Picking

Philadelphia’s Living History Archeology Lab, where I volunteer every other week, is a haven of unitasking.  I might be assigned to a six-hour session washing Colonial-era dishes or identifying leaded glass using an ultraviolet light or counting and cataloguing hundreds of pottery sherds.  There’s a meditative aspect to this work, especially the task called “picking”:  sorting through the remains of an Old City neighborhood to find the tiny artifacts – seeds and bones and beads – that have been sifted with water through a 1/8-inch screen.   

The goal is to work slowly and carefully, tackling no more than a quarter-sized pile.  First, I scrape the gravel across the tray with a tongue depressor, then separate the contents with a tweezer by type:  brick, mortar, bone, charcoal, flora (seeds), metal, misc. (buttons, beads, straight pins, teeth), insects, and oyster shell.  Focus – and nearsightedness – are the skills I call upon to hone in on a splinter of cream-colored egg shell, a transparent fish scale, the fibrous backside of what looks at first like charcoal but is actually a bit of burnt bone.   

Writers, too, are archaeologists: digging, processing, and repairing the relics of experience to find the meaning in it.  Memory is our medium for binding the human to the object, and as I work through the mountain one molehill at a time, I’m thinking about life’s lost objects and found wisdom, the mysterious ways memory serves and finally fails us, the fragments that float to the surface or fall through the screen.

 

Progress

When I first moved to Philadelphia, the Goldman Theatre, on 15th and Market Streets, was already in bad shape.  The white facade was sooty and most of the tubes that had illuminated the theater’s surname – GOLDMAN, spelled out vertically — had fizzled and burned out.  I walked past it every day on my way to Suburban Station, noting the titles advertised on the marquee — nothing I’d ever heard of or would ever want to see.  There was a red velveteen display case next to the ticket window, featuring curled and yellowed news clippings of the Goldman’s glory days.  Peering in through the greasy windows, I learned that the Goldman was one of the city’s oldest first-run movie theaters, a place where film stars had shown up in limousines for glamorous premieres.  But by 1984, that was ancient history.  The most exciting thing happening at the Goldman was that it was about to be torn down.

It’s funny how you can walk past a building every day and not really see it, how one minor change in its appearance can make you understand what you’re seeing entirely differently.  To me, the Goldman was merely an eyesore.  I was unmoved by editorials that appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, complaining that first television and then multiplex theaters had ruined the experience of cinema and that people had lowered their expectations so considerably that film, too, was a dying art.  It was sad, I thought, but that’s progress.  Where I grew up, in Phoenix, new gas stations and grocery stores and houses were born every day.  There was an atmosphere of plenty, a weird consensus among the citizenry (mostly transplanted Easterners) that it was impossible for anything to die or be depleted. 

Such were my sentiments when I visited the corner of 15th and Market one dreary, rainy evening, the evening the wrecking crew was to begin the blasting and hammering that would bring the Goldman down.  I arrived just in time to see the “G” plucked from the tower’s shoulders by the talons of a squealing crane.  The “G” hovered in the black sky a moment, gleaming in the floodlights the crew had set up.  Then finally it was lowered; I remember how it twisted and swung, as if it were resisting, in the gentle wind.

 

Railroad Ties

Russ Mosier at the Pennsylvania Train Museum, August, 2009

From my front porch, I can see the trains pass on SEPTA’s R5 line.  This is the same line where, one hundred years ago, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s monstrous, smoke-belching locomotives sullied laundry hanging in yards; it’s the same track the first electrified train – the Tuscan Red GG1 – traveled from 1935 to 1983, outlasting the railroad that built it.  Though our age is more Get There than Golden, the train – running on track originally laid to connect Philadelphia with the western ‘burg(h)s  – is the reason I was persuaded to move to the Main Line.  Writing is a semi-solitary life, and I am reassured by the train’s warning horn, calmed by the rush of steel through the gauntlet of trees, even as my house trembles cracks into every corner.  To me, the train is connection:  to city, to commerce, to community.   And, as it turns out, to my father. 

During his visit, Dad walks to the station every morning to, as he says,  “keep the trains running on time.”  At seventy-five, he moves more carefully, counts the steps up to the platform, grips the banister tighter than he used to.  He chooses a seat in the shade and watches a fox rummage in the underbrush, a commuter balance hot coffee and a briefcase, a student hoist a backpack as she hurries to catch the express to Philadelphia.  He is alert to what, for the non-retired, is routine: the crackle of the speaker making track announcements, the scent of damp decay in the September air.  After a while of watching, he returns to my house to tell me a story I’ve never heard before, one he fished from memory while sitting and surveying our neighborhood from the Chamounix Road bridge.  

