“I know it’s in here somewhere…”

There are few pictures of my grandma.* She appears in an occasional group photo, but otherwise, she had a knack for avoiding the lens. I remember her saying that the camera “does me no favors.” That was the closest Grandma came to a statement of vanity.

I love this photo of Grandma because she either does not realize the photo is being taken or she does not care. She is 100% focused on the task of retrieving something from that glass.

I wonder what she was looking for.

I asked Regan (my sister and fellow wonderer) what she thought. Regan came up with several elaborate scenarios, but then said, “I bet she was looking for a pencil to keep score.” Bingo. That was it. Grandpa was shuffling the cards and Grandma scrounged up a scrap of paper (or old envelope or just about anything one could write on) and was looking for a pencil.

Somewhere in that glass was a Mongol yellow pencil. Grandma would have to dig a bit because more than likely the pencil would be squat, at least half-used, the wood hacked away with a paring knife to expose a centimeter’s length of lead at a time. A pencil sharpener was an unnecessary luxury. Grandma always had that pencil, somewhere in her house when I was young. I am sure there were several pencils floating around her house matching the description, but only one ever appeared at a time.

Grandma’s glass was a catch-all, something of a portable junk drawer. At any given time it would have held one of those white sticks for marking fabric, a book of matches, a metal clicky ball-point pen from the bank, and a couple bits of string (too short to be of any real use, but Grandma hated to toss anything). I also imagine a couple of pennies, a hair pin, and a thin layer of dust at the bottom of that glass.

I have my own portable junk drawer sitting on my desk. It is a large cup that includes pens (some even work), a scissors, a letter opener, a ruler, and random bits at the bottom (paper clips, old post-it note, a rusty bolt). From time to time I will find myself hunting for that specific Flair felt-tip marker or gel pen in my cup, digging and pulling up a thirty-year-old empty fountain pen, a crochet hook, or a yellow Mongol pencil.

The pencil tip is soft and dull, and the years have darkened the surrounding uneven wood. I can see Grandma standing over the garbage can with an old paring knife, carving away at the pencil, exposing lead enough for completing a few crossword puzzles or scoring a weekend of card games. I think about other things: Grandma’s boiled dinners, little dishes of ice cream with Spanish peanuts, and endless games of “Spite and Malice” at her kitchen table (just to name a few of thousands of memories). I put the pencil back in my cup, in a much better mood than I was when I pulled it out.

I wonder if my grandma had something in her glass, something that she kept there so that from time to time she would come across it and remember someone special to her…

*Caveat: There are a bunch of adorable snapshots of my grandma in her twenties, hamming it up with friends, family, and coworkers. I will share some of those soon.