Daddy Was a Thief

by Perry Glasser

We are not talking about armed robbery or breaking and entering. Not even pickpocketing. Daddy was no crook. You’d risk a punch in the snoot for even suggesting such an idea. Honest, square-dealing, he was no cheat, either, not even at gin-rummy, the card game he played at low stakes with cronies or his children for the sheer fun of the banter.

“What’s the name of this game?”

“Gin.”

“That’s what I’ve got,” he’d say and lay down his cards, laughing.

My father, Dave, considered smash-and-grab guys to be lowlifes; he thought of himself as law-abiding. Unless you count his years as an old man, unsteady on his feet from several toe amputations when he might sneak a mini-Mary Jane or cherry-flavored hard candy from the acrylic bulk sale candy bins at the food market, he never so much as shoplifted.

My mother would scold him, but he’d dismiss her nagging. “They expect a certain amount of the stuff to disappear. Like grapes.”

“That’s not the point,” Muriel would say with exasperation, pushing their cart into the next aisle while Dave inspected the caramels.

His behavior was partly denial, but it was more defiance. A diabetic whose wearying last years were little more than dragging his failing body from one physician to the next, Dad preferred to believe that purloined candy had no effect on his blood sugar. His logic was persuasive; if no one saw him eat, how could the candy be counted against him? The podiatrist, the endocrinologist, the internist, the ophthalmologist, and the vascular surgeon—what they did not know could not harm Dave.

The disease eventually killed him, despite the nutritionist who had prescribed an Exchange Diet, a scheme by which people might control the glucose levels in their blood by attending to the carbs that they ate. Dad understood the instructions to mean you could exchange a body part for hard candy, a deal he did not think was all that bad. The sawbones did their work until his heart failed under anesthesia, yet another case where the operation was a success, but the patient died.

This final event of his life also proved his post-eighty-years philosophy: You have to die of something. A worldview worthy of Lucretius, his resignation was a counterpoint to more than a decade of imposed rules he hated, rules compounded by a regimen of ever-changing pills whose names he never troubled to learn but identified by color and shape. Maybe other men ingested medications; Dad took pink for blood pressure and several shades of blue for everything else.

The body that betrayed him had been his ally most of his life. My father was an articulate man who had enjoyed three semesters of a college education on his football scholarship to William and Mary, quite a turn of events for a Jewboy from the Bronx in 1933. After he left school and worked at odd jobs requiring muscles and not much else, Dad settled on being a housepainter. He hauled drop cloths and ladders, not to mention five-gallon buckets of paint, brushes, sawhorses, rollers and God alone knows what else. In a day when colors were mixed on the spot from pigments whirled by hand into white paint, his eye could match any hint of color in a rug or upholstery. He started his own company, but he was a better craftsman than businessman; rapid expansion in the post-war boom led to bankruptcy in the mid-1950s. His greatest regret was being unable to pay the workmen whom he considered his pals.

Later, Dad maintained an upscale clientele on Park Avenue and the wealthier suburbs north of New York City. Decorators adored his precision and neatness; he charmed client housewives. While painting never could make him rich, most years Dad was able to support a wife and three children in our two-bedroom apartment on the sixth floor of a building on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, a tonier address than most. When money became scarce, Mom returned to the workforce. I was the youngest, so they looped a hemp cord stringed through a door key around my ten-year-old neck so I could walk home and let myself into the apartment after school.

I am still neurotic about not losing my keys, patting my pants or coat pockets repeatedly. I inspect the floor near my seat before exiting a movie theater. There is no telling what may be inadvertently lost in the dark. It is simply prudent.

As a similar matter of prudence, Dad’s clients locked their liquor cabinets. It was not as though he’d earned their distrust, but everyone knew painters were notorious drunkards. Fact was, no one ever saw Dad touch a drop other than at bar mitzvahs, weddings, and, later in life, at the Irish wakes that marked the passing of his childhood friends. I never saw him drunk, though on a few occasions I did see him merry and bright-eyed with wine. I am sure that clients also placed their silverware and jewelry under lock and key, just in case the soft spoken, well-mannered man in white overalls had sticky fingers.

Their precautions were misdirected.

Dad’s palms itched, but only at the sight of their books and records.

I was mall-shopping with my daughter, Jessica, when some doo-dad in a technology-computer outlet made it into my pocket. The store chain is long gone, bankrupt, either by the collapse of the earliest technology boom or by desperadoes like myself who while passing a workbench littered with wires and screws and circuitry palmed a $.79 adapter plug before a furtive run to the parking lot.

Such items were unmarked; they were probably not even for sale. But that did not prevent a security guard from emerging from behind some one-way glass to pursue me to the car. He was a skinny guy, all red goatee and sunken blue eyes, jeans hanging on his hips like unfurled sails.

My daughter—maybe she was fourteen—looked on while I explained I had had every intention of buying the item, but since it had no wrapper and no price-tag, I’d assumed it was junk and put it in my pocket to keep my hands free and then simply forgot to check at the cashier. Even as I spoke the lie, I realized how lame it sounded. My daughter, Jessica, always my ally, never engaged in adolescent histrionics. No eye-rolling, no deep sighs. She’d come into my custody when she was eight, and we were partners in most things, in this case, partners in crime. I think I could have risked smuggling a valise filled with heroin through airport customs, and even if Jessica would have looked bright-eyed and forthright as a Girl Scout selling peanut butter cookies.

I offered to pay for the doo-dad then and there, but since it lacked any price-tag, the security guard could not tell me its cost. I asked if he was sure it was the store’s property: after all, it had been on a table with a litter of other parts. Maybe another customer had abandoned it. But he was not having any of my excuses. I suppose he had heard them all before. I was fairly sure he could not legally stop me in the parking lot, much less ask me to empty my pockets, but the niceties of law seemed irrelevant on the sunny afternoon.

I handed over the doo-dad. The rent-a-cop sternly told me that he had a photo of me that would be posted in the security office. If I ever showed up in the store again, he would personally make certain the police would be summoned. I imagined a darkened booth festooned with Polaroid pictures of ruthless shoplifters taped to the walls, all of us crazed and desperate wives and husbands, all of whom were steps away from the slammer, all of whom would be incarcerated after a police car came bearing down on us in a Code Three lights and sirens scream.

In our car, Jessica stifled her giggles. “A photo?” she said, and lost control. She laughed harder. She was not humiliated. This was just another day with her father the lunatic. I asked her not to share this story with her friends, and she informed me there was no chance of that.

I smiled and said, “We’re entitled.”

Even as I said so, I remembered Dad and his loot.

The one time I asked, he said, “They’ll never miss it.” He slapped his forehead in mock amazement. “You have no idea how many books and records this guy has.”