My grandfather Luther worked repairing bridges on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad line when my dad was a young boy.  Back then, 1938, men went where the work was – and so Luther traveled from Hamilton and Okeana, Ohio, from Richmond and Lynn, Indiana, to the day’s job, sleeping in a club car and returning home on weekends.  By day, the crew built and bolstered bridges suspended over rivers where, by night, they’d gather to fish and to dream. 

One night, Dad says, Luther and a confederate wired an old railroad tie and sank it in the black water, then watched from the opposite bank of the river as one man after another cast his line and hooked the heavy hunk of wood.   Every now and then, they’d pull on the wire to make the thing move, baffling the crew members, who could never manage to haul the Big Fish to shore.   “The next day,” Dad says, smiling and shaking his head, “he’d be back up on the bridge, thinking of the next trick.” 

Luther, my Bible-gifting grandpa, a prankster?  As Dad tells the story, I’m thinking about how unfathomable fathers often are.  That is, until the first line of a treasured story hooks you to him and tugs taut between you, and you can feel if not see the weight of years, of life traveled, at the other end of that line.

 

My Mother’s List

 

Ruth Rodgers Mosier as a student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana

 

The summer before I left Phoenix and went to Bryn Mawr College, my mother gave me two things:  my first serious wool coat, mail-ordered from Talbots, back East, and a list of books I should have read by that point in my life.

The coat was classic and elegant and perfectly ugly, I thought — my mother’s idea of a Bryn Mawr woman striding purposefully to the library to translate something from ancient Greek.  Of course I had to hate it; I was 17, and still had trouble untangling my mother’s taste and ambition from my own.  Even my decision about college was corrupted by her favor.  Bryn Mawr was my first choice, but first, it was my mother’s choice for me.

The list is three pages long, single-spaced, recorded in my mother’s neat, slanted script.  There’s something old-fashioned about her handwriting; it is guided by the same untroubled faith that allowed her to create a canon for me by consulting no higher authority than the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in our own family room.  She listed the authors alphabetically, leaving no room between their names for debate.  

That day just before I left home for college and forever, my mother stood frowning at the bookshelves, pen and paper in hand.  Watching her, I knew that the list, like my fancy education, was intended to help me surpass her.  I understood, too, that I would never catch up.  I am an avid but turtle-slow reader, unable to comprehend the words on the page without wondering about the person who wrote them or revising the passage in my head.  My mother, by contrast, didn’t read books; she devoured them.  In my memory, she wears an apron over her clothing as she makes her list, as if to protect her business suit from her giant-sized appetite for facts, stories, words.

I find now that I’ve filed the old list under “Resume,” that drop-safe of things I’ve done to enable a writing career or perhaps, at times, to avoid one.  My mother, a successful real estate broker who implored me occasionally to take a job with tangible benefits, used to give me a new business suit every Christmas.  And yet, this same woman also gave me what amounts to her resume in the form of a book list.  As if the true measure of success is not what one has done, but what she has read.

This image of my mother at her bookshelves is almost like religious symbolism to me; I conjure it when I need to ward off a bleaker vision of unread books piling up in warehouses, their jackets torn and bodies remaindered.  Whatever greater fate my mother had in mind for me when she gave me her list, she conveyed to me the hope that the life of a writer is worthwhile.  In that way, she sent me off to school wrapped up in something dignified and durable and better able than that tasteful wool coat to keep out the cold.

 

Repair

Inside the Antiques Mall at the intersection of Routes 33 & 29 in Charlottesville, Virginia, one vendor’s stand is set up like a kitchen pantry, a nostalgic display of tin spice cans and rusty wire whisks and homespun kitsch of the Old South. Some of it is sadly similar to items I have dumped, sold and donated while cleaning out my parents’ home in Phoenix, to prepare it for sale this past fall. Faced with the crisis of my mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and the urgent arrangements for her care, the redistribution of our family’s heirlooms felt haphazard: our best intentions tempered by exhaustion and despair. My brothers and I are mourning, and we’ve barely had time to process what we’ve been through. And so inside the cool, quiet mall with its carefully cased treasures — quilts and tea sets and framed photos of someone else’s ancestors – I am not exactly in a collecting mood.

And then, in a nearby breakfront cabinet, I see a set of blue willoware: china distinctive for the tale it depicts and notable to me because – unlike the sherds of colonial willoware I wash and label and repair as a volunteer at Philadelphia’s Living History Archeology Lab – these dishes are entirely, miraculously, intact. My supervisor, Deborah Miller, taught me to recognize the pattern by its geometric border design and its trio of figures crossing a bridge. “The three dudes,” Debbie calls them, with the affection of a material culture scholar, who has handled and analyzed thousands of broken pieces of 18th-century ceramics. I am surprised and strangely comforted to find the pattern here.

