Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact #4–Unfinished crafts

It’s not my usual practice to eavesdrop on other people’s conversations, and less so to butt in, but sometimes I make exceptions. So it happened, almost two years ago, that I was in line to check out at the co-op with my bi-weekly feed order, when I overheard a middle-aged woman talking with her friend, near the cash registers. She was animatedly discussing a hobby that she had recently taken up, and the great satisfaction that it was giving her. Stained glass, she was saying, gave her a creative outlet for making designs, and the colors and light just were so pretty to look at!

I had just returned from Los Angeles, where my brothers and I were starting to scale the mountain of worldly goods that my parents left upon their death. At the time, we were simply trying to figure out the lay of the land. Our explorations reached the back corner of the shelves in the garage, a land of boxes that had been labeled and tied shut with twine decades ago. One of the dozens of boxes was labeled “MMA Glass” and another was “MMA Stain glas lead”. These labels were puzzling to us, so we opened them, and the labels were accurate—one heavy box was dozens of sheets of colored glass, and the other heavy box was smaller chunks, some thick or patterned, and a good stock of lead for joining.

Not all memories lie exposed, on the surface, always visible. There’s stuff in your memory that you don’t know is there. Something—an object, a smell, the angle of the light on a winter day—can abruptly shake the crust off of a long-buried memory. Fragmentary and decayed, it is once more exposed to your consciousness. Like filling in the missing pieces of a shattered urn or partial fossil, you reconstruct the memory into a coherent whole. My oldest brother recollected, dimly, my dad making some things with glass. We all, eventually, remembered a mobile of glass and wire fish that hung in my dad’s office, though I had no idea my dad made it. We shrugged, talked of maybe donating the glass to a craft club, and continued our exploration.

Naturally, I was pretty excited to hear this stranger’s enthusiasm for stained glass as a craft. I strayed enough from my own character to butt into her conversation, and offer her a goodly supply of material, on the condition that its delivery would likely have to wait at least a year. She said she’d be able to give it a home, we exchanged names and phone numbers, and there things stood.

A few months later, both of my brothers were again at the parental home, working on the mountain of stuff, while I participated via a video link. My brothers had opened—possibly for the first time in over a decade—a steamer trunk and sorting through a hodgepodge of things. There were trivial souvenirs of travel that my parents always collected: plastic shopping bags from every country they’d been to, hotel bars of soap, “do not disturb” door tags in dozens of languages. There were children’s clothes from our younger days. There were some really nice shirts that my dad had bought during our travels, and seemingly never wore. There were some fabric art projects that my mom worked on, and one of these made my brothers quite interested.

What I could see over the video link was my brothers unfurling a large white cloth with some embroidery, but I couldn’t see what was embroidered. They were laughing and pointing and obviously trying to decipher something confusing, while I was just getting frustrated. Eventually, the whole thing got laid out, and they finally held the phone so I could see what they had discovered.

My mom had been working on a years-long embroidery project; it was to be a growth chart recording the progress of my brothers and me, done with much more artistry and craft than the traditional pencil markings on the kitchen doorway. Both of my elder brothers were there, with several entries, color coded to tell them apart. There was one entry for me, the youngest, and that was apparently it. There were no more entries.

My mom’s embroidery project ended soon after my birth. The last stitch was probably added in 1968. My dad had ordered the stained glass supplies, and set them aside, maybe a year later—along with the glass and some instructions, padding was provided by newspapers dated 1969. My mom was coping with a five year old, a three year old, and a baby. My dad had just started on the tenure track at the university. They had also just bought a house. My dad’s mother had died just before I was born, and his dad (who lived nearby) needed help adjusting to a very different life.

There’s only so much time in a day, and so many days in a week. I know that in my own life, even without children, hobbies have fallen by the wayside as I’ve gotten busy. As a kid and young adult, I happily experimented with lots of hobbies and crafts, and gained moderate proficiency in many. I enjoyed most of them and would probably have loved pursuing them, but the demands of life meant that I put most of them down and walked away. Perhaps in some parallel life I spend my leisure time kayaking, or weaving and knitting, or playing the organ, or flying, or climbing. In one of these lives, maybe I’d see the stained-glass lamp my dad bought the plans for, or I’d have grown up seeing more tapestries made by my mom. Maybe there would be other things, from pastimes they’d sampled but that I never knew about and will never know.

And so, after my most recent trip to Los Angeles, among the boxes that completely filled the bed and cab of my farm truck, were the box of “MMA Glass” and “MMA Stain glas lead”. I contacted the person I met at the co op a year earlier, and she was still interested in the supplies. Her hobby had bloomed, and was keeping her happy and busy. A week ago, she drove over to our place to pick up the boxes. I’m happy that the supplies will get used. Colored glass should not be wrapped in paper, tucked in a box, and buried in the back of some shelves in the darkest corner of a garage for half a century. It should be filling with sunlight and pleasing the eye. The hobbyist said she’d make a small piece for me, as a memory for my dad.

The embroidery sits, rolled up, in one of the boxes I have to unpack. None of us wants it, but none of us feels great throwing it away, though that will probably be its ultimate end.

It feels a little odd to be grateful for things not received, but that box of unused stained glass, and the blank spaces on the embroidery—they are actually very full. They are filled with games of catch and walks on the beach, with drives to the mountains, with an extra half hour of work with flash cards, with an extra bit of fussing on a birthday or when I was sick. No matter that I am not inheriting a fancy lamp or beautiful wall hanging. Mom and dad left me so much more.