Maybe I was fifteen. The first album at issue was a Seraphim recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony by Herbert Von Karajen conducting the Berlin Philharmoniker. The brown cardboard of the album cover was worn and frayed, so it must have been frequently handled. I thought the German spelling interesting, and I did not think hard about my father’s rationalization that the collector in the freshly painted apartment would hardly care. I still have the recording. The other recording he presented to me was a collection of arias sung by Maria Callas. At least I’d heard of Beethoven, but I was sure opera was awful. I still have that album, too.

Dad’s taste was not elevated: the albums had been randomly chosen. They were monaural at a time when our Magnavox fake walnut stereo cabinet featured a control knob for Volume and another for Balance, state of the art for stereophonic sound. Our family had begun to accrue vinyl records that had been specially made for that dawn of new acoustics, multiple track recordings. They were mostly big band music with absurd sound effects that popped and cracked and hurled sound from left to right like the ball in table tennis. Sound engineers could make that happen. Dad loved that stuff.

 “You never saw so many records,” he told me. “A whole bookcase of them; floor to ceiling. We spent half the day moving them so we could paint the shelves. When they are dry, tomorrow, we have to put the records back. How could they notice?”

Over a few years, in this way, I also obtained some hardcover books, often with dustcovers and a few in slipcases. Those might be illustrated; color plates were preserved under tissue paper. Most books were postwar classics. I remember Marjorie Morningstar and All the King’s Men. Unlike the records, they are long gone, but for all I know they were first editions. I still have a slender, numbered volume signed by Rebecca West. I believe the stolid outsized Atlas and Gazetteer that stood in our apartment’s built-in wall shelves came from the same source. The maps were colorful; the paper heavy.

Dad had no personal interest in these things. I am sure he could never have afforded to buy them; I am equally sure he acutely felt the gap between what he liked and what he was supposed to like. Though he lacked the financial means and personal passion to inject high culture into my young life, he stole it for me.

I wish I could write that I stole for my daughter, but that would not be true. I am not the Jean Valjean of the computer age. No one ever required a computer conversion plug to survive.

I also wish I could write this was the one and only time I shoplifted, but that would not be true, either. My crimes were always petty, pocketing an object I could afford, the money in my wallet.

It was about validation, the thrill of getting away with something. Everyone had so much; I had so little, and there were always hands in my pockets seeking to relieve me of what little I had. Braces for the kid? School clothes? Summer camp? Stealing was how I defied the circumstances that made me an itinerant professor and single parent. Morality is an abstraction. I was motivated by self-righteousness entitlement.

 Gaze, Universe, I steal with impunity, for I am destined to win.

In 2012, Perry Glasser was named a Fellow of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in Creative Nonfiction. Riverton Noir, a novel, won the Gival Press Novel Award in 2011. He has published three collections of short fiction, as well as a collection of short memoirs entitled Metamemoirs (2012). Glasser lives in Haverhill, Massachusetts where he drinks staggering amounts of coffee while working on a young adult novel.

The Shop

by Robert Maynor

The Shop sits on a road called Farm. It’s a cinderblock building on a concrete slab that is divided in half by a thin wall. One half is offices, the other is a warehouse full of tools and steel pipe, an old Murray lawnmower without a hood, a white 1994 Ford F-250, tubs of Gojo, motor-oil, two tall wooden shelves full of pipe fittings, an ice-machine, a STIHL calendar with bikini models on it, five-gallon buckets, a cardboard cutout of Bill Elliot, a big monkey stuffed with beans, ladders, one hundred empty cans of Kodiak, a scissor lift. Across the street is a transmission shop. To the left is an empty lot where a VW bus is parked with sweet-gums growing out of the windows.

My grandfather bought the Shop sometime in the early eighties after telling the bigwigs at Grinnell to suck his ass and after working for a little while from my grandmother’s kitchen table.

My grandfather will be turning seventy soon. He likes to talk about retiring. I think if he really does retire, he’ll die, despite his health. Good health can only take a man so far. 

        His secretary, Nance, is at least as old as he is. She still uses a typewriter and a rolodex and sticks post-it notes all over the Shop like they’re wallpaper. She was always kind of fat, but these days it’s gotten to where it’s almost fascinating. Normally my grandfather hates fat people, even though he’s growing a little liquor gut himself. He yells at Nance like he’s married to her.

        My dad started working for my grandfather when he was seventeen, as a helper. After he graduated, he went to school in Sumter for two years and got an Associate’s degree in Forest Management, then went to work full-time fitting pipe. He is forty-seven now. He hates his job. I think he hates his life. He haunts the Shop like a ghost.

        When my dad goes to the gas station for a drink or a can of chew, he brings Nance back a snack-cake or a pack of Jolly Ranchers. He always picks on her about Jesus. She thinks he’s the funniest man in the world. She probably loves him more than she loves Jesus.

        When I was sixteen, I started cleaning the Shop. They paid me fifty dollars a week to scrub the commodes and vacuum the floors inside. My grandfather gave me a key. It was the first key I ever had to anything. My dad gave me an apron.

        “Don’t pay no attention to that dickhead,” my grandfather said, grinning beneath his thin little mustache.

        “I don’t,” I said.

        My grandfather keeps a lot of pictures in his office of me and my cousins; my dad and my aunt and uncle; my grandmother. There’s a stuffed pheasant on the wall and a piece of paper with a cartoon buzzard that says: “Patience, my ass. I’m going out and kill something.” I’ve never known what that means. There’s also about fifty copies of handprints tacked over the window from biggest to smallest, with the owner’s name written on the bottom of each one.

        When I was seventeen, I had sex with a girl named July in that office, on a drafting table, at a kind of weird angle. Afterwards, cleaning the toilets, my back was sore as hell. Driving her home, the whole car stunk like bleach.

        At the Shop, trucks cling to the parking lot like the shed skins of men. My dad drives a tan colored Chevrolet with a broken tailgate. My grandfather drives a Ford Sport-Trac: it’s green. It used to have two gold racing stripes down the middle, but it doesn’t anymore. My uncle drives a two-wheel drive F-150; clean and well-oiled, like him. The workers drive dirty, faceless trucks that cough when you crank them.

        In the mornings they gather, these working men, in the lot like dogs. They are every color. They stand in a broken circle, wearing short-sleeves, even in winter—thankful for the cold. One of them has a mustache and one of them has an eyelid that sags half-way over his eyeball. They don’t drink coffee. My father stands before them like a priest. He lays blueprints out on the hood of some truck and draws on them with a square pencil sharpened with a knife. He brings home a little over eight-hundred dollars a week.

