The Curator
Prologue to Lessons in Printing
Curator
The moon has moved
to its winter window. The spirits in the house are restless; old
magazines slump off stacks.
She pokes about in corners, moving boxes,
rustles papers, and thinks of a great-aunt
scribbling notes — where she hid the silver,
who gets the chiming clock,
divesting.
Uncles wait in boxes for their handwriting
to be admired. On a beach the child
who becomes her father, sits
in a dress and straw hat.
Beside his report cards.
Also perfect. Voices sift
from the attic. She cannot move
without bruising books inscribed
to someone else. This room
belongs to her father’s family,
that one to her husband’s, the closet
to an ancestral diary and a daughter’s
discarded dresses.
She opens the airless Chinese chest
and gasps for breath, recalling
the scent of a mildewed past.
Pulling tight the shabby bathrobe,
she piles hunting trophies on tragic
clippings, rearranges cousins,
shuts the door.
The Curator
If a piece of paper gets into my house for a day, I’ll save it forever.
Some in my family had a penchant for alcohol. I’m addicted to preservation. So was my mother. My inheritance from her is box after box of memorabilia. When I lugged them into the package store near her last home, the clerk who helped ship them to Utah teased that my mother must have been a rock collector. But really, it was just paper. We’ve never thrown away postcards, dance cards, opera programs, airplane boarding stubs, birthday cards, train schedules, birth announcements, report cards, children’s art, newspaper clippings, books by our relatives, books we plan to read someday. Aunt Barbara saved her long-mourned cat’s whiskers, carefully labeled in a jewelry box. We raise the value of mundane things just by nesting them in shoe boxes, stuffing them into picture frames, stacking them in corners or under the stairs. Holding on to them. Letting the ink, and the paper, age, like fine wine.
This preservation project may hold the key to understanding my printer father, and to clarify why, from the time I turned twenty, I wrote my father off as a lost cause.
Librarians call the jumble of personal effects that one gives to an archive ephemera. That word makes me laugh. From the dictionary: ephemera–noun–items of short-lived interest or usefulness, especially those that later acquire value to collectors. Its Greek origin signifies “things lasting only a day.”
In my hand is the physical evidence that in 1941, my father, Kearny Clark, bought a Chrysler Windsor convertible with white sidewall tires for $953 with a trade-in. I remember the freedom of driving that shiny black car—the keys were always in it—the red leather upholstery, the leaky canvas top. My mother saved this receipt for fifty-two years, and I’ve stored it for another twenty or so. It bears my father’s signature, and he probably printed the sale form used by Hahn Motors. How can I throw all that away?
A piece of the EKG printout from Mother’s death bed shows the steady but irregular heartbeat that held until her other organs failed. The tape rests in an album beside her leather-bound high school diploma and a poem in spidery writing celebrating her marriage: “...To you he’s The Only One.../ So you gained by marrying / without tarrying /...Yours Cordially, Grandmother Cochran.”
I regret items that got away from us: Mother’s wooden peach box of family photos left behind during a hasty move; the letter my sister Kathy wrote from Kentucky as she learned to cook squirrel and was deciding not to marry the man who shot it; The Child’s Garden of Verses that Mother illuminated with water colors while she read it to my brother and me, which my sister-in-law took; my father’s old record of “St. James Infirmary,” no longer playable. I regularly go back to the cupboard where I last saw one of the many slugs that my father made for me in his print shop. It was a shiny casting of printer’s lead that I could press onto a stamp pad, then on paper to print a name. The first one said Nancy, my childhood name; a later one read Clark, because he made it for my son. The slug was always done in a cursive font, such as this: Monotype Corsiva, sometimes used for headlines. Nancy is not there.
These amassed materials open a window to my father. Tangible items like old 78 records tingle my memory, and letters and clippings fill in gaps to help me understand the boy and the man he was before I came along and started noticing things for myself. In among a daughter’s discarded dresses, I keep some of the bound volumes of his weekly paper, the Grays Harbor Post, and microfilm of the rest. Of course, there’s an old, awkward microfilm reader on a shelf above them, the better to look at my family’s hard-to-focus past.
One day I typed up a formal chronology of my father’s days on earth; my own life enters the list at his quarter-century mark. His breakdown makes a dark mark twenty years later. He and I coexist on the page for thirty-three years. The lineup of family events, births and marriages continues onto several new pages. On the hundredth anniversary of his birth, I got news of the arrival of his eighteenth great-grandchild.
I’m a writer, a retired teacher and software engineer, a wife and mother, a grandmother. I am also the daughter of that loving but melancholy printer who inherited a small print shop based on old technology, operating in a town in decline. A daughter trying to understand her ambivalent feelings toward that father.
I want to tell you how he lived. And died.
❦