Fame

I am ten years old. My brother is in boarding school in Massachusetts so I can enter his room whenever I want to and go through his stuff. The top drawer of his desk smells of lead pencils, erasers and ink stained wood. A protractor, a jack knife, and a couple of marbles rattle as I push the drawer shut. Nothing interesting there. A wooden box with a hinged top holds his record player. I lift the lid, turn it on and place one of his precious 45’s on the turntable. I lower the needle and hear scratchy rock and roll. This isn’t fun when he isn’t around to tell me not to touch his records. I turn the dial to OFF and close the lid.

Finally I end up where I always do in John’s room; sitting in the brown velvet worry chair in the corner next to the bookshelf. Behind me are windows looking out to the garden below. I don’t know why it is called the worry chair. Little sisters don’t listen to the details of stories that parents tell at cocktail parties. From my spot in the chair, I reach over and run my finger along the row of matching book spines. Which volume will it be today? I stop at the last one; XYZ all in one book. I lean over to grab the last volume of the World Book Encyclopedia and pull it into my lap. “What if I read every blue and red volume? Would I know everything?”, I wondered. I open randomly. Eli Whitney invented something called the cotton gin. Black and white photographs accompany the article. One shows black men with bags over their shoulders picking cotton. Another shows a machine with gears.

I keep flipping. George Washington. I learned about him in school. Our first president. He couldn’t tell a lie. He admitted to chopping down a cherry tree. What's so bad about chopping down a tree, I wondered. That’s nothing compared to the time Gay Parker and I stole clip-on flower earrings from the 5 and 10 cent store on Springfield Avenue to use as barrettes for our dolls. Will I never be president because I lied to my mother when she found the garish accessories and asked me about them? I said they belonged to Mrs Parker, who was a Quaker. She must have known.

What does it take to be in the World Book Encyclopedia? I wondered if I would ever do something impressive enough. I read about women but they were mostly nurses, like Clara Barton and Florence Nightingale. Eleanor Roosevelt was in there, but she was married to a president. I didn’t expect to be married to a president and anyway, I wanted to be famous in my own right.

Maybe we all wonder how we will be remembered and even if we will be remembered after we are gone. Being in print is not the only way. Encyclopedias are gathering dust on shelves or have hit the land fills long ago. We are all famous to the people that matter. To the people we know. It is like making peace, it happens so often we can’t even keep track. It’s all a matter of showing up.