        My uncle moved to the Shop from Texas. He is my dad’s younger brother. He lived in Texas for my entire life with his wife and two poodles, one black and one white. They knew how to do tricks, like play dead. When he moved here, my grandmother said he was coming home. The floor of his office is covered in the shells of sunflower seeds. Sometimes he leaves his radio on over the weekend. He tries to teach Nance how to email.

        My own brother loves to go to the Shop. He’s eleven now. He climbs up in the lift and grabs the joystick like it’s his own dick and drives the thing around like a madman. He hooks the safety chain onto one of his belt loops, but he never goes up. He says he’s never going to college. He says he’s going to own a Shop that sells and works on lifts.

        “There’s only one problem,” my dad says. “You’re scared to go up without me.”

        My dad’s office is outside, in the warehouse. It has a cracked tile floor and a desk and a metal folding chair that I’ve never seen him sit in. He wears boots every day until the leather begins to peel off of the steel toes and then he throws them away and buys another pair.

        I quit cleaning the shop when I went to college and they hired a woman to do it. I took up working odd hours for a plumber.

        “School comes first,” my grandfather said.

        “I should’ve know you’d turn full queer,” my dad said. He calls plumbers hockey jockeys. “There’s only three things you need to know to be a plumber,” he says. “Shit flows downhill, payday is on Friday, and knockoff time is at 3:30.”

        I quit that job too.

        There’s a squirrel that lives in a pine tree that rises up over the Shop like a steeple. It jumps from its tree onto a power-line and then from there onto the roof. My grandfather wants it to be killed because he says it’s getting into the Shop through the roof vents and eating the insulation. My uncle bought a pellet gun and spends at least two hours every day trying to shoot the squirrel. If he ever kills it, I think he’ll cut the tail off and zip it up in his fly and walk around with it hanging out like that until it rots.

        “You know,” my dad says, eating a gas station hotdog off the hood of his truck, his shirt soaked through with sweat, his knuckles black and scabbed; he is smiling with the thought in the corner of his head that in a few hours he will drive home and have the opportunity to run his truck headfirst into an oak tree, but won’t; will go home instead to my mother and that crumbling yellow shack and count the hours until he can go back to the Shop; leave his family behind for a little while; further break his gnarled back. “That ain’t the only squirrel that can climb.”

        Someone painted the front door of the Shop red. It looks like lipstick on an old woman. It shows her age: her tits are sagging, there’s cobwebs in her eyes, her carpet has grown moldy and is starting to stink. She could use a new set of shingles.

        My grandfather will be turning seventy soon. My dad will be fifty, half dead. Nance goes home at 4:30, and my uncle knocks off at five. When the men come back from their jobs, they get in their emphysematous vehicles and leave. My grandfather goes out into the warehouse and runs a push-broom over every inch of the cement floor. My father sits on an upturned bucket, reading the paper and spitting into a bottle of motor oil.

        “Go home, boy,” my grandfather says. “Go home.”

        “I will.”

        “There’s nothing left to do here.” He leans his broom against the wall and stands in an open bay-door and looks out. The sun is beginning to set over the top of the transmission shop. He is nothing but a shadow.

        He reaches up and grabs a string, pulls the door shut, and the whole warehouse is dark. My dad folds his paper and stands. “I’ll see you tomorrow then,” he says.

        “I’ll be right here.” They go inside to my grandfather’s office together. They look silently at the photographs strewn about the room like dust—vestiges of another life outside of the Shop. They turn off all of the lights, lock the doors, and go out to the parking lot. They nod their heads and get into their trucks and drive towards home.

Robert Maynor is from the Lowcountry of South Carolina. He has worked as a commercial plumber, dishwasher, cook, landscaper, and musician. His stories and essays have previously been published in Bartleby Snopes and Lander University’s New Voices. He is twenty-two years old.

Give Me a Sign

by Linda Tharp

There’s a lava rock wall in front of a Maui condo complex from which a nondescript sign announces the complex’s name, a series of leapfrogging n’s and o’s heralding vacation before you’ve even dragged your jet-lagged self out of the rental car. The wall’s rocks are rough and my daughters’ skin, still mainland pale, appeared delicate in comparison as they stood under the sign for the requisite photo in their matching sundresses and Salt Water sandals, their hair not yet chlorine-brassy and their noses not yet peeling.

Nine years later Mom and Dad invited me back to Maui; they returned every April or May and always stayed at the complex with that rock wall. My husband endorsed my joining them, probably hoping time away would have a mellowing effect on me, and assured me he could handle his job, the house, three kids, and our Dalmatian for a week. A week! It was too good to be true.

“Are you sure you don’t mind?” I asked him. “Because you’ll have to get the girls back and forth to school.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Don’t worry—I mean, I can drive.”

I shook my head. “It’s not just that. Things come up that you never have to deal with, things you don’t even know about: permission slips, missing library books... There’s more to it than just driving.” Then I said, so quietly he asked me to repeat myself, “Besides, what about Erin?”

“What about her? I told you, we’ll be fine. Just go have fun.”

I half-heartedly bought sunscreen and a paperback or two, and agreed—perhaps too enthusiastically—when others said, “That’s so exciting you get to go!” What they didn’t know was that a lethal cocktail of melancholy and guilt threatened to derail my trip before it even started. Worse, I feared my cocktail glass would be refilled every time I saw the sign hanging on that rock wall and remembered my girls standing under it. 

I’m not sure how old they were in that photo—probably five, six, and eight. It seemed as if time stood still then, like I’d be forever unsnarling tangles from tender scalps and refereeing turns in the front seat, and I remember feeling comfortably stuck, contentedly itchy with life’s predictability. Now, even though it had been six years since life morphed from comfortable and predictable to this, returning to a spot we’d all enjoyed seemed callous, like I was trying to forget—or ignore—what has happened. Because today, Erin, our oldest, is in a wheelchair, nonverbal, and permanently disabled. She will never stand or speak again.

Six years after that photo was taken—six years after she tied a plastic grass skirt around her waist and swayed her nonexistent hips, six years after buying her sisters puka shell necklaces with her allowance—Erin lay in a teaching hospital’s ICU in a medically-induced coma, her private room so crammed with monitors and IV pumps and nurses that she seemed inconsequential by comparison. She eventually survived the tenacious virus that breached the usually unbreachable blood-brain barrier. Or, that is to say, doctors called her existence survival.

I expected things to become more complicated as the girls got older, and when Sarah, our middle daughter, accidentally baked her pet rats Phoebe and Camille in a misguided attempt to give them a morning of fresh July air (which became intense heat sooner than Sarah anticipated), I felt a perverse sense of relief despite my rants about irresponsibility. The complications I anticipated were along the lines of nefarious boyfriends and speeding tickets; sun-dried rats, I decided, would provide exemption from future catastrophe.