At the lab, we like willoware because its narrative offers clues to aid our reparation. Bottles come in distinctive shades of greens and browns, redware hints at matches with its swirling yellow slip, but only willoware offers a pictorial legend: the story, told clockwise, of the mandarin’s daughter and her servant lover. Pursued by her father’s chosen suitor, they escape across the bridge to a gardener’s cottage, then by boat to an island, where the lover is killed and the daughter dies in a fire. They are transformed into immortal doves, surveying their own lives from the heavens, positioned always at 11:00 o’clock. Knowing the whole story helps us to find the missing pieces in the pile and put them together again.

Already, my mother has forgotten my children;  I’ve been told that some day soon or distant, she will forget me, too. Last fall, alone late at night in my childhood home, sorting through my grief and the flotsam of personal history, I thought I knew the end of this particular story. But as every writer discovers, you can’t find the shape of the narrative until you reach the end of the draft. For now, I’ve kept Mom’s measuring spoons and some of her costume jewelry and have  let everything else go.

I’ve worked at the lab for a year now, long enough to know that what I don’t know about archaeology is as vast as the adjacent storage room, where one million artifacts are still boxed in their sample soil. And long enough to see that some of these objects we work on eventually become whole. Their finished form gives me faith in this sometimes tedious, but always worthwhile, endeavor and allows me to begin with the end in mind. I understand now how essential this preliminary work is to the long process of repair.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far: to use cool water and a soft brush to wash the artifacts, and to avoid scrubbing painted designs. To use mesh trays for drying and aluminum trays for labeling. To make one clean stroke with the B-72 adhesive for base and topcoats, and to thin it with acetone if it begins to bubble or string. To use white ink to number dark sherds and black ink for light ones. To place the field specimen number on the inside of vessels and on the bottoms of plates or the bases of bottles, and never near the seams. To work carefully and steadily, even as tourists lean in through the windows, nodding at us in sympathy as we sit at the long lab table spread with broken glass or china or pottery. To smile when someone says — inevitably, at least once an hour — “That’s the world’s biggest puzzle,” because it’s true.  The truth, after all, is unoriginal.

 

Witness

 

photo by Alison Mosier-Mills

 

 

At Gettysburg, our guide skipped the monuments and tailored his tour to my old friend Laurie and her teenage daughters, visiting from Chicago.

 

“Right there,” he said, pointing to the house-turned-field hospital, “the limbs discarded after surgery were piled right up to the sill of the first-floor windows.  Imagine the gauntlet those brave volunteer nurses – most of them completely inexperienced – had to walk through just to go to work.”  He told us stories of a young woman who enlisted – and cross-dressed – as a Union soldier and another, Tillie Pierce, who gave witness to the battle in her published diary.  He implored us to imagine the sticky summer heat, the air dark with cannon smoke, the line of Philadelphians holding ground on Cemetery Ridge as the Confederates made their slow-mo march — Pickett’s charge — across a field of last resort. 

 

“The poetry of history,” wrote G.M. Trevelyan, “lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing into another, gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone.”

 

Our guide’s stories brought history close and held us to the spot, while lightning flashed in a distant corner of the darkening sky, preceding an afternoon storm that felled the last witness tree in the National Cemetery.

 

Detours

 

We got a late start to the Grand Canyon.  We wandered — the term describes our attitude, if not our speed on I-64 — past Circle Ks, planned communities, the long gauntlet of sagebrush and Saguaro cacti.  We were oddly ambivalent about our destination, my brother, my husband, a college friend, and I — driven only by duty to show our eastern friend this southwestern wonder of the world.  When Bedrock City beckoned to us from a roadside billboard, we were easily lured off the highway. 

 

We spent a long afternoon making fun of the amateurishly rendered characters at this makeshift theme park:  Fred’s rug of synthetic hair; Dino barking like an actual German Shepherd, not at all like the cartoon; the “Dino slide” so hot you’d skin yourself alive on the way down.  We photographed ourselves behind painted wooden images of Fred, Wilma, Betty and Barney, our faces slotted in for theirs.  We blew cash on souvenir shot glasses bearing — most likely without license — Pebbles and Bam-Bam.  The audacity of the place impressed us.  Bedrock City was so obviously run down, borrowing glory and charging admission.

 

My twenties were my Age of Irony, a time when I was old enough to find humor in these false gods — they had been cherished childhood icons — and still young enough not to feel wistful about them.  How to explain, though, our reluctance to get to the point of our trip?  We lingered with the Flintstones so long that we ran out of time to see the Grand Canyon; we had a dinner commitment in Phoenix that seemed like it couldn’t be broken.  And so, thirty minutes from the South Rim, we turned around and headed home, taking with us only a funny story and our belief that there was all the time in the world for wonders.

