Grilled Pork Chops, Again (February 2007)

Dear Grandma,

Last night was grilled pork chops again, salad, corn, black tea without cream or sugar, roasted red potatoes, and we made ice cream sundaes for dessert. You forgot to run the dishwasher this time, so instead of our usual teacups and saucers - yours the white one with the red dragon on it from Ireland, and mine white with pretty blue flowers on it - we drank our tea from matching blue cups and saucers, which one of your daughters-in-law purchased for you from England. I asked if blue was your favorite color. You said you like all the colors, from brown on up through. The only color you don't really care for is orange. Too bright.

When I got there, smoke was hanging like a thin veil through the house because you had just added more logs to the woodstove. The smoke alarm went off and you took a woven placemat from the dining room table and waved it under the device a few times, and it stopped. "Be quiet," you said to it.

The television was on again in the Keeping Room, and I confess I now make a habit of turning the volume down when I'm taking dishes down to the little table. I watched you carry the blue cups and saucers down, stacked on top of each other and I thought for sure that they would fall from your grip and crash to the floor but they didn't. You had me bring the teapot down. Your teapot is silver with pretty etchings; your friend Bridget brought it to you from Ireland.

We sat down, you poured the tea, I helped myself to salad, we took turns with serving corn. The t.v. remained on, three feet away from us. The little table sits under a large window that looks on the back porch and out to the backyard, and I thought I heard voices nearby in the winter darkness out there. Your new neighbor's son was probably out snowmobiling, you said. The wood stove continued burning over in the far corner of the room, and I sat facing you and the wall of bookshelves behind you as we ate. I'm sitting where Grandpa used to sit.

I can't remember all that we talked about. We would comment on the news or a commercial, and we made some small talk. It seems like our conversations deepen after we've finished dinner and dessert. We usually sit for another hour with our tea, warming it up from the pot, and talk some more.

You asked if I'd read any good books this week, and indeed I had, Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods. I asked if you had read any good books this week. You had been to the library for the first time in a few weeks. They were all wondering where you'd been and how you were doing. You're a big part of their circulation, it seems. You pointed to two books stacked over on the oak table, a mystery, and a book by someone who writes books in which people and foxes are characters. This got me curious to know what your favorite book of all time is. I guess I like superlatives: favorite color, favorite season, favorite book. You didn't really have one, but you pointed out a few that you really liked, and I stood up on a chair to reach one down that you said that anyone who has anything to do with children should read. It was a slim hard cover with a red cover jacket. (Now I have three of your books, and I need to make sure I don't start a collection!) I don't think you've read too much classic literature, the stuff I studied in college such as Dante, Wharton, Shakespeare. I wondered what classic books, if any, you have read. I couldn't think of a good way to ask you, so I kept silent.

You talked about Grandpa, who was never much of a reader, and you knew that when you were dating him. He told you he would watch the movies for his book reports. You firmly believe, as I do, that the book is always better than the movie. Richer, more to it, more character development. You named The Horse Whisperer as an example. You had read that book and the movie was playing in theatres, so for once you told your daughters you wanted to go to the movies. You, your two daughters and your daughter-in-law went, and by the end all were crying, and the younger women, who hadn't read the book, were wanting to know why you didn't tell them they needed to bring Kleenex.

I asked you in a "speaking about books"-way if you've ever heard of an "owl garden." I thought that with your longtime interest in gardening and your shelf full of books on the subject, you may have, but you hadn't. This is something I read about recently in the book Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson. An owl garden, I explained, is a garden of fragrant, night-blooming white flowers. Wouldn't that be pretty? You said yes, you knew of two flowers that are white and nocturnal. I believe you called one a "moonflower" and said your neighbor used to grow them in pots and you enjoyed watching them unfurl as the evening drew on.

You asked if I had work tomorrow, which I didn't. I told you how nice it was to work one day, then rest the next, work the next, always with a day off inbetween. I had grown very tired of working full time, I confessed. It drains me, sitting and staring at a computer all day. I told you, I don't know if I am lazy or not a hard worker or what, but I just don't feel cut out for office work. You nodded your understanding and said the reason you enjoyed your job for the county so much was because you interacted with people. I explained that due to technological advances, it seemed that people who were across the room were e-mailing me instead of talking to me. I imagine that a few decades ago, offices were much livelier places, whereas mine is almost always as hushed as a library. About eight people and I sit quietly behind our cubicle partitions, clicking our mouses and quietly doing all communication over the Internet. You said that in the days before, you would have taken dictation or typed a letter.

You said thoughtfully to me, "You might like working in a bookshop." I had said earlier, "If only one could make a living reading books!" I heartily agreed, it has been a dream of mine to have a little bookstore, but with all the big box chains snow, to open an independent bookstore would be, like Garrison Keillor puts it, "charging a rhinoceros with a pink umbrella." I know I would enjoy working in a cozy bookshop. Or, you said kindly, you could take a library science degree. Yes, I've come close to doing that as well. About a year and a half ago I asked my supervisors for letters of recommendation because I had decided to apply for my MLIS. That didn't really get anywhere, my application packet was never completed, and I gave up the idea for a while. But I suppose I could always try again. "You may have to do it through night school," you said. We shall see.

You had been taking Christmas things upstairs, but you left your tree with the pictures and cards you received out on display, so you could look at it a little longer. You went over and got a picture postcard of an older couple for whom you'd caned fourteen chairs. You told me of how you'd met the wife's sister, and then a few months later the wife called you and asked you to cane their chairs for them. You started caning chairs a few years ago - learned it from a book - and you're quite good at it. You charged her a modest price - $35 - 40 for each chair, and you caned all fourteen. We went up to the dining room where you pulled out a handful of pictures of the chairs you've caned, which were all beautiful. You like to cane chairs in the spring, because you can sit on the back porch and do them. I suggested that maybe this spring, as I'm still coming over for Thursday dinners, we could retire to the back porch after supper and talk while I watch you cane your chairs. You liked that idea. I joked that I would be your apprentice. I really would like to learn this craft from you, to have you pass it down to me the way a cobbler or carpenter would pass down their trade to younger generations.

I asked if you would cane a chair for Ryan and me as a wedding present. You said you should have enough time by July.

I knew our evening was up when you started clearing the ice cream dishes off the table in a cheerful way. I think it's good for me to let the evening go on until you wrap things up for us, rather than me suggesting that I get going. It seems that our evenings are usually about two hours, from 6 to 8, on these short winter days. I'm sure that as the days lengthen and the spring comes and deepens, we will spend longer hours together, on the back porch, after dinner. As for tonight, it was so cold outside that I started my car and came back inside while it was warming up. You were putting away the dishes and getting ready to run the dishwasher, unplugging some appliances and plugging others in, careful not to upset the circuit balance. We said goodnight, and you said to me, "Be good." You kissed me on the cheek and I kissed you on yours, and then you waved your customary wave from the sink at the kitchen window as I drove off.

You had said to me as we were clearing the table that I could work with books as a librarian or in a bookshop, as I wrote my own book. "You really think I can?" I asked. "I know you can do it," was your confident response. I don't know if I will ever cease to be amazed and impressed by your belief in me as a writer. You make me believe that I just might do it.