Often I wondered if Erin’s doctors were misguided, if their achievements weren’t necessarily in Erin’s best interest; if her survival—by their fluid interpretation, anyway—would be enough. In the era of that photo, I believed Erin’s future held more than the comfortable predictability she was raised with. The particulars swirled in my imagination like glitter, bits of hope and promise catching the light but not settling into a discernable pattern. That pattern took shape in Erin’s early teens, her passion for space exploration blossoming into dreams of a NASA career, and while she lay fighting for her life in ICU, a dog-eared NASA application packet with the return address of “Astronaut Selection Office” lay at home on her bedroom desk—which illustrates the fluidity of the word “survival.”

We did our best to maintain an illusion of normalcy during Erin’s eleven-month hospitalization, but life felt like a series of wrong choices: spending time at Kelley’s science fair awards instead of at Erin’s bedside, or letting Sarah and Kelley go to Catalina Island with Mom and Dad for the day despite a nagging fear that the ferry would sink. I was governed by guilt and doubt, no longer trusting instinct or common sense. Part of that, I know now, is because life was upended for no reason other than a willful virus. Nothing seemed safe anymore, or sacred, or sure. In a matter of hours I had gone from weighing Erin’s desire for our attendance at her space launch, to listening as a neurosurgeon recommended sawing away part of Erin’s skull. Now I was afraid seeing that condo’s sign would unnerve me more than finding those two caged heatstroke victims in our backyard. 

I was in no hurry to leave our rental car’s backseat despite the five-hour flight spent seat-belted to a barely cushioned concrete slab, my reluctance having nothing to do with comfort and everything to do with avoiding that sign for as long as possible. But as fate would have it we neither hit traffic nor careened off a cliff so here we were, pulling into the condo’s parking lot, and there it was, not thirty feet in front of us. Empty, is what I thought—the wall looked empty without three little girls in front of it. I waited for the smack upside the head I’d expected, the harsh realization that all three girls would never stand here—or stand anywhere, for that matter—ever again. The smack never came.

I spent hours on the same chaise lounges the girls squirmed on as they waited to go swimming after lunch, Coppertone making them slick as eels, and on the same beach where they built castles that melted like sugar with the tide. The smack never came, but a revelation did: even if Erin hadn’t gotten sick, even if our whole family was here right now, the girls wouldn’t be in matching sundresses, I wouldn’t pose them for another cheesy picture, and there’d be no more sand castles. It had nothing to do with Erin’s illness, and everything to do with the passage of time.

After Erin got sick I spent countless nights wondering if her survival would be enough, if blinking and breathing and swallowing would be enough for a girl with the former determination—and the former smarts—to join NASA. But in my either/or mind, I’d lumped “survival” and “NASA” together: Erin couldn’t have one without the other. When those sand castles were washed away, the girls built new ones, some more elaborate than the original, some less, but they didn’t stare at their now-vacant lot pining for what was.

The nonverbal, wheelchair-bound Erin will never join NASA. But the able-bodied Erin would not have received a standing ovation upon her high school graduation three years after she was almost declared brain dead, or be named Ambassador of the Year for her involvement with a nonprofit that provides wheelchairs to the disabled in Third World Countries ten years after that. The old Erin lived large, but so does the new Erin—without ever uttering a word.

I’ve returned to Maui every year since then with Mom and Dad. That rock wall is still there, but it no longer symbolizes evaporated plans—now it’s simply jagged stones, possibly thousands of years old, possibly manmade and bought at Home Depot, stacked like a jigsaw puzzle. And if I look closely, I see tongues orange from POG juice, fingers sticky with Roselani ice cream, and am reminded of what’s waiting at home.

Linda Tharp loved language from an early age when she first realized words can hurt you, a tactic she employed against neighborhood bullies due to her inability to throw either sticks or stones very far. She lives in Southern California with Gary, Erin, and grand-dog Maggie, and is currently writing a memoir based on the impact of Erin’s illness.

On Raising Snakes

by Ed McCourt

Corn Snake Mike is pointing out a wooden bird house on the edge of his property and is beginning to tell the story of how he came to build it when a broad-chested blue jay darts down to rest on its roof.

“Almost as big as a kingfisher,” I say.

“Close.”

Instead, Mike tells the story of an abandoned hatchling blue jay a neighbor found squeaking on his porch. That neighbor knew to bring it to Mike. He took it in, hand fed it, raised it up indoors: “It learned to imitate the sounds of the house.” He tells me about the first time the blue jay barked like a dog, then when it learned to whistle, and finally when it started imitating the ringing of his kitchen phone.

“My father would come in and answer the phone and yell about pranksters because no one would be on the line!” He follows this punchline with his habitual, guttural laugh and a push of his glasses. He is wearing a black T-shirt and on it is an eagle carrying a banner that reads “100% American” and practical sneakers. I know that, before becoming a Corn Snake guy, Mike was raised here in the south and retired from the automobile manufacturing industry. He tells me more about blue jays, how they love anything shiny, how he trained his to take pennies from his hand and drop them into his shirt pocket only to land on him later to ensure the coin was safe.

I’m not sure how I first found Mike, but I do remember that at the time an internet search of “Corn Snakes” and “Florida” turned up his home-made website as a top result. I asked him once how his website got so much traffic; it turns out he had taken a continuing education course search engine optimization, and the next month, he was in the top ten results in Google for “Corn Snakes.” We are friends now, but at first, I was just a guy curious about snakes and he was a popular google search.

Why snakes? Slithering, yes.  But isn’t there something elegant about it? And their skin! Cooler, smoother, and much softer than anyone who has not held one might imagine. That curious flicker of tongue, those severe (concerned?) eyes. For such a simple animal, it can be polarizing; as an order the serpent elicits a response matched by few, save the arachnid. My curiosity includes serpents, but also extends to other reptiles, or more accurately ‘herps,’—a commonly truncated nominalization of the word ‘herpetology,’ the scientific study of reptiles and amphibians.

When I talk with Corn Snake Mike, we stand between the side by side sheds: the snake house on the right, fully insulated and temperature controlled, and the smaller, less sophisticated hut on the left that he calls the “Mouse Farm.” It houses hundreds of adult mice alongside their thousands of offspring, many of the females puffed out awkwardly at both sides like those pickup trucks with obtrusive double wheels on the back axle. All generations live together in plastic tubs: pinkies (the babies, named because they are furless), fuzzies (for their short fur), hoppers (they are jumpy), and other adults. Screens top each tub, pinned down by old peanut butter jars filled with water, a small hole drilled in the bottom so the mice can lean up and suck a droplet through the mesh.  

