memory of the story to sort through the words on the page. I took my favorite pen and copied the words inside the cover of a coloring book. I had been practicing writing my name for weeks; the physical act of writing soothed me. Holding the pen, laying the ink from the ballpoint onto the page -- smoothly, without wobbles -- filled my attention, required a focus that created a cool quiet in my mind and a stillness in my muscles. The jangle of attentiveness receded.
By six, I had gone from tracing words to writing letters, mostly to my grandmother. When I didn’t have a letter to write, I liked to draw houses and plan gardens. I had a harder time with house shapes; I divided the paper into small squares. 
One visit to my grandparent’s house over the winter holidays, my mom and grandmother and The Aunts were all off shopping, and it was just my grandfather and uncle and me left in the big house. My uncle was reading in his room -- he was the only child I had ever met who spent more time by himself than I did -- and I asked my grandfather for some typing paper. His brow wrinkled in confusion. “You want to type?” I liked the unlined white page, bright and crisp, that made the marks from my pen stand out clear and distinct. “No; I want to draw.” He brought me four or five sheets from my grandmother’s sewing room, where the sewing machine was stored on a shelf inside the closet, a thick blanket of dust covering it; a typewriter sat on the sewing machine table, stamps, envelopes, and an address book in the sewings notion cabinet. When he delivered the typing paper to me, I asked if he had a ruler, and he looked at me funny again, but went down to his drafting table in the basement and brought back the neatest ruler I had ever seen -- a long triangle with three different types of measurements, one on each side. 
I put dots along the top, one every quarter-inch, then the bottom and both sides of the page; I connected them vertically and horizontally, placing my pen carefully along the ruler’s metal edge on the third side. The regularity of the exercise was meditative; I started a second sheet instead of drawing up the latest cottage-with-a-loft design that occurred to me while I was taking a bath the night before. I fantasized about the house that Pa built for Ma and Mary and Laura and Baby Carrie, and wondered what it would have looked like if they had been able to stay in the house on the prairie instead of having to leave when the treaty with the Indians fell through. I decided there should be maple trees for gathering syrup in the woods at the north, and a barn with milking space for the cow next to the horse stalls beyond the lean-to for storing the plow.
My grandfather came through the kitchen nook and looked over my shoulder. 
“What are you doing?”
I sighed, then took a leap of faith and explained.
“Well, when I draw houses, I’m not really any good at it. I get confused about how big to make the trees and how much space to put in the kitchen or for the fireplace, and so I divide the paper into squares and it makes it easier to choose the shape and sizes.” I looked up from the page, waiting for him to tell me that there are plenty of coloring books that I could use and stop wasting my time.
He said nothing, standing behind me, looking over the paper now covered in squares, but without the cabin or the barn. There’s nothing to see yet, I thought anxiously. I chewed my lip, then remembered that it’s an unattractive habit and stopped.
“What do you want to be when you grow up? An architect?” 
I set down the pen and picked up the pencil to add shapes on top of the squares: the blueberry bushes needed to be in the front yard, along the drive. I drew as I answered.
“No; I want to be an astronaut. I want to go see what it’s like on the moon and then when I come back from space I want to live in a cabin in the forest like Little House in the Big Woods. I want to write stories in the morning before I garden and read in the afternoon before we all cook dinner and tell stories at night by the fire.” The carrots and lettuce needed to be by the side door, the one by the kitchen on the south side of the house. He didn’t move or say anything while I drew the spiky tops of the carrots next to the cluster of tomato circles, inserted wavy lines for lettuce along the border of the rectangle that was the garden bed set back six feet from the kitchen door. 
“I’ll be right back,” he said, and disappeared down the basement stairs once more. When he came back up, he handed me a pad of paper the color of old spearmint as he walked to the kitchen to pour coffee into his cup. I was in awe as I looked at the pages. There was a repeating pattern of green lines in squares on the back of the page, faint enough to see for reference when I drew; every fifth line was a deeper emerald, making a larger grid of its own. I had never thought of making a second set of larger squares on the page. This would make everything so much easier! There were pages and pages -- a whole tablet! I looked across the kitchen table and beyond the island. My grandfather stood beside the stove, his head nearly touching the exhaust hood. The light from the window over the sink played hide-and-seek in the shadows of the sleeve of his white shirt as he spooned sugar into his mug, ting-ting-tang tolling from the cup as he stirred in the milk.
“Where did you get this?” I breathed. I thought he was a god.
“It’s called an engineer’s pad,” he replied as though talking about the sun or the rain. “Engineers use it.” He came back through the breakfast nook, the smell of coffee rich on him as he bent and kissed my head in passing. “After dinner you can show me what you drew.”