Grandfather - a short story from a compilation I've titles SCARS

GRANDFATHER

It is presently midnight. The house is silent save the music of the house itself.  Snow cascades gently toward the ground, illuminated by the halo of light surrounding the streetlight globes outside my window. Twelve strikes following the music from the old Grandfather clock, a small facsimile of a distant clock in London. Music from the clock that I have come to know as a comforting and often totally unaware sound of its time keeping in the house. Like the settling groans of a house, the soft clicking of the furnace as it blows on again to bring heat to the otherwise silent house, so are the nearly silent songs of a house resting for the new day.

The face of the Grandfather clock is imprinted on my mind, the moon dial that keeps me knowledgeable of the changing of our revolution shifting from an old-fashioned moon face to a ship at sea on a wave searching again for the bright full face of the moon to lead it onward. Time constantly moving forward.

It is a Sunday ritual for me to first wind the grandfather clock, then to retire in the room in which it sits to read the Sunday fat installment of the newspaper accompanied by a strong brew of coffee. At the base of the clock are three small indents, each a scar from a time past, each caused by the carelessness of the winding key being dropped upon its base. Each put there by my son, when I have allowed him to wind the clock, the key dropping from his little, chubby fingers, what I remember more now of those scars was of the time that the little boy would rest easily on my forearm as I held him in wonder as the chain that suspends the weights disappeared into the head of the clock only to descend when the weight of time brought them to gravity again.

It is in the night, when the house is mostly still that the song of the grandfather clock reigns over the house. It is a sound that when slowly awakening in the morning, comforts me to snuggle in for the further time until its chime will ring out the usual six o’clock waking hour and it is time to know the world once more.

*

As I sat thinking morning thoughts, the solitude of the quiet and contemplating where in the world the term Grandfather clock comes from, I began to think of Grandfather and wondered what he was doing during the early hours, knowing that he too was an early riser. Was he spending his morning much in the same manner as me now, sitting alone in a room perhaps reading the paper or thinking about the time long ago? A time when his kitchen was filled with activity and he had no way of knowing that years later he would be so totally alone. I spend this time alone out of choice, he spends the time alone now out of circumstance.

*

I thought back to a particular late summer morning, the chill of autumn hinting more each sunrise. I reached into the box of solvents, stains, tools from another man’s garage, another man’s workshop, another man’s life. Grandfather has sold his house and now lives within a community of peers. Having lost Grandmother, his wife for more than fifty years, the house, yard and garden proved just too much to handle alone. The family gathered over the course of two weeks to help him prepare his house for final sale. On the day that his belongings were disbursed to the family members, I noticed that Grandfather favored me with many of his tools. As I jumped up on the workbenches and cabinets to retrieve his fishing pole and tackle boxes from the rafters of his garage, my eye spied something up against the back wall of the bench. It was a small brown paper sack which had caught my eye. I brought it down to the work bench and peered inside. I pulled out a ½ full bottle of 86 Proof Mellow Mash, Yellowstone Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, which looked as though it had been in that garage for as many years as I’ve been alive.

Grandfather walked into the garage as I was pulling it from it’s bag and looked at me curiously. I jokingly teased him, “So what did Grandmother think you were doing out here?” We both chuckled. A twinkle set in his eyes, he looked at me and said pointing to the two space heaters at the base of his workbench, “Well you know winters can get mighty cold around here. He chuckled, “Sometimes, a man just needs a little nip.” I smiled, imagining Grandfather sitting at one of his projects, stealing small sips directly from his bottle.

Grandfather had worked with wood years ago, before restoration was sheik. He worked the wood because you simply reused things in his day. Grandmother would make her own soap from lye and fat. She would never discard a piece of cloth knowing that someday it would be batting for a doll or at very least a rag, which she would wash again with lye and bleach to bring clean to reuse until the threads had worn as thin as gauze-paper. Everything was put to use, recycling was just a part of life.

I looked at my recklessly put together, or moreso neglected work bench, propped in the most unusable corner of my garage. The board on the back with the individual tool hangars sat empty save the hangars, as the tools spread about on the floor of the garage, across the top of the work bench, everywhere but their intended place. I looked again into the boxes of implements that grandfather had bestowed on me, the rightful heir, since he had admired in the past my handiwork. Grandmother used to call my wife and talk to her at length about that “working-est husband” of hers. When grandmother and grandfather would come to our house, it was always with at least twenty minutes notice, so I would slip into my gardening togs or my old holey jeans and tee-shirt and head either to my garage, basement or to the garden, according to the weather and season. So it was there they always caught me working hard. “Labor hard, it is a man’s way.” Grandfather had spent his career on the railroad, with real tough men and real tough labor. Soft hands annoyed him. Men who took sweating and aching for granted as a part of the day were admired by him.