There is also the side of the ‘farm’ I choose not to see—the table where Mike does the killing. “I just grab them by their tails and wham!” He gesticulates a fast turn of his wrist, a quick, mechanical snap—a motion he repeats hundreds of times each week. “They never feel a thing ... it is like falling off a twenty story building for them.” The silent victims of the pet trade, millions raised like miniature cattle, slaughtered to sustain pets, mice and rats are used in lab experiments because they share DNA strains with humans. Ultimately, we sacrifice these millions of mammals, our close genetic kin, to facilitate the hobby of keeping cold blooded species.

This is a world I have found myself in, but not without reservations. Animal husbandry has always operated on a basic tenet of symbiosis: grain for eggs, pasture for milk. The arrangement with traditional pets is a bit less concrete, but clear; well-timed treats for loyalty, affection, or a coy purr.

This is more difficult to explain in terms of herps.

Yet they are bred nonetheless, in impressive numbers. According to a study presented to the 112^th Congress, some five million homes in this country house nearly fifteen million reptiles, and as a nation we exported an additional eleven million. Most of these are produced by hobbyist breeders in small spaces like Mike’s, and a huge cottage industry has risen alongside it.

Mike has huge varieties of corn snakes in his collection. I would drive up his long dirt driveway and park along the chicken wire he uses to coral his hens and tortoises, and he would appreciate my interest and explain to me the tenets of good snake husbandry. But there was one piece of the corn snake puzzle Mike never really addressed: the science.

So I read. I found online forums and bought corn snake books written by the respected breeders in the field. I got a juvenile ‘normal’ (the ‘wild’ coloration and pattern) from Mike and kept him as a pet, mostly because I wanted one, but partially for the purpose of familiarizing my wife with the notion of having a reptile in the house. This wasn’t an easy sell at first. “I don’t think we are snake people,” she would say, invoking the stigma of the snake.

In my research I learned that, like the modern dog, reptile breeders work to isolate aberrant genetic traits. For corns, these genes have been mostly recessive, and include amelanistic genes, anerythristic, hypomelanistic, diffused, dilute, stripe, motley, lavender, sun-kissed, lava, charcoal, caramel, and cinder. What is further is that these genes are on separate alleles and hence can be combined to make literally millions of potential varieties, called ‘morphs.’ There are candy cane corn snakes and pewter ones, avalanche and coral, plasma, gold dust, and citrine. There is snow, opal, and both—snopal. And each year people are breeding to further diversify the offerings in what is the largest segment of the pet trade running, though being outpaced in terms of growth by more exotic snakes like pythons and boas (for the corn snake is a species of colubrid native to the US). Eventually, I found a pair for myself that were heterozygous for multiple traits and could hence produce variegated offspring.

And like that, I was a snake breeder. I have learned that it doesn’t matter how many pairs one has, even if it is a single pair of domestic and otherwise non ‘exotic’ colubrid, if they produce eggs, then one is irrevocably a snake breeder. My wife can say goodbye to her weekly book club if that gets out.

As a father of snakes, I have become much more attuned to the stigma surrounding them, particularly in a state like Florida where venomous species are indigenous. There is a kind of ubiquitous serpent mythology here; local newspapers document rattlesnakes simply for having the nerve to be seen in public. In my neighborhood, I have seen dozens of ‘rattlesnakes’ killed and laid out with the trash, only to identify them has harmless, overgrown Florida garters, racers, or banded water snakes. A friend of mine actually will not use the word ‘snake’, and instead calls them esses (for the letter S, and the sound they make), because in his experience, uttering the very word conjures them.

It would be misleading to say it is a local phenomenon. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the first man and woman were duped by a devil in serpentine form. Similar mythology has sprung up around the Ebola virus. The story goes that the virus originated from a woman carrying a basket containing a snake. When opened, the snake gave Ebola to the first man it encountered. It is said that the serpent is still alive, roaming the country side, only now it can, like the equally terrifying snake-headed medusa, stricken a man with Ebola just by fixing its gaze on him.

The fear of snakes is logical as metaphor. The snake—as an extension of nature, of death, of disease—can live in plain sight undetected, and then when it is not at all expected, rise and strike with unmatched accuracy. For that reason, it is not quite the danger that scares us, but the quiet cunning of the thing.

Of course, this is not the experience with a clutch of eggs. Like an expectant mother, I fretted over the oblong eggs and watched them swell. I checked temperatures, humidity levels, and practically prayed over each nose ‘pipping’ out of its egg. I was, after all, growing living beings from a shoebox of peat and perlite in the stifling heat of my office closet. I did end up with some genetically unique animals, though when I compared them to the morphs Mike had in his collection, they weren’t really anything new, other than how vivid the ‘cube’ pattern was that graced the dorsal line of a handful.

Breeding aside, my favorite snakes of Mike’s aren’t the unique, strange, genetically aberrant in his collection. My favorites, by far, are a pair of ‘wild’ sub-adult yellow rat snakes that have found their way into the Mouse Farm and have taken up residence, pressed into the narrow slot between two tubs of mice.

In the shed, Mike opens a mouse rack: an offering. The rat snakes come over and peek in, look back at us for a moment, and snatch one of the scurrying bunch.

I love these yellow rat snakes, not because they are more beautiful than the selectively bred specimens next door, but because of their condition. Their presence, in as much as we can anthropomorphize the behavior of cold blooded reptiles, is an act of volition. They are free to leave, but because of Mike, because of his mice, they remain—without enclosures.

When I happen upon a wild snake, I try to give them that same choice. Choose not to bite me, and you might come to my home. Choose to eat my food, and you can stay. It is a simple system that creates some sense of contract between two living beings.

So why not stop there, with a wild snake that has ‘chosen’ to stay? If husbandry is ultimately a refined form of biological symbiosis, and we do not receive the obvious benefits from reptiles that we do from other animals, what is it that we gain from the keeping of herps? Perhaps I raised snakes for the same reason I write—to accomplish the most challenging thing in the world: creating something unique, beautiful, and complete.

Perhaps the entire “exotic” pet trade is, in some way, an effort to compartmentalize the wild element of nature into something manageable and urban. We restrict animals to square boxes the way the sun is contained behind the right angles of the neighbor’s house, the high-rised skyline. The mouse farm, the snake racks, our own homes and neighborhoods—all of us in boxes.

But there are other explanations that I worry about. Does this make the animal into spectacle? The same kind of misguided apotheosis as the circus elephant, crowned, bejeweled, glorified, but depressed and severely malnourished when back in its cage? Perhaps it is a symptom of the dissonance between man and nature: the best we can do is scrape together this facsimile of wildness, a tamed pseudo-beast that would rather allow itself to be manhandled than to strike out in its own defense, to provide ourselves a surrogate for nature. Does it in some way relieve the burden of our manufactured cartons, the various cloistered spaces of our lives? Perhaps we find it more tolerable knowing that something ‘wild’ is similarly confined and still surviving. Or worse, is it vindictive: I am in a box, and so it will be for you. Misery loves company, scales and all.

