Maggie's Store - Part One

Maggie's Store

Part One

            “Don’t touch anything.  Remember that.”

            Those were my grandmother’s instructions.  They were always the same instructions.  They didn’t mean anything because I always touched everything and nobody said anything when I did.  I never broke anything either.  I’m pretty sure that had a lot to do with this disparity between command and action.

            I was very young then; much younger than being an antiques dealer can be and... be one.  That’s OK for to relate the influence my grandmother had on my development “in the trade” I must begin well before I could have grasped the concept of “antiques”.  For the rare book community this means “years” before I could “read”.

            They were going out.  “They” was my mother and my grandmother.  We were at my grandmother’s home in ****, Maine.  The year would be 1958 and the years may be continued to 1962.  These were formative years for me... in the trade.  I was four in 1958 and my grandfather had just died.  I don’t remember the “died”.  I remember that he was “sick” and was told that he “died”.  I sort of remember the latter.  The former I remember because I recall being told he “is sick” and that I was being taken to see him.  This was in his bed; “The Four Poster”, a big bed in a big bedroom that was way in the front of the upstairs of my grandmother’s house.  This was on Main Street, across from a “Hall”, “the newspaper” and next to the “drug store”.  It is (for it still be) a very large Greek Revival home at the front end by the street.  This shrinks back from the street to an earlier homestead attached to “the barns”.  “The barns” were only known if one could, at age four, manage to “get there”.  The cause of that problem was that most of the domestic life took place at this older rear homestead of the whole “house”.  That definition excluded “the barns”.  Also due to this I faced a problem of the FRONT section of the “house” as “get there”.  The front was, and remains to my mind to this day, a separate house.

            Anyway:  Way, way “up there”, “miles” from the warm wood stove heated kitchen where my grandmother made donuts and hung them to cool in the summer kitchen just outside the kitchen door on a special rack where... I could eat “one” as soon as I “can touch it”.... I went to see my grandfather with my mother on what I now know was his death bed.  I remember looking up at the bed’s edge which was flush with my forehead and seeing this large prostrate form under the covers and hearing that form make noises that are pretty much what one thinks a bear would make in a cave if it was asleep.  I don’t have to remember much because I wasn’t there very long and nothing else happened.

            Then he died.  I guess.  I don’t remember that.  I don’t remember if my mother went to the funeral or anything.  All I remember is that everyone always referred to him after he “died” the same as when he was alive which was “The Doctor”.  That’s what he was called before he died and after he died.  He’s still called that to my face today by a wondrous world of folk who vividly “remember” him, tell me about it (the same story for the 100th time but that’s OK) and will never read this story because they are ...so far out there... in the Maine woods... and can’t read that well anyway... or are dead.  All that  doesn’t matter.

            NOW I am not sure but I’m PRETTY sure that my grandmother got along pretty well without him.  To understand that has taken many moments of thought for most of my life and I don’t have anyway of affirming my thoughts because everyone is dead and I can’t ask them “HEY:  SHE WASN’T ALL THAT UPSET WHEN HE DIED, HUH?”.  But I have got the drift, over the years.  My grandfather was a stern man in addition to being “The Doctor”.  Being a doctor in rural Maine from the “end of the War” (WWI) till he “died” was enough to make even YOU stern for one had to do really great things like go miles and miles “UP” in to some place in the woods “NOW” because “someone” “is” and, well, like HE said:  “Maybe we don’t need to get there too fast.  What am I going to do with a half dead man in a canoe?”.  My grandmother was his nurse so... went too... a lot.  Sometimes “there weren’t no point” and he went “alone”.

            Babies are born sideways and backwards and with no brains and on and on in the Maine woods so even if I did eat ALL of the donuts while they were still “too hot” I couldn’t escape from being all to familiar with the various “places” he “went” and “what happened”.  Additionally, out there at the front of the house, was his “office” which was this series of old off-white rooms filled with off-white metal furniture and this… off-white “table” in the very front room to the south so the “good light” came in on this table where people were ... “sewed up”.  THAT was some room if you were four years old and just sort of deciding things for yourself for the first time like “I DON’T WANT TO GET A SHOT”.  That room, and it was so far away from the warm kitchen with the wood stove that one “couldn’t hear anything”... was what I’d call today “SOME ROOM” in an old house.  Outside of the door to that room was his roll top desk and his book shelves of medical books and a gun rack with his different “hunting” guns on it.  That one room was always real light and warm and my mother would say things to my grandmother when she’d come out to the kitchen to get more “hot” water like “You’ve been in there a long time”.  I think I know a lot more about what THAT meant NOW then I did then.