 

 

All That Is Lost Is Found

All writers tell rough drafts aloud, but this was grad school, so we gave ourselves themes: crappiest job, caught-naked scene, best prank, worst party, the moment that changed your life.  It was less like a slam than like dinner theater with a rapt, appreciative audience.  Since that summer, I’ve rarely listened to a story or told one that someone didn’t interrupt.  Sad as it sounds to my students, this was entertainment in the era before YouTube.

 

One night, I told “The Story of Menstruation”, about the sex-ed film the girls at my school were shown in fifth grade.  More to the point:  how, a week before the premier, Danny Favata pulled the pizza-sized reel from the AV closet, threaded the forbidden film through the projector, and wheeled the contraption into our classroom, where we awaited what we thought would be “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”.  Blinds drawn, lights out, we watched as a background of purple velvet appeared on the screen.  And then, letter by white girly letter, swirled just enough of the film’s title to horrify, before Mrs. Grimstead yanked the projector’s cord from the wall. 

 

This oral draft was really Danny’s; it paid tribute to his status as AV Operator and his bad boy ingenuity.  It was as truthful as memory could make it, and yet it skirted the true story, which I wrote as fiction years later for a ‘zine called Whispering Campaign.  “What I wanted was his courage,” my female narrator confesses, “which I could only imitate.”  No wonder.  “The Story of Menstruation”, as we were to discover at a segregated viewing of the film, was full of baffling information and censorious imagery:  a girl cluelessly riding a bike in a dress, a girl collapsing in tears over a tangle in her hair, a girl unhappily showering in an avalanche of ice cubes.  This, we were told, was our story.  And these were our instructions, delivered in a voice — as familiar as a lullaby — from Disney’s “Cinderella”. 

 

“All this time I thought you were exaggerating,” my friend, the writer Brian Bouldrey, admitted in an e-mail message that arrived yesterday.  Attached was a link to “The Story” on YouTube, where, as Brian says, all that is lost is found.  “Why is nature always called MOTHER nature?” he teased, quoting the film.  Thirty-five years later, the film is exactly as I remember it.  But I’ve spent those years writing a different story.

 

For me – as a writer and as a reader – the story often hides in the rough draft’s odd image: a perfumed permission slip, a bully’s scabbed knuckles, a classroom arranged in battle formation with boys against girls.  Whenever I read student work or submissions to Philadelphia Stories, I look for these odd images in order to find the writer’s truest intentions.  They are like a treasure map carried across the desert during the long process of revision, instructions creased closed and spread open again and again until the document disintegrates and the gold is found.    

 

Philadelphia Freedom

 

 

It’s high tourist season in Philadelphia, and so not at all unusual – if slightly unsettling – to find a man beside me on the regional rail platform clad in breeches, buckled shoes and a tri-corner hat.  He’s commuting, as I am, to the colonial neighborhood overseen by the National Park Service, but he’s costumed for interpreting history at the Visitors’ Center, while I’m clad in privy-picker jeans and black t-shirt for my volunteer work at the Living History Archaeology Lab. 

 

Like any city, Philadelphia has its versions:  public and private, seen and unseen, drafted and revised.  This summer morning, the two of us proceed down busy Market Street, parting at 6^th, where the entrance to the Liberty Bell pavilion intersects the long-buried stories of George Washington’s nine slaves.  http://www.ushistory.org/presidentshouse/slaves/index.htm  

 

The Finest in the Field®

  

This is the trademarked name of my old softball glove, one of few relics salvaged from adolescence, when I more sensibly aspired to play professionally.  No wonder I took the sport so seriously:  my glove was nearly magic with its Deep Well Pocket®, “HolDster”® finger hole, its patented Basket–Web and Edge-U-Cated Heel.  It was a masterpiece of craftsmanship, signed by Reggie Jackson himself!  Before the start of every season, my father swabbed the glove with Neatsfoot Oil, rubber-banded its pocket closed around a ball, and buried it beneath my mattress to cure. 

 Several years ago, I took my old glove out again to coach a team of nine-year-olds, who can’t be blamed for their impatience with my sensory descriptions of fielding and batting technique.  As I talked, the girls sat in a circle picking grass and smiling politely.  All those words when they wanted action!  They waited for me to get to the point of softball, which is to say the plot.  But I wanted to teach these rookies more than just the rules of the game.  I wanted them to know the joy of snagging a grounder on the first bounce and, at bat, to feel the satisfying crack of connection with the ball.    

I started writing stories at their age.  Middle-aged now, I’m keenly aware of the distance between where I am and where they are, between what I have learned through practice and what they have just begun.  Back then, I played catch with my brother in our front yard for hours, learning to match aim with intention.  Then I went inside to pitch words to the pages of my journal, coming closer to a target only I could see.  I’m still practicing – in many ways still a rookie – but after all these years, I have succeeded in shaping my life around its purpose, like a seasoned glove ready to catch a moment of experience.