The Cigar Box

I am not a sentimental person. With few exceptions, I cast emotion aside and discard everything that isn't useful to me at this moment. I purge. Rather than keep an item to see if I might need it a year from now, I throw it out. I have never really understood people who save letters or birthday cards. They just don't make sense. “When in doubt, throw it out.”  Wise words.

That isn't to say I don't keep any memorabilia. My cousin Steve played for the Oakland Raiders in 1973 and he gave me a football signed by the team.  I really like that ball. All of the Raider fans I have met have been absolute freaks, but in a nice way.  If you are a Raiders fan, you know what I am talking about.  That autographed ball is a big deal and I have strong feelings about it, but honestly I would sell it for the right price.

I caught a ball at a Mariners playoff game against the hated Yankees in 1995. I still have that ball but I would sell it for maybe twenty bucks. I don't care that much about the ball, but I do care about the twenty bucks.

I never met my grandfathers.  One died before I was born and while we don't talk about him much, everybody says he was a good guy.  My other grandfather ran off, abandoning his family.  We never talk about him.  I didn't know my maternal Grandmother well, she passed when I was young, but my paternal Grandmother, "Gram", was a fixture in my life up through my early twenties.  She was like a third parent to me and I think about her often.  It's funny now to admit how much of an impact she made on me, but I didn't realize it until about ten years after she passed.

I have stuffed into the back corner of my closet a small cardboard box that contains Gram's white gloves that she wore once in a while.  Gram didn't wear the gloves often, she only broke those out for Easter and Christmas. I don't know how I ended up with the gloves, but the last time I opened the box, they smell of lavender and mildew and I plan on keeping those until the end of my days.  The gloves are all I have left of Gram that means anything and I cherish them.

I can still see Gram in my fading memory, walking my Sister and I the four blocks from her small house on 10^th avenue to First Presbyterian church Sunday mornings, rain or shine. It was a three minute walk, but Gram would drag it out to ten or fifteen minutes, depending on who she bumped into. There was always a wandering herd of eighty year old ladies migrating to the church for the 7:00 AM service and some of them were slow movers. Almost all sported an aluminum cane or walker. Gram fell in with that crowd and it took a while to get to the service.

She usually wore the same outfit, a sensible all-black skirt and jacket combo, with sensible shoes and a little black hat pinned to her steel-grey wig that she wore to church and the odd funeral home event. The hat seemed to make the whole ensemble work.

Gram was from the generation where appearances mattered. She was a card-carrying member of "clean and ironed" guild where the unwritten rule was you wore your old clothes with pride, as long as they were clean and freshly ironed.  She was a true zealot with the laundry.

Gram taught me that we didn't want to put on airs like Gladys from down the street did.  Gladys was maybe 80 years old and lived in a one room flat but she wore a new dress to Sunday service almost every year.  Gram and I didn't think much of that.  We despised Gladys and her ostentatious behavior.  I was maybe eight or nine years old when I learned that the path to heaven was certain if we wore second hand clothes that were clean and ironed.

I used to have a cigar box that my Mother gave me, but I lost it some years ago. I used to look for that lost box once in a while, but I stopped; I finally admitted that it is gone for good. The box was where she kept her acquired treasures from when she was a teenager. It was a standard sized cigar box, perhaps 10 inches long and was tan or brown with an faded orange shade acquired over the thirty or forty years that she owned it. Since my Mother came from a family of moderate means, I know she had few things that she valued, but what she did own, she kept in that cigar box.  She never said it, but I think the box, or the contents of the box meant the world to her at one time. It was just a cheap wooden box with odds and ends gathered by a young girl who was given little, but I could tell it meant something and she chose to give it to me, to keep safe so that those treasures it contained would endure where she could not. 

Inside the box, my Mother had lined the bottom panel with a purple, velveteen fabric of some kind. Over the years, the fabric had come lose in one corner and had become natty and worn. I am just guessing here, but I think she borrowed or stole or was gifted that fabric from her own Mother. Maybe it was left over fabric from a dress or a pillow that her Mother made, or maybe she found it.  Whatever it was, I could tell that the fabric was there to cushion and display the contents and it was made by my mother, when she was a girl.  Then, except for a single item that was in the box, I lost it all.

My Mother kept several items in the box, but I only remember two. First, she had an old knife. It wasn't exactly a real knife, it was more of a carving tool. It was made of metal and had a heavy red plastic handle and a crescent moon shaped blade. The handle was fluted so that it wouldn't slip, even if it was wet. It felt solid and substantial and if you have ever held a good tool in your hand, no matter what the tool was for, it felt like that.  If you have bought an 'exacto' knife in the past twenty years or so, it was probably light weight aluminum stamped out in a factory somewhere in Asia. Those exacto knives are sharp, but feel weak and inaccurate in your hand. At least, that is how they feel to me. My mothers cutting tool was made to be held and used over and over. It was a good tool. The blade was old and dull from use.  It was all used up and wouldn't cut butter, but it felt good to hold and to use. If you had to pick between the dull blade on the good handle, or the sharp blade on the flimsy aluminum stick, you would take the dull one every time.

The other thing in the box was a broken bar of soap. My Mother had cut the bar with the carving tool, a small bit at a time. You could tell she spent a lot of time on it. It had incredible detail. It might sound silly, but she had carved a sheep out of the bar of soap. It was an amazingly good depiction of a sheep. Sometime before she gave the box to me, the sheep's head had broken off, so the sheep only looked like a sheep when you stuck the head back on. The soap is sticky enough that if you pushed the two pieces together firmly, it would stay stuck for a minute or two. It fell off again when you bumped it.