It wasn’t long after writing on this subject that I went back to see Mike, and of course, to pick up an order of mice. It was spring and as we spoke I noticed the boughs of his white grapefruit trees were full and bent to the point of breaking. He offered me whatever I could reach, and told me about his two varieties of fig trees. Through the branches, I noticed one of his bird houses that line the southern corner of his property. It is always difficult, I thought, to imagine the bird—with all its darting and soaring—contained in a wooden box.

“There are actually two nests in that—one in the house, and another below it in the top of the log where something bored out an opening. You can lift up the house and see a second nest beneath.”

We walked over. Mike told me he had seen a tufted titmouse going in and out, and hoped that the nests would be full of eggs, or better, hatchlings. “Unless a rat snake has made a meal of them,” I joked. Macabre, but this was the same place where we let patient rat snakes feed on live mice practically from our hands.

His face was solemn, “I sure hope not.”

We didn’t see anything at first, but I whistled a bird call, and by the end, we counted five down coated heads, popping up, mouths agape, waiting to be fed.

It was these hatchlings that reminded me why we kept these corns snakes: the natural world is magnificent but ever fleeting. The whole industry is but an attempt to keep in boxes some connection to nature that is otherwise uncontrollable and transient. We whistle and call it up to us, and after a glimpse, its downy head is back, low and hidden in some thicket. This practice is a meager attempt to sustain that singular instance in which nature is summoned to us, all beaks and scales, down and fur, and graces us with a moment of mutual recognition.

Ed McCourt is an Associate Professor in the English Department at Jacksonville University. His essays and poetry have appeared in the Little Patuxent Review, the Portland Review, Gravel Magazine, the Bacopa Literary Review, and elsewhere.

A Ha-pence of Sense

by Peter Wadsworth

Soon after reaching his hundredth birthday, my father decided he had finished with looking after himself and moved into a nursing home.

I visit once a week.

I enter the room to find him slumped in a chair. The thought insinuates: "he's dead!" A rattle, and saliva trickles from his mouth. I shake myself and stride towards him. "Hello dad," I say, and repeat louder when I get no answer. A gentle pressure on his shoulder elicits no response, neither does a firm grip. I retire, defeated, to fetch his jacket from his room, and pass a resident in the corridor determinedly making progress while clutching her walking frame and muttering to no one in particular. Returning with the coat and a wheelchair, I grasp his shoulder. He stirs, eyes flickering open and shut as his consciousness struggles to return to the resident's lounge. Still a little confused, he looks around and notices my presence. After a few seconds his dazed expression turns to recognition and a little smile flickers across his face. I sit next to him while he gathers strength, inspecting his face. The forehead sports a large plaster earned from his latest fall. Yellow teeth few but still his own. Hair pure white, the waves hinting at once lustrous full locks. The face still remarkably unlined, belying his 102 years.

When I was fourteen he constructed a kayak in our garage: a two person—well, a one man and one boy. We were going on an adventure. A template was ordered, paper patterns for tracing the cross members in ply, and detailed instructions on how to form the skeleton and clad it in canvas. But my father had a better idea: he had acquired the very first samples of a new development, glass fibre. Little by little we (that is he, while I watched and occasionally passed a tool) built up the frame until we had what looked like the bones of a twelve foot prehistoric sea monster. Over this were stretched layer after layer of glass fibre fabric and lashings of resin. This was not a light nimble craft but a dreadnought, only just able to be lifted by the two of us. That long hot summer my father and I cannoned down the river Wye. Water levels were low and we were the only kayakers on the river. Stories are told to this day in those whereabouts of the two crazies who barreled down the half dry river bouncing from rock to boulder to rock in a miraculously undamaged kayak.

He has little conversation, and grunts as I ask him if he wants to go out. He readies himself for our little routine. The wheelchair is positioned next to his chair. I take his hands and become his strength. "On three," I intone and pull him gently forward while he rocks his body. A second pull and he has the rhythm. With the next he pushes himself forward and I carefully draw him out of the chair as he gradually, with great effort, rises to his feet. He steadies sufficiently for me to guide his left hand to the wheelchair, and I lead him on a slow, unsteady pirouette to line him up with his destination. On my command he trustingly slumps backwards and is safely ensconced in the seat. I propel him purposefully down the main corridor towards the entrance, passing staff who wish him a good trip or teasingly place orders for fish and chips.

Inserting my father into the car takes all of five minutes for a drive of a thousand yards to an ordinary looking pub, which unaccountably but delightfully has an excellent chef. Our five minute disembarkation routine has us safely inside the building. Seating is tricky. I get my father out of the wheelchair with the one two three routine and plonked down on the bench seat. Then I need to maneuver the heavy table as close to him as possible. I gently lift one foot up and move the table base under it, repeating the procedure for the other foot. I scramble up off the floor and smile inanely at the bemused fellow diners. I roll up my father's sleeves and tuck in a number of napkins under chin and chest. We are ready. My father orders lamb, which comes on a raft of sweet potato with assorted vegetables, all beautifully presented. I have had the dish before and it is delicious. I cut the meat into bite-sized pieces and place the cutlery in his hands. Food has always been an important and serious occupation for my father and we proceed in strict silence. He struggles to grip his knife and fork, then spends much time and effort in persuading sufficient morsels of food to remain on his fork as he lifts it waveringly towards his mouth. I find myself transfixed by the spectacle, hoping that his efforts will be rewarded and saddened at his frequent failures. A residual determination drives him to persist. Forty minutes after commencing his meal he is pursuing the few remaining rebellious peas around his plate with a persistence worthy of a door stopping reporter. "Did you enjoy your meal?" I ask. "No", he responds, looking down at his empty plate. "I like it plain and simple."

Like all seventeen year olds I realised that I knew more than my parents. They were old, behind the times, could not understand. One of the less objectionable manifestations of this obvious truth was that I believed I was a better cook than my mother. So, with the arrogance and ignorance of youth I took over the preparation of the evening meal. Not having trained with Escoffier I would raid the pantry and refrigerator, pillaging anything vaguely edible. Unique and scary concoctions, often of ill-assorted vegetables, perhaps some dubious meat or fish, seasoning, spices and/or herbs, were placed triumphantly in front of my long suffering parents. Unlike my mother, who often retreated to wedges of bread smothered in butter, dad reveled in the strange and unexpected,and so looked forward to his evening repasts. After a particularly enjoyable meal my father said he would like the dish again sometime. I did not reply. I had created a concoction of such complexity that re-creation was an impossibility; I could not recall all the ingredients or quantities. I sighed, another culinary masterpiece was lost to the world.