I remember the day that I bought the kit to assemble my huge work bench. Though I never let on to grandfather that it was indeed a kit, he caught me in the act of screwing, hammering and assembling the monstrosity. I could hear him in the kitchen, “you know that husband of yours is the working-est man.” He said proudly, glad to see that those in my generation still could apply themselves to “Men’s work”.

I pulled the long box of sandpaper, steel wool, assorted stains and other products that I had assembled to refinish my wood projects. I looked at the screwdrivers that I had relegated to the pile, ashamed that I had done so primarily because of laziness. Laziness, because they had sat over weeks soaking in lacquer or the handles had been coated so many times by paint, stain and other sticky mess that they simply couldn’t be bothered to be cleaned again. The ends chewed by implements they weren’t intended to open and use upon. Now relegated to open the metal lips of stain and paint cans, they could have been more. Grandfather’s tools of course were meticulously clean. I remember once on the rare occasion that my yard tools actually hung on the rack I had erected for them, instead of standing in a large flared upright pile in the corner of the garage, waiting to fall on the next person to venture their way, Grandfather shook his head in amazement as he stared at the rust and dirt still clinging to the spade, shovels and hoes. I came home from work that day to impeccably cleaned tools as well as file sharpened. Those shovels and hoes would cut through the ground like a hot knife in butter.

When I walked into the kitchen, I saw a look of dismay on my wife’s face. Apparently grandfather in his enthusiasm had taken to sharpening our kitchen knives as well. The Waustaff knives, knives intended to last as heirlooms, knives we had only a few years prior received as a wedding gift, sat forever ruined at the hand of a steel file meant for garage and shop tool sharpening. Knives that came with warranties that read as thorough as our TV’s, knives that we were supposed to take in to a local German knife man with expertise in these matters. To entrust the cutlery into his hands, with even loaners available. Now the knives would shamefully sit in the knife block on the counter with all of the other, “ordinary” knives.

And so with grandfather’s tools and stuff, I started to embark on my next project. I had a garage sale gem that I would refinish with stain and paint and then set in a specific place in my den.

*

I refinish furniture for most of the same reasons that I run and garden. There is simple solitude in it. The time spent burnishing the wood, bringing back the life to the wood is somehow cathartic. As my tinny radio plays Beethoven, Brahms, Bach or Mozart, the music seems to invade the grains of the wood, captured there and then sealed in with the stains. I sit at my work bench and wonder if maybe a bottle of Schnapps, Scotch or a Brandy might not be a bad thing indeed to secret into a special crevice to warm the hands of the sander in the cold afternoons on a cold winter Saturday.

But before the snow would fly, I would need to cruise the town looking for signs tacked to street signs heralding estate and garage sales to pick up my hobby’s bounty. Garage sale haunting at the end of the summer became an annual ritual for me many years ago. I would cruise up and down the neighboring streets on Friday mornings, knowing that the best picking wouldn’t last until the weekend.

There was a time when there was no corrugated furniture, a time when hard wood was used to construct a desk, a chair or a cabinet. I have picked up numerous pieces of “junk” at garage sales for close to nothing. Not the kind of treasure you read about, wherein under a framed oil painting lies one of the masters, someone has secured for two dollars and then turns to sell for hundreds of thousand, but more of something with the history of a family in it. Furniture that once had a place in the bedroom, family room and other rooms within a house of people going about their daily, ordinary lives. As I look beyond the surface to see that under the scars, stains and paints there might lie a wonderful grain of walnut, a swirl of maple or the scent of cedar within, my mind reels to the possibilities of the piece, the memories of the piece that I am trading for a few dollars.

I always enjoy the amused looks on the faces of those trading a chest for five dollars, just clearing out their clutter and adding to mine, and getting some cash in the deal. “Oh, I don’t know, Grandma used to keep that thing in her living room, doesn’t go with any of my stuff… Oh that thing has been sitting out here in the garage for twenty years, I bet that thing is sixty years old, no, wait, maybe older than that. Fact is, I oughta take it down to one of those antique dealers, probably worth a fortune.”

The funny thing is they are smiling smugly at me for taking their junk off of their hands AND paying them to do so, and just the day before I saw a very similar chest one of those antique stores for $250.

Grandmother and grandfather would be proud of my thriftiness. They would marvel at how the working-est grandson was also the bargain-est. They’ve both been gone for a long time now, but when I’m sitting in my den and look out my double French doors to the living room where the stand-up piano I once stripped of avocado green paint and sanded with six grains of paper, finding the wonderful grain of hardwood underneath sits, I know I took on the tradition of trash to treasure recycling Grandfather was so proud of. Now to toast him with a sip from his old bourbon whiskey bottle sitting on my wood shelf; Here’s to you Grandpa, you were a lovely soul. You left a wonderful scar on my heart that reminds me of how much I miss you.