Yesterday, I had a flash of memory triggered, I think, by sitting at my computer and writing, writing, writing. I suddenly realized I was feeling an emotion I had felt many, many years ago. Around 70, I would guess, 70 years ago.
I received a child-size wooden desk and chair as a gift, perhaps for my birthday which is the first of April, and now that I think of it, perhaps that is one of the reasons the memory was hanging right there, ripe and sweet for the taking with my birthday only two weeks away.
Rocky was sitting in his wing chair in front of the fireplace where I also sat in my wingchair, computer in front of me, to write. So I had an audience, and as my fingers ran over the keyboard, my mouth started to run too, and I shared my memory, then made connections to my life today. Here is what I told him:
I had this little wooden desk and chair. The desk had, perhaps, three drawers in it and I kept crayons, erasers, blunt scissors,and stubby pencils that my Dad sharpened with his pocket knife in there. And, most importantly, the sooty pads of ruled paper that my Dad brought me from his caboose.
My Dad was a Conductor for the B&O Railroad and our town, Garrett, Indiana, was the headquarters for the Chicago Division, in spite of its small size of only 4000 people. Perhaps it was because the "shops" were there, shops being where the engines and cars were cleaned and repaired. Dad had started working in the shops when he was only 14 years old, but had climbed out of the shops onto the rails to actually have a job that involved riding on the trains.
When Dad was assigned to passenger trains, he wore a dark navy blue uniform with brass buttons, and he punched people's tickets and generally managed what went on in the passenger cars.
But when he was assigned to the freight trains, he wore striped overalls with blue or red bandanas and rode on the caboose. He was in charge of everything that went on with the freight cars, which meant seeing to it they suffered no damage, that they were dropped off at the proper destination, that no one hitched a ride, and to take care of whatever else might come up concerning them.
Of course, the railroad provided other men to help my Dad, switchmen who checked the tracks, car inspectors who checked the freight cars, brakemen who manually handled the brakes in an emergency, and trainmen who were his assistants and ready to take over if he became incapacitated. But he was the boss of the train. Conductors and engineers were always arguing over who was the most important, and Dad's argument was that the engineer was only in charge of the engine and coal car; the conductor was in charge of all the rest of it!
The caboose at the rear of the train provided the most fun for me. It was a combination office and motel room--on wheels. I loved it when Dad took me "up to the caboose" with him when he was off duty (or as he would say, hadn't been "called out.") He would restock the icebox, put away canned goods, and hang up clean clothes to wear "on the other end." That meant Chicago--Chicago was "the other end."
I will never, never, never forget the smell of the caboose. The smell of soot and ashes and cinders and the steel of the wheels, iron of the tracks, and hot steam fueled by coal, and, most importantly, the smell of working men who are living together. The sooty smell permeated everything, and Dad's work clothes were hung in the old closet under our stairwell away from the good clothes. He even had his own caboose blanket, a quilt my mother had made for him from 4-inch squares of dark corduroy. That blanket was so coveted, in spite of or maybe because of, the odor that clung to it, that all three of us sisters asked for it when he retired.
Sitting in the cupola when I was a five year old was the most exciting part of the visit to Dad's caboose. The cupola was the single-man loft, one on each side of the caboose, which looked out the upper side windows. It was where the men could watch the tracks ahead, or where they slept or where they would just ride between cities. Dad would give me a boost up the ladder and I would sit up there and watch him putting things away below. I would imagine what it would be like for the train to be moving, for me to be grown up, for me to be a grown-up man where I could have a job like a freight train conductor and travel to an exciting city away from home.
The train was my Dad's home away from home. This was my Dad's other life, an adventure condoned by society mixed with his parental responsibilities to support his family. He might not have the best of both possible worlds, but he had a foot in each one; loving family on one end; Chicago and all it offered on the other.
I have only a little knowledge about his Chicago adventures, and that is another story to explore but not here. This is a blog where I am remembering the desk I had as a child and the sooty discontinued pads of forms that my Dad brought me to write and draw on.
In the lower portion of the caboose next to the iron coalstove for cooking was a wooden booth where Dad and his trainmen could sit and fill out their forms--how many freight cars had been put off at a certain town, how many had they taken on, how many oil tanks there were, how many refrigerated cars, were there any emergencies, any problems? There were forms for many situations, and as bureaucracy will do, the forms kept changing. That's when Dad would bring the old ones home for me, in all their sootiness.
I didn't care! This was the end of the Depression years. We didn't have money to buy crisp new white tablets for me to scribble on or ring bindered journals that we have today. We were the original recyclers, and I loved my ashes-stained forms. The forms were laid out in some kind of a grid, and I filled in lines and boxes with the numbers and letters I had learned in school. I made them look very official, organized them and filed them away in some of the drawers. As I grew older, my lists grew more relevant to my life. I made schedules I would never follow, set goals, made plans, experimented with creative writing, and filed thoughts away in my logical mind just as I filed things away in my desk.
Of course, my desk usually stood in a corner--a corner of our front room (living room to you youngsters) when I was five. At age 75, I remember the organizational activity that became one of my strengths and the pleasure I got from the tools of writing. At age 5 it was stubby pencils and sooty tablets; today, it's a computer keyboard and applicable software.
Later, when I outgrew my little desk, I used an old Mission style Sears Roebuck oak library table pushed into a corner of my bedroom. It doubled as a night stand. As I raised my children in the 1960's, I had a refinished office desk shared with my ex-husband in a nook in our master bedroom since I was a part-time student at the University of Houston. My reading corner then was piled up pillows against the headboard of the bed.
Since then, I've replicated the special corner for myself many times. I post photos here of three corners I have now, a reading corner, a creative corner, and a banking corner. I may not have had "A Room Of My Own," but I've always been able to sit, not for punishment but for pleasure, in my very own corner.
Do these look wild to you? I had never had any experience with Sweet William before last year. In fact, I always got them mixed up with primroses, the little plants you can buy in the grocery store mid-Winter. But summer of 2007, I planted a package of "Wild Flowers" that had Sweet William listed as one of the mixture contained within. A few of these dainty plants came up last year. Now this year, even more have come up. Now this is a plant I like! Pretty, dainty, tough and it multiplies! I plan to plant more when I can find the seed. (From my photo, it looks like a gaillardia came up, too, although May seems pretty early for what I've always considered a summertime flower.)