That sheep was amazing to me. It was amazing both because it must have been hard to make a sheep out of a bar of soap and it was amazing that anybody would try. Who would do that? You put a lot of time doing something so I assume you would want it to last. Soap doesn't last. I think now maybe the soap was all she had to work with. I think now that the choice of material was a window into my Mother's life. She didn't have clay or stone or a good piece of wood. She had a carving tool and a bar of soap, so she did the best she could with what she had. That says a lot about who she was and where she came from.

Over the years, the box got bumped around and the velvet lining was soapy and the cutting tool was a filmed with the soap. And the head broke off the sheep.

Anyway, my Mom was a talented artist, and she tried to pass it on to my sister and I.  I don't know what she did to interest my Sister in art, but my Mother tried for years to get me to fill the artists apprentice position that she was creating, but I didn't inherit the artistic gene. I tried but eventually, Mom felt sorry for me and excused me from further indentured service. She could see that I had no talent. I feel bad now because art was so important to my Mother and she wanted one of her children to share it. 

Except for the odd soapy sheep. my Mother was a painter. She had both a technical appreciation for the art of painting and the talent to create. I am no expert, but I think that is a rare combination. One day, she and I were alone in the house and she pulled out a book with hundreds of pictures of the great works by Rembrandt, Picasso, whoever. I didn't get it. To me, it just looked like a bunch of really well done paintings.  I mean, I could tell they were really well done but that was about it.  We sat together for an hour while she leafed through the book, pointing out this interesting aspect of that important painter, highlighting some historical fact about each. My Mother spoke with reverence about some of the painters. She obviously liked them. Others, she passed by. I have no idea which was which or why she didn't like some of the painters. I was less than impressed and found something important to do outside like wash a car or walk the dog. How hard would it have been to spend an hour and enjoy her appreciation for something like that? Nope. I wasn't listening.

She did mostly pictures of old people and faces and hands. She told me once that faces and hands are the hardest to draw. It sort of makes sense. If you draw a guy walking and his knee is bending backwards, or he had a hunchback, you might explain it with some garbage about how the light is hitting the subject from a funny angle, or maybe you meant for his knee to bend backwards or he was suppose to be a hunchback, but here is the thing:  Hands and faces, you can't fake. The detail required to get some realistic impression is too demanding. You need talent to draw faces and hands. Mom could do that.

My Mother painted with a knife. It wasn't a sharp cutting knife, it was a bent flat metal blade made for painters. It sounds funny now, trying to describe using a knife to paint, but that is how she did it. It was shaped like the kitchen tool you use to get the pie out of the pan, only a lot smaller and narrower. I thought everybody used a knife to paint until I was twelve or fourteen when I saw a movie about some joker using a brush while he painted a pot of flowers. That is wrong on at least two levels, First, nobody painted with a brush, as far as I knew. Real artists use a blade. My Mother used a blade. Second, my Mother thought artists who painted pots of flowers were all frauds. There is no technical requirement. If the pot is really ten inches high, and you paint your pot six feet high, it's still right. You can screw up all you want and claim victory if you paint pots of flowers. A lack of skill is no impediment to pot painters. I digress into that snippet of criticism because it shows you the difference between an artist and the rest of us. The rest of us see a painting of a pot of flowers and think it looks OK. My Mother could see more because her point of view was more correct. A well painted pot of flowers should be of no particular value to anybody. I walk through a store now and see paintings of flowers and laugh to myself. Who would buy that crap?

When Mom painted, she would dab dab dab the knife on her palette that had small piles of different colored paint. Four piles of slightly different colored brown, a yellow, a red and three blues surrounded a big pile of white and another big pile of black. She would pick up a little of this color and a little of that color then mix mix mix to get the color she wanted, then she would scrape one two three times onto the canvas. I can still hear the sound of the knife roughly sliding on the canvas. That sound was there for those years when I was growing up and my Mom was painting, but I didn't remember it until a few days ago. The sound of the knife on the canvas, I can't get it out of my head now.

“Dab dab dab mix mix”, then the “scrape” on the canvas. It was such a light sound and you practically had to be sitting in her lap to hear it. To me it meant nothing at the time, I didn't even know that I remember that sound until I started to write this down, but now, the memory of that sound means the world. You had to be quiet to hear it. You had to be paying attention. You had to sit still. If you tried to talk, or the radio was on, or a car passed by, you missed it. Life is like that. If you just stop and listen, you might learn something.

“Dab dab mix mix scrape”.

“Scrape”.

“Scrape”. The knife ground against the fibers of the canvas, spreading paint. Creating something out of nothing.

“Scrape.”

Picking up bits of this and that, mixing on the palette, then onto the canvas.

“Scrape”. The guy in the movie with the brush was, to me, a complete falsehood. You can't get the good stuff onto the canvas without a steel blade and a steady hand.

Remember the cigar box? The one I lost? I felt bad about that over the years. I felt I lost something of value that my Mother tried to pass to me, but now, I feel great about it. It was just a stupid box with a broken bar of soap. My Mother didn't give me a broken bar of soap. And she didn't give me an old cigar box. She gave me the knowledge she gained in her time. She showed me the tools she used over the years. She taught by example. She just showed me which tools she used, how she used them, what she was creating when she used the tool. What was being created? It didn't matter, the lesson was the same. A bar of soap, a painting or a person? First she showed me the carving tool, to shape the soap. Or shape the soul. Or shape the life that hasn't yet chosen a path to follow. Then the blade, to mix the paint, to scrape on the colors of life, and create depth, to be the catalyst for a greater good.  She spent a lifetime building some worth where none existed before.
“Dab dab mix mix scrape”.
"Scrape".
"Scraaaape".