After the meal we complete the afternoon by a drive in the country. The hinterland of West Yorkshire is a mosaic of crisscrossing roads linking once industrial towns with ribbon development. But this seeming megalopolis contains unblemished hills and moors, prosperous farms and dense woods. These hidden places are what we seek. Each of these trips is an exploration, every turning done on whim, meandering through unexpected villages and stone bounded fields. My father gazes around, trapped in a metal box but enjoying the views. "Perfect clouds," he volunteers.

In his fifties he took up gliding. It became a passion. The silence, the freedom, the vantage of an eagle. He became a skilled but individualistic pilot. Low speed flight was a fascination. As air speed drops lift caused by airflow over the wings decreases and eventually the craft stalls, one wing losing lift completely. The glider drops suddenly to that side, spiraling down out of control unless the pilot has the skill and sufficient altitude to recover by putting the nose down and diving to gain speed. My father wondered if it would be possible to keep a stalling glider from losing control. On a series of flights he gained maximum altitude for safety, and gradually, after repeated stalls, he found he was able to keep flying by innumerable subtle adjustments of the ailerons. The slower he travelled the faster the plane dropped, but still under control. Back at the clubhouse he eagerly told the flight instructor of his discovery. The instructor was furious, said that was impossible and that if he tried such a stupid maneuver again would be grounded.

Later that season my father had a launch by winch. The driver, inexperienced, released him too soon. He did not have sufficient height or speed and was therefore unable to circuit round to land. Rather than spiral into the ground, he used his new technique to keep flying, dropping ever faster to the ground. The glider landed normally but very heavily. Both he and the glider survived. He with a painful back, the glider with scratches. Ground staff were astonished. "Why did the glider not crash, you could have been killed!" My father kept his silence.

He awakes as we pull into the nursing home drive and I decant him into the wheelchair. He needs his bathroom; I can see that his pad is leaking. In his suite I manhandle him onto the toilet seat. Exhausted, he rests for a while as I close the door to give him privacy. Looking around his bedroom I notice a faded photograph in a silver frame. A pleasure boat on a river, a glimpse of a man leaning out of the cabin. My father swings open the bathroom door. He is ready to have his pad replaced.

When my sister and I were in our early teens our parents bought a thirty foot cabin cruiser: four berth, galley, washroom, centre control cabin, gleaming white timber hull, sparking chromium fittings. It just happened to be called Yvonne, my sister's name. My mother was afraid of water but that was of no concern to my father. It was his pride and joy. The boat was berthed in a small marina hidden on a minor tributary of the river Severn, a pastoral idyll. We would drive down for the weekend, my parents disappearing into the boat to get things ship shape while my sister and I were free to wander. I loved exploring further up the little river, now too narrow for pleasure craft. I passed through swathes of nettle, both white and pink flowered. Tempted to stroke the leaves in the direction of the barbs to avoid being stung, invariably I had then to search out dock leaves to rub on my inflamed hands and legs. Being brave in the face of adversity, I would continue further into the wilds. A plop caused me to look across the river bank, a plump water vole was sculling towards its muddy hole. On a stagnant outreach of the waterway busy water boatmen skittered on the placid water surface, whirling legs bending the elastic membrane. A little upstream I caught a flash of turquoise and froze, moving my head round very slowly until I espied a kingfisher perched on a thin branch stretched out over the water. A full five minutes passed but the bird remained a statue. I slowly and quietly withdrew, only to hear a splash. I hurried back to see an empty branch and ripples spilling out from the water below.

During one long languid summer spent on the river Severn we ventured down a small tributary of the main river and chose a shady clearing to camp. My father made the craft secure, then began to forage. Mystified, my sister and I watched as he gathered broken tree branches and bunches of reeds. Squatting down beside the boat he began to strip the branches of bark, the green wood shimmering in the dappled sunlight. To our delight, half an hour later an elegant yet sturdy child sized stool with willow frame and reed woven seat stood before us, created using but saw screwdriver and hammer. The stool was used constantly all summer, supporting our fidgeting bodies without complaint until joining that optimistic group of goods mentally labeled “will be needed again” and consigned to the furthest recesses of the garage.

We head for the lounge and his favourite armchair. I retrieve his walking frame and he transfers to it from the wheelchair. Always a man of few words, he waves at the chair. I eventually deduce that he wishes for it to be moved alongside the adjacent armchair. "Not fall," he mutters, and I realise that placing the chairs together would prevent cups or biscuits placed on the arm falling down the gap. After flopping down into the soft upholstery of his chair he fiddles with his walking frame against the chair front. I reach over and move it to one side. He bristles and harrumpfs. The thought comes to me that his fiddling had been to some purpose. He had placed it hard against the chair so that his leverage would be maximized when he later had to struggle out of the chair by himself. I am comforted that in such a reduced existence his intelligence was still at work.

He hated school. Most of his teachers regarded him as "thick"; dyslexia had yet to be recognized. But in mathematics he excelled, particularly with problems, exercises in logic, the harder the better. Later in life he ran a plumbers' shop in a chemical works, but spent much of his time solving problems throughout the massive site. On one occasion he was presented with the first samples of a new wonder plastic, polythene, and asked to play about with it. Some of the samples were of tube, which sprang back into shape if bent. This was a challenge to my father, and he tried many possible techniques until finally succeeding in having them retain a bent configuation. A little while later he attended a seminar run by the scientists and chemists who had invented the plastic. During their presentation it was stated categorically that the tube could not be bent permanently. Although a man of few and hesitant words, my father stood up and explained that he had devised a method of doing so. The experts laughed him down. "Impossible", they cried. Dad, disgusted, walked away fulminating against "so called experts who don't have a ha'pence of sense between them." In his nineties this under-educated man obtained one patent for flood defenses, and a second for generating electrical power from ocean tides.

He looks around at fellow residents, some asleep, others staring into the void. Helpers position a hoist over a chair and gently lower an old lady into place. A heartbreakingly dispiriting environment. He wishes to be moved to the dining room, even though the evening meal is an hour away. We go through the one two three routine, I move him the thirty feet to the dining room, and lift, adjust, cajole, and shuffle him into place at his favourite table. He is dismissive of the food at the home. “All reheated from the day before,” he grumbles unfairly. But any food is better than no food, and so alone in a sea of plastic tables, confident that he will not miss his next meal, he retreats into his memories as I withdraw until next week.

After leaving a long career as an architect, Peter Wadsworth now uses time once consumed with his work to pursue writing. Following the advice and encouragement of Alex Shoumatoff, the renowned Vanity Fair travel and environmental writer, Wadsworth has recently dusted down old scribbles and now works on new ones, delighting in recording the lives of people in all their complexity and the places they inhabit. He loves to travel to far flung places, recording both people's differences and their common humanity, but is always drawn back to his homeland of West Yorkshire with its gritstone towns, purple moorland, and proud, friendly people.

