Dad’s Study

          My dad’s study was a small low-ceilinged room filled with shelves, a desk, a chair, and a filing cabinet.  I don’t know why this seemed like such a mysterious, awe-inspiring room to me.  I do remember that for some reason we weren’t allowed to go in there by ourselves, again an opportunity for young lads to reveal their depravity. 

I remember going in there to ask dad a question, or bring him a mug of coffee from my mother, and furtively glancing around at the interesting looking shelves, or glancing into an opened drawer.  There were things that now seem normal, but to my young eyes looked like treasures.  An old SLR camera with a strange, Japanese name on it.  A pair of binoculars.  Marbles.  A kaleidoscope.  Books with unfamiliar titles.

The desk drawers were similarly enchanting.  Little cubbies for push pins and paperclips.  Many pens: fountain, ball and calligraphy.  Nibs and erasers.  The smell of those erasers, the type that are the consistency of rubbery chewing gum that you could stretch and pull apart, and then mash back together…smelling of graphite and rubber. 

That smell.  It almost magically pulls me back through time.  If I close my eyes and tune out the sounds of my own children, one making sweet sounds on the couch while she endures a full-body cast following hip surgery…the other downstairs shouting at the top of his lungs, pretending something.  If I could just close my eyes, and focus on the smell of the eraser that I have in my hand, I could once again be the little boy whose parents are outside in the garden with my brother.  I came in to “go to the bathroom” and while in the quite, cool house, I casually walked through the junk room and quietly pushed aside the green accordion door until I could slip into Dad’s office.  The quiet sliding of the desk drawer.  The clink of small metal objects as I sifted my fingers through my Dad’s possessions.  The smooth friction of the binocular focus knob as I looked through them out the small window toward the barn.  The bright circus of the kaleidoscope pointed out the window toward the bright sunlight.  The furtive putting back of everything, hopeful that Dad wouldn’t notice, and then breathlessly slipping out through the green accordion door and shutting it, having no idea I was creating an intense memory to be forgotten for 30 years, and then recaptured by the man I was to become, now with a growing volume of grey hairs myself, looking down at the twisted grey eraser on my desk, wishing I could become half the man, half the husband and father that my Dad was and is.

I look up and, hearing again the sounds of my own house, remember the 30 years that have come and gone and with a half-sad smile let the little boy that I was walk out of the quiet, cool house, into the bright sun and across the stream to help my family tend the garden.