Richard Dansky

By itself, an object tells you nothing. It is the context that tells you everything, the description and motion that lets that object become part of the story.

Take, for instance, an ambulance. By itself, it isn’t much. But put it on a busy freeway, lights flashing and moving a hundred miles an hour, and you have a story. Life and death, the skill of the driver, the race to the victim or the emergency room. The simple object full of possibility – for rescue, for tension, for a thousand things – has become part of a story.

Or, conversely put it somewhere else. Put it on the road, coming around the corner from the place you’re desperately trying to reach in time. Turn the sirens off, and the lights, too. Set it at normal driving speed, not the frantic plunge of a lifesaving sprint to the hospital.

Make sure it’s going in the wrong direction. Watch it go the other way.

That told me a story, too.

###

I don’t think my grandmother ever read any of my books. By the time I started getting published, her eyes weren’t the best any more. Besides, ghosts and vampires and magic swords weren’t really her speed. There were other books on the shelves of her house. Chaim Potok. James Herriot. Things like that, Some were hers, some were my grandfather’s. I never did ask who preferred which.

She had all of my books, though. They were displayed prominently, tiny paperbacks with purple werewolves on the cover tucked into a towering bookshelf in between the coffee table-sized monsters that discussed American Cut Glass and The History of Israel.

They meant a lot to her. And that meant a lot.

###

My mother wanted to write. She was good at it, won lots of awards in school. Once she told me about the time she accidentally walked out on stage to receive someone else’s writing award, simply because she and these other girls had won awards in the same order for so long (first, second, third) that it had become rote. When the order got switched up, just this once, she was already on autopilot and out on the stage.

If you know my mother, it’s hilarious. Trust me.

Mom stopped writing in college. She ran into a professor who didn’t like her work. He slammed it. It stopped her cold. To my knowledge, she hasn’t written since.

It means a lot to her that I write, even if it’s not necessarily the sort of thing she would prefer me to be writing. “When are you going to write something nice?” she’s asked me a few times. The fairy tale that I did as the intro to the second edition of a game called Changeling, lavishly illustrated by Rebecca Guay, remains her favorite thing that I’ve written. But what matters is that I write. I think she’s glad I didn’t give up on that dream, that when I ran into my own professor who critiqued my work with “We have nothing to say to one another,” I kept going. Or maybe she’s just happy I found something I genuinely love doing.

We found some of her writing, back when we were packing up the family house in Philadelphia in preparation for my parents’ move south. It was well preserved and hand-written, neatly scribed on a sheaf of lined paper.

I read it. It was good. Maybe if she’d ignored that professor, if she hadn’t stopped, things would have been different. Maybe I wouldn’t have gotten the encouragement to write that I got from her. Maybe I would have gotten more, and found that particular calling sooner.

I don’t know.

It is what it is. But her writing’s still here, and it’s not too late for her to start again.

###

At a certain point after the death of a loved one, the stories blur. You become hesitant to tell them, because you’re not sure if they really happened that way or if that’s the way you wanted them to have happened. You pause before beginning the telling, afraid that you might not get it right, that you might accidentally offend through misremembering or dramatic license.

You worry that your memories of the one who’s gone fit with everyone else’s, and you become afraid. Afraid to share them. Afraid to risk adjustment to the cherished recall through someone else’s recollection that, no, that’s not what happened. Afraid that the discussion or disagreement will take precedence over the memory itself, and somehow subtly replace it, attach itself in association.

I have memories of my grandmother. Memories of her catching me stealing an extra piece of candy out of the bowl on her glass-top coffee table, and telling me I could have it but there’d no candy next time. Memories of asking her for her chicken soup recipe for the first time, and of her clueing me in to the true and sacred secret of the light and fluffy matzahball. Of asking her if it was OK to change the recipe, because my friend Ed had suggested – sacrilege! – adding shitakes to the mix. Memories of Thanksgivings and weekend visits. Memories of sitting quietly with her in the TV room, telling her what I’d been up to in the months since the last time I’d been able to get up to see her, and all the while her cat rubbed against my feet in hopes that I’d be the sort of sucker who knew where the cat treats were kept.

These memories may not be accurate. But they are mine, and they are true.

###

There are things in my house that came from my grandparents. Some are valuable. Some are not, at least not in the sort of way the marketplace values. Some I was told to take; a few tools, my grandfather’s whisky collection, things like that. A few were given to me, things it was decided I should have because I was the right one to have them.

And at the last, before my grandmother came south on what would be her final journey, I asked for one last thing. It was a tourist gewgaw, a bit of memorabilia that my grandparents had picked up on a trip to Spain. It was a stand, and a series of cocktail skewers done up to look like swords. Swept hilt, basket hilt, mock-gold and steel and inlay every color of the rainbow – all that, and maybe two inches long. Sharp enough to hurt if you jabbed someone with one with intent, tiny enough that a mock duel fought with them looked ludicrous, even when the hands clutching them belonged to children.

That’s what I asked for. My mother, who was helping my grandmother get ready for the trip, seemed surprised. She asked me why.

I told her it was because when I was a kid, all of us grandchildren would take those swords and pretend to duel, which wasn’t strictly true. Mainly, we poked one particular younger cousin with them, but that’s not why I asked for them. He’s bigger than me now, and in better shape, and if he remembers and decides he finally wants payback, I’m going to need more than cocktail skewers to protect me.

But really, that’s not it, either. The real reason is that they are indelibly fixed in my mind as being perfectly and utterly of that house, of that time, of my grandparents. Because every time I walked into that house, child or adolescent or man, I found myself reaching for them as I walked past the shelf where they stood, to reassure myself I was really there. Because I want that stories – all those stories, really – with me.

An object, imbued with time and place. Description, too, I hope. No motion, though. Not now. Maybe someday, and for someone else. But not now.