Red Wings

by Susan E. Lindsey

“Your stepmom and I are sorting stuff,” Dad said over the phone. “Is there anything of your mom’s you want? When you come out to Washington, you can take what you want back with you to Kentucky.”

My mom, an educated, well-read, and articulate woman, had been dead nearly twenty years. She died of cancer in her fifties. We had sorted and disposed of most of her belongings shortly after her memorial service, but Dad had kept a few things.

My father and beloved stepmother, Bernice, had been very happy together, but they were getting older and more aware of their mortality. Dad was calling his kids to pass along his possessions, starting with the things of Mom’s that he still had.

I pondered his question for several days. I had loved my mother very much. Shortly after she died, my father gave me her wedding and engagement rings. I had since passed them along to my daughter when she married and she wore them with pride and affection. Nothing of Mom’s would mean as much to me as her rings, but Dad obviously wanted me to have something else of hers. I thought about durable, but sentimental things—things that had meant something to her and would mean something to me, but that were portable enough to survive a trip of more than 2,000 miles. Not the delicate rose-covered china or the beautiful lead crystal—my sister, who lived closer to Dad, could have those. Not furniture or the boxes filled with her many books—too bulky to transport or ship. My brothers could divide them.

I called him back. “If no one else wants it, I’ll take the sterling silver flatware you and Mom got for your wedding.”

“OK. I’ll hold it for you.”

A couple of weeks later, Dad greeted me at the SeaTac Airport baggage claim and wrapped me in a bear hug. Bernice said, “Hi, sweetie,” and kissed me on the cheek. At their house, I dropped my bags in the guest bedroom and wandered into the kitchen. There, spread on the kitchen table, was Mom’s silver service. Knives lay in long, neat rows. Bowls of spoons glimmered. A bottle of silver polish and several cleaning rags lay nearby. A pile of blue flatware storage cloths sat next to the bottle of polish.

“I went to the bank and got it out of the safe deposit box,” Dad said. “I’ve been trying to clean it up for you.” I was oddly touched at the thought of Dad storing Mom’s silver at the bank, making a special trip downtown to pick it up, and polishing it in anticipation of my arrival.

I sat down with him and as we polished the silver, we caught up a little. I told him news of the family in Kentucky. He told me news of the family in Washington. It was an easy conversation. When it lulled a little, Dad stepped into the family room to check on Bernice.

I polished a teaspoon, working the blue liquid into the Damask Rose pattern on the handle. I thought of my parents on their wedding day—Mom, twenty-one, and Dad, twenty-three. They had married in the church her parents attended, the same church where my father’s grandfather had preached. Neither of them came from money, but my grandmother had well-to-do friends, and my mother worked in a jewelry and china shop. The couple registered for china, crystal, and silver, and received enough gifts to set a table for twelve.

They didn’t know on their wedding day that they would have seven children and little need for such elegant tableware. We grew up eating off Melmac plates and drinking from cheap glasses with painted-on daisies. We used everyday stainless steel flatware. We never got out the china and silver, even on holidays. Counting Dad, Mom, and all of us kids, we had a family of nine, and usually Uncle Ed and Aunt Jean and their six kids joined us. Even service for twelve wasn’t adequate.

So the china and crystal sat in the cabinet—lovely and fragile and representing an ideal at odds with reality. Perhaps when my mother was a young bride, she and my father had a few romantic dinners for two on the rose-strewn plates. Maybe she dreamed of someday holding supper parties or inviting the pastor and his wife over for dinner. Somehow, in the process of raising seven kids, she never found time to host formal meals. I wondered if she ever had the urge to tug open the china cabinet doors and set a lovely table.

When I was a child and dusting the dining room, I stared through the cabinet’s glass doors and dreamt of elegant dinner parties. Sharing a table with five brothers and a sister was usually loud and crazy—no formality, no grace, no elegance. I often yearned for something several steps above Melmac and meatloaf.

Dad walked back into the dining room and broke my reverie. He held a sturdy shoebox. “Red Wings: The Fittin’est Shoe for Work” was emblazoned on the side. Dad had worked for the phone company most of his life. He installed and fixed phones, and climbed poles to repair storm damage or string wire. He loved to work outdoors, in the garden, or in his workshop. Red Wing shoes, his first choice in footwear, were a lot like Dad—sturdy, hardworking, dependable, and without pretention.

“I think it will all fit in here,” he said. “This box should hold up well on the plane.”

I had a sudden post-9/11 realization. “Dad, we’ll have to ship it. They aren’t going to let me on the plane with a box of knives—even if they are Damask Rose.”

I researched shipping options. When we finished polishing the silver, we carefully inserted the knives, dinner and salad forks, teaspoons and soupspoons, seafood forks, butter knives, and miscellaneous serving pieces into the pockets of the tarnish-proof cloths, rolled them up, and tied them. We tucked them into the box, alternating the rolls, placing handles to the right and then to the left. It all fit beautifully and Dad taped it up eight ways to Sunday.

We took the heavy box to the Fed-Ex store, bought insurance, and shipped it to my workplace. I flew out of SeaTac that night and the box arrived safely.

To this day, I’m not sure why I chose my mother’s silver. I don’t lead an elegant life or host champagne suppers or dinner parties. A few times, I used the silver for holiday dinners—always with great joy—but most of the time, it remained stored in the Red Wings box.

I recently bought a wooden silver chest at a garage sale. I took it home, retrieved the Red Wings box, and unpacked all the silver. I slipped the knife blades into the velvety slots, stacked the forks and spoons into narrow channels, and found perfect places for every piece. The silver was lovely shining against the dark blue lining.

I picked up the Red Wings box and opened the kitchen trashcan. I hesitated. I thought of my mother and her china cabinet filled with beautiful things she never used. I thought of my father and his work shoes; I thought of him polishing an expensive set of silver and entrusting it to a shoebox. In the end, I could not throw away the Red Wings box.

Years from now, when I’m gone, my daughter and son will sort through my things. My son will kneel to pull things from under the bed, pick up an empty old shoebox, and raise a quizzical eyebrow at his sister.

Susan E. Lindsey fell in love with words in the second grade while reading The Wizard of Oz. After a nearly 20-year career in corporate communication and public relations, she now leads a much happier life as a writer, professional editor, and speaker. Her essays, short stories, and articles have been published in various newspapers, magazines, and anthologies. Susan earned a degree in communication at Pacific Lutheran University. A member of three writing groups and numerous historical and genealogical societies, she is completing work on a nonfiction manuscript.