            Anyway:  He died and years later I had a whole box of the “tools” from that room that even included this hand clamp that you grabbed a baby’s head with and “pulled it out”.  After that; the “died”, the people would still come to my grandmother because she “knew what to do”.  WELL she DIDN’T know what to do but she DID DO and that was good enough and always included a lot of the phrase “The Doctor”.

            That room gradually fell out of use and it was pretty much a quarter century later before I was actually “out there” “swamping it out” (in 1982).  My mother had been dead near a decade and my grandmother had just died then after having pretty much “another life” of her own and I was selling the “Anything you want?” to a dealer I knew from Farmington but he didn’t want all that much of it “either” so I “ended up” with “it” in my barn and... even to this day I “still use” one of them off-white metal tables that just the slightest glance at will assure you that YOU don’t want to get “sewed up” on... “that”.

            My prose has seems to have drifted from my opening of the “They were going out” but that’s because I wanted throw a hard ball at you about what is was really like in the warm donut smelling kitchen in 1958 when I was four years old and they (my mother and grandmother) said that and then DID “go out”.  The going out was actually “GOING OUT BUYING”; an antiques dealer term for a preferred above all other activity that IS done when EVER IT CAN BE.  My grandmother had become an antiques dealer very far back in HER life and well before MY life.  As near as I could ever find out it “began” “during the Depression” when “they” (her & The Doctor) “didn’t get paid” “much” so she started taking “stuff” instead of “cash”.  Then she’d sell it.  To this “Judge” in “Portland”.  I know who that was and so do the rest of us up here in The Maine Woods but it is here unnecessary to elaborate on that except to note that THAT “Judge” knew what he was doing... too.  Therefore, it was NOT an accident that “out in the shed” and “out in the barns” were these “piles” of “stuff” that I “could play in” and ...eventually... PLAYED STORE IN... and that “these people” would come “down the driveway” to the shed looking “for your grandmother” and she’d come out and “dicker with ‘em”.  After the “dicker” some THING(S) would either “come in” or “go away”.

            “After The Doctor died” and coinciding with me “growing up” seems to have been a period of “growth” of this seemingly “nothing” taking place “out there”.  “Huh” is my hindsight but if your in the trade that “huh” has a lot of impact that I still use.  Seems to me there was “a lot more” “stuff” that came and went “then” (“after The Doctor died”).  And more “people”.  These were not ordinary people.  NO, no these “people” were (and are) ALWAYS different and they ranged from old crow bait ministers who’d just purloined a bag of “old coins” out of some widow or THAT SAME widow “I’d drop by” with “That sugar bowl you’ve always wanted” or the guy with the mustache and “this rug” “I know it’s old because I took it out of MRS. *** front room:  This morning:  An hour ago”.  And the “Judge”.  He was special because... he brought Mr. Wallet with him and that was by far a bigger Mr. Wallet then anyone else ever brought… into the warm donut smelling kitchen.  He’d come with his “wife” and she either “talk with my mother” in the kitchen or “wait in the car” or ... to everyone’s great relief “DIDN’T COME UP THIS TIME!” for she was “some stuck bitch” in the classic rural Maine sense and we (the whole family in the warm kitchen later) would always make fun of her and how we “felt sorry for the Judge”.  Every time he’d buy “pretty good; but not as “good” as when he was “alone” for then (but even when “she” was there) he’d often buy “enough” that “it’d be best to have it (the purchased lot) go down on the train” which it did and my grandmother’s “man” would do “all that” “later”.  THAT was antique dealering where I grew up.

            So at an incredulously EARLY age I was “go’en out buy’en” “with them” but had absolutely no notion as to what that was.  Or what I was doing especially as it turns out forty years later to be very concise to me that to have the kids “along” was a “good foil” in rural Maine.  All that went right by me THEN and I dutifully report that “go out” meant getting in the back seat of my grandmother’s “car” which today would be called a “monster” and “classic” and... more but THEN ...I hated... because all I could see from the “JUST SIT THERE” position was the sky and the telephone lines with the pole tops and these DID NOT flash by but slowly proceeded in little crescents from pole to pole for seemingly “hours” that we drove “incredibly slow” off into I had no idea where.  This included stopping by railroad tracks to pick blueberries and other “We’re gonna just leave them some” visits that were NEVER short and some actual doings that have now become “legends”.