Gary Crawford - May 2011

 

The Copy Book
by
Gary D. Crawford

When a dear neighbor passed away at age 92, a small trunk was found in her attic. It belonged to a previous owner of their home, so her son, knowing of my interest in such things, kindly passed it on to me. This little time capsule contained fifteen old photos, a tattered copy of a National Geographic Magazine, an even more decrepit report of a Methodist conference, and a small notebook.
I have always been fascinated by time—how it flows by us, or how we flow through it. Yet despite its being all around us, time is utterly beyond our reach. It flows relentlessly, in only one direction, but at amazingly variable speeds. Sometimes it is possible to return to an event or place, to revisit it or even change something, but the opportunity is fleeting. Very quickly it passes by, and then is quite gone.
For example, some time ago a neighbor took down an old shed that “always” had been there. His act changed the village slightly. We now can see the fig tree behind and a small compost pile, even glimpse the Cove beyond. This change could be reversed, of course; we could find an old shed much like the original and replace it. The old village then would be back the way it was. We won’t do this, of course, because there is no reason to. But we know we could. The old village isn’t really gone.
But then one day, we look around and find that dozens of changes have occurred. Switching things back now would be a huge and immensely expensive project. And to which “back” would we change things? To that moment before the little shed came down? Only a few of us now even remember that old shed, and no one cares about it. Suddenly the reality sinks in. The old village is well and truly “gone,” having slipped away when my back was turned. It has “passed” into the past.
But is that really the way it all works? Or does that old village still exist? Perhaps it is I who moved, sliding into the future somehow and leaving the old village back “there.” Relative motion can be confusing, after all. As a child, I recall looking out a train window, watching the train on the next track drop behind as we pulled out of the station, then being astonished to discover that we hadn’t moved at all. It was the other train that had pulled out, moving in the opposite direction.
In either case, it seems that a veil of some sort has fallen between Then and Now. One can see through it, dimly, but not reach through it. We can no longer connect. Once, when visiting the home where I grew up, the sense of the palpable past was a yearning certainty. My little brother could so easily have come scampering around the corner of the house from his sandbox—if only he hadn’t been in his 60s and living in California.
Now, as I peer at the objects from the trunk, each seems to tug at me from the past as if seeking a link with me, some connection across time, that most curious of barriers…
The dozen or so photographs draw me first. All are portraits—two girls on a pony, a baby, a dapper young fellow with a moustache and brilliantine hair, and so on. All these young people smile with the pleasure and confidence of youth. Are they smiling at the camera, only, or do they somehow sense that in some unimaginable future some person will be gazing at them and wondering. What I’m wondering about, of course, is How Did It All Work Out? All their hopes and dreams are concluded now; their future embedded now in our past.
Alas, nothing is written on the photos. Only the photo with the pony has a faint inscription: “June, age 5, and Beatrice, age 3, Dec. 25, 1923.” Who were they? Without last names, further inquiry may be impossible. Unable to connect to the photographs, I set them aside.
The National Geographic magazine is in rough shape, but the wonderful photos remain clear and sharp. The big story in this issue of November 1909 is Ernest H. Shackleton’s “The Heart of the Antarctic.” A good issue to save! But as to who saved it, there is no clue. Again, no connections.
The church report is from a generation earlier, dated 1883. In March of that year the Wilmington Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church was held in Cambridge, Maryland. It ran for a full six days, concluding late on a Monday night. That final business meeting catches the eye, setting off a flight of speculation like geese coming up off the cove. First they voted on some resolutions, such as deciding that “some relic from the old jail be procured for preservation by the Conference Historical Society.” (One wonders which poor devil they selected.) Then “the Trustees of the Riddle Board were elected and classified.” (From easy to difficult, perhaps?) A letter from J. B. Steigler, “formerly professor at Wesleyan Female College, claiming back salary,” was referred to a special committee. (Ought we ask why the good professor might have left the College without collecting his last paycheck?)
The old report gives the imagination a good romp, like throwing a stick for the dog. But it’s nothing more than that, just a bit of fun. Like the report itself in my hands, it is all quite dry. Not knowing who from this house might have attended the Conference, if anyone, we fail to connect with it.
The notebook has possibilities, however, for it is handwritten. Like dessert, it was saved for last, and now I pore over it, determined to find some way to connect, to reach out and bridge the gulf of time.
Inside the front cover is a date, very faint, “April 25, 1889,” but there is no name. The book, done in pencil in a rather good hand, is fairly crammed with written matter on both sides of all pages. The variety of subject matter is quite astonishing: geography, literature, poetry, history, pairs of homonyms, science, health, and much else. The first item is a list of precious stones, followed immediately by a page-long biography of James K. Polk. There are sentence diagrams (remember those?), a list of islands of the world, and a biographical sketch of John Greenleaf Whittier.
I realize now this not really a notebook, but a “copy book.” Everything in it was copied out of books or from the chalkboard. Children used to have to do that for hours, both to fix the information and to practice penmanship. It must have taken months to copy that much material.
It’s a disappointment for someone trying to “connect,” however. Even so, the copy book is in hand—the hand of some student from the century before last. But whose head bent over these pages, time and time again, day in and day out? The pencil that touched those pages, the hands that held the book, the arms that carried it back and forth to school—to whom did they belong?
I can’t tell if it was written by a boy or a girl. In vain, I search for some personal reference, a marginal “I love Mary” or “Billy put my pigtails in the inkwell again.” But there is nothing, not a scrap. No poems, no references to parents or siblings, no essay about “What I did last summer.” Disappointed, I flip the book around.
There, on the last two pages, the only ones written with the book reversed, appear two items. The first item is a method for removing corns from the feet, both the recipe for the solution and the treatment method. (The recipe includes cannabis indica.)
The other item is quite different from anything else in the book and I reproduce it here in full.

