What hoppened?

The house is brimming with dogs. Dogs under tables, dogs around tables, dogs at each other’s tales, dogs panting, dogs leaping, dogs barking. Judge and Ezra and Bella are reunited. “Let’s play” says Judge. “I will follow you around the table and you will give me the little bone that is in your mouth. “Ok” says Bella. Around the kitchen table. Around the coffee table. Around the dining room table. Around me. Panting. Prancing. Circling. Bella keeps the toy. Judge gets on her nerves.

I let them out. Quiet. Children have gone to school. Parents have gone to work. The house is quiet. Ben Franklin’s miniature printer’s shop is quiet too. The clanking of the gears, the woof of the pressure, the street noises outside, have disappeared. The cutting of the balsa wood, the sanding of the cuts, the glueing of the furniture, so quiet and so fraught, have stopped.

Ben Franklins’ Print Shop was a Friday night project for Merv when he was a child. I imagine him working away at his mother’s kitchen table. He is all absorbed and patient. He is turning the plans this way and that in his head. He is designing and erasing on pieces of paper. He is cutting and glueing and sanding and staining and painting. Slowly the Print Shop emerges from the chaos of his mother’s kitchen table. It goes to school, a small catastrophe mended, and then it goes up to his mother’s attic.

Children love grandmothers’ attics and they love little houses. Adults sat on sofas drinking coffee. Children disappeared, to explore the attic. Up the final set of steep stairs, and then, that Print Shop. Careful little hands moved beds and desks into their proper places. They examined the papers coming from the printing press. They put Ben Franklin back to business, narrated now by a 6 year old many times bigger than him. Ben printed away, his days and years and philosophies and works completed in the attic play of a couple of hours.

As attic treasures do these days, they dispersed themselves. Houses are sold. People move. Spaces are emptied. Dumpsters are scheduled. The Print Shop came here to North Carolina. It went up to the third floor.

The Print Shop got unpacked. It got settled. A young child carefully pulled out a chair from under the desk of the Print Shop. The young archeologist looked it over. Identified it immediately. A chair. Knew its function. Placed in carefully on the floor. Sat in it. It splintered, of course, its little glued balsa wood structure unable to sustain even the slight weight of the child. The child had expected the solidity of a chair. “It is a chair. I sit in chairs. I will sit in this chair.” Form, function, Plato, philosophy, archeology, all collapsed together. The child cried out “What hoppened,” and then burst into tears, holding the chair pieces in hand.

“What hoppened,” I think as I drink my coffee at the kitchen table. The dogs are all at Merv’s feet, demanding scratches and attention. One little boy all grown, the next generation all grown, the next generation nearly grown. Ben Franklin long gone, a grandmother’s attic all dispersed.

The dogs are tired. The games are slow now, slow circles, long panting. This kitchen table in North Carolina is now quiet. Goooood moooorning.

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