Chapter 8: School of Dreams

If my grandmother’s home was a museum and the shack was paradise, then my grandfather’s house was a school of dreams.

For one week each summer, my grandmother let me spend time with my grandpa who lived five miles away in Plympton, Massachusetts.

His home was a three-hundred-year-old farmhouse located on one hundred acres of farmland deep in the forest just a few hundred feet from the Kingston town line. The house had no electricity, running water, or central heating. Except for age, it was virtually unchanged from the day in the 1650s when it first opened as a colonial roadside inn.

It was a little island in time that had somehow escaped the benefits of the twentieth century. Even the windows contained the original handmade wavy glass so common to antique colonial houses.

After my grandparents got divorced, my grandfather lived alone in the house.

Simple but delicious meals were prepared on an ancient wood cook stove located in the corner of the kitchen. The stove was a smoky thing and everything we ate or wore had the comfortable mellow-brown flavor of wood.

Food and milk stayed fresh and safe in a wobbly wooden bucket at the bottom of a deep stone well. Even in the hottest days of August, water from that well was cold and clear.

In the evenings, after dinner and dishes were finished, he and I would sit for hours at the kitchen table and I listened as he filled the night with one story after another. Shadows from the flickering yellow light of the kerosene lamp moved on the walls as he unraveled countless tales of knights and unicorns, leprechauns, elves, and the travels of Gulliver.

“Look over there,” he would say, pointing to the shelf above the stove, “those three boxes of cereal are just like the sails on a whaling ship. And over there, that butter dish looks just like the dories the men would use to hunt the great whales.”

His words transformed the kitchen into the whaling grounds and ships from the saga of Moby Dick. Shadows became the characters and crew, and the coat rack with my grandfather’s felt fedora hat would come alive alive as the stern and possessed Captain Ahab.

A long story like Moby Dick would take several nights to tell. The evening hours my grandfather and I would spend around the kerosene lamp became the center of my summer days.

I’ve so many recollections of that kitchen as the deck of a sailing ship or the treasure mines of King Solomon that it’s hard to recall how the place actually appeared. The remembrances and images of his stories are more vivid than my memories of that room in daylight.

My grandfather would ask, in fact, demand, that I see things in a different way. “Look at something and then look at the things around it, ask questions of it,” he would say. “What else does it look like? How does it feel and how did it get there? Pick it up with your thoughts and turn it over in your mind. Hold it from the inside and look out through its eyes. Hear its story.”

Shredded wheat wasn’t breakfast. It was an adventure. “You’re eating wheat all the way from Kansas,” he would declare before launching into a tale of covered wagons, the long journey west through prairie fires and floods. “If you chew it carefully you can taste history.”

That was just the cereal. A teaspoon of sugar became an excuse for tales of plantations in Cuba, pirates, buccaneers, slaves, and freemen. Everything had a story, and everything was part of something else.