The Telephone
James Alfred Cooper
He procured some thin, common, pine boards and made a flat shallow box, 4 inches deep, a foot long, and 8 inches wide. He stained it. He bought a piece of round steel 8 inches long and a ½ in. in diameter, and wound some fine insulated wire around it. Through the wire he transmitted a current of electricity from his little galvanic battery, and made the steel bar into a permanent magnet. Then he made two bridges of hard wood and screwed them to the bottom of his box about four inches apart. On these two rests he placed his magnet with the fine insulated wire now wrapped around only one end of it. Insulated wire is made by winding silk thread dipped in paraffin around the wire to prevent the electricity escaping from the surface of the conductor. Some people think that electricity runs through the center of the wire. It does not penetrate the wire at all but remains on the surface.
When Bob had finished placing his magnet on the bridges and saw that it fitted nicely he laid it aside. Then with some vinegar and a hot wire he cut off the bell-shaped top of a glass jar. This was to be the mouthpiece, and as glass is resonant, he expected to get very good results. He measured the outside diameter of it and marked a circle just a little larger on the outside of the box. He cut this out and inserted the mouthpiece. Inside this aperature [sic]he placed a flat and very thin plate of soft iron and fastened it against the end of the box with two small screws. This was his vibrator.
The next thing to be done was to splice two pieces of common wire to the ends of the fine insulated wire around around [sic] the end of the steel magnet. He bought a coil of insulated wire 200 yds long. Everything was complete and he made another instrument like the first. He then placed the magnets in their places. The end of the magnet around which the wire was coiled projected slightly and almost touched the vibrator. The ends of the fine wire he carried to two binding screws which he fastened to the bottom of the box and to each of these he attached the line wire. This was better than splicing. His vibrators fitted over the mouthpiece. The ends of the fine wire were fastened to the binding screws. He then got two pieces of copper and fixed it like the modern telephone.
How very curious! The essay opens with the word “he,” without identification, but then “Bob” pops up like a jack-in-the-box. I come to the realization that this is no essay from the “Popular Mechanics” of its day, for this is hardly published material. Clearly, the writer watched this contraption being built by Bob and learned from him as the project went along. These must be the student’s own words, the only sample of the workings of his mind in the entire book. I say “his” words, for the fascination with electricity and wood-working suggest a boy. Of course, there is the name, “James Alfred Cooper,” between the title and the text. But is it about him or by him? And who is he?
Cooper is an old name around these parts, one of the early antebellum settlers, so I consult the census records for our area. No “James A. Cooper” is listed in the 1860 census, though the head of one household is James H. Cooper, a farmer. In his household is listed a 19-year-old neighbor, “Joseph H. Cooper.”
This Joseph H. Cooper appears again in the 1880 census, where he is now 39, head of the household, and his profession is “carpenter.” No wife is listed, but there are three children—the youngest of whom is—hello!—a six year-old son, “James A.” His occupation is given as “At School.” Eagerly, I flip to the 1900 census. There he is. James A. Cooper is now married to eighteen-year-old “Mary A.” and, like his father, is a carpenter. So, if he was six years old in 1880, then by 1889 (when this copy book was written), he would have been…15 years old.
Zzzzzap! Like a sudden shock from that little galvanic battery, a spark leaps across time and we connect with the writer of the copy book. Fifteen is just the right age for the writer of the copy book, consistent with both the content and the handwriting.
As I gaze at the worn little book, lying open on my desk, an image takes shape out of the time-mist. A teen-aged boy sits there, surrounded by dim lamplight, crouched over his copy book. It’s nearly full, so Jim flips it over to get at a blank page and writes out the boring piece about the treatment of corns. Then, with his homework assignment behind him, Jim’s eyes brighten as he begins on something much more interesting—a report on how someone built a homemade version of one of those new-fangled telephones that were spreading everywhere across America. It all fits. The first telephone line had been run down to Howeth’s Store just three years earlier.
Did Jim ever imagine that one day the Cooper family might have a telephone themselves, right in their own home? Or a smart phone that would bounce signals off satellites hidden behind the sunlight in the sky overhead? From a local history, we learn that Jim’s father was known “as being the fastest and best carpenter ever.” This explains why we are given the precise dimensions of the box. Then the significance of “he stained it” suddenly dawns on me, an entirely irrelevant fact but one which a carpenter would have noticed.
I earnestly hope that all turned out well for Jim and Mary. There are Cooper families living in Talbot County. Perhaps one of Jim’s great-great-grandchildren is still around and could let me know the answer to the question: How Did It All Work Out?

Gary Crawford and his wife, Susan, operate Crawford’s Nautical Books, a unique bookstore on Tilghman’s Island.