Essays

She called it The Office so we called it The Office though anyone outside the family would have called it what it was: a closet. The 3 x 3 foot doorless alcove off a corner of the living room was likely intended for books and maybe a record player. And we did keep the record player there along with hundreds of albums of Classical music and Broadway tunes, and dozens of books that Mom and Dad had collected over the years, their college textbooks, literature about the Western United States, novels, art books, and an odd assortment of paperbacks.  
But Mom saw much more in the three-sided stall than a throw-away cubby under the eaves. She envisioned a place where she could be alone to write: essays, journals, newspaper and magazine articles, publicity materials and newsletters, all of which she did fairly invisibly.
Writing was secondary – or so it seemed to us – to her role of mother, wife, and household manager, an assignment she embraced wholeheartedly. We could tell by what she did for us and how much she did for us, that she loved being a mother and loved us.  
During the school year, she attended every school function; volunteered at Hot Dog Day; drove us to ballet and piano lessons, swim team practice and friends’ houses; served as Camp Fire Girl Leader; and was waiting for us at home every afternoon when we walked up the hill from the school bus. She fixed our breakfast and made our bag lunches every morning, and placed dinner on the table every night.  
Summer vacations were full of exciting adventures though not in a scheduled sort of way. We had plenty of time for hanging out at the house, in the yard or at the nearby swimming pool; going cardboard sliding on the dry, brown hills; or, for Jeff, playing Army in the field near our house. All that was done in and around activities Mom planned for us like visiting nature centers and art museums; having picnics with other families in nearby parks; taking ceramics classes together; hiking on a nearby island or on Mt. Tamalpais; or spending the day at the beach.  
As much as she loved all that, and said so, as I grew older, I realized she was conflicted about her life. I believe part of her wished she were a newspaper columnist along the lines of the Boston Globe’s Ellen Goodman who also appeared in our local paper, or a full-time magazine writer. She didn’t so much want to combine both at once but rather to be two people living two separate, simultaneous lives, doing each full-time.   
Instead, she carved out of her full-time Mom life as much time as she could for her writing and did so right in the midst of our family life. The Office was perfectly situated for that. In her central location, she was close to the kitchen where the phone was located which she always answered no matter what she was doing, and not far from our bedroom where we might be playing, fighting, or calling for her. The front door was nearby in case someone stopped over.  
By creating an office, Mom staked a claim for herself that was uncharacteristic. In every other way that I recall, she put herself last. She served herself dinner last, sat down to eat last, took the smallest portion if we didn’t have enough to go around, dropped everything in the morning if Dad was running late so she could drive him to the bus – still wearing her robe. She interrupted dinner preparations on rainy days to drive Jeff around on his newspaper route, didn’t buy herself new clothes yet had time and money to sew new outfits for me, and deferred to my father in countless ways. She planned her days and lived her life around our needs and activities – all without complaint.  
So it was completely out of character and really wonderful that in this way, for her writing, she took care of herself. She knew she needed a space, no matter how small. If there hadn’t been a cubby in the living room, I’m convinced she would have found some corner of the house in which to place her typewriter, maybe part of her bedroom, or in the L of the kitchen where Jeff and I ate meals.
I wish I could have overheard the conversation between my parents that resulted in Mom creating The Office, if indeed there was a discussion. It’s possible she just put her typewriter in there one day and established the cubby as hers, sort of squatters’ rights, though that seems highly unlikely because Mom and Dad discussed everything ad infinitum before taking any action: where to plant a fruit tree so it could get the best sun and water, when to visit Grandma and Grandpa next and all the logistics involved, who to invite to an upcoming dinner party and what to serve, and what part of the state to explore on the next vacation. Loaded with minutiae, the conversations were interminably boring to Jeff and me and we tried not to be in the room during those times.  
I assume a discussion about The Office ensued. Did she have to fight him for it? He was proud of our house, pleased to afford a brand new starter home perched on a hill north of San Francisco that looked out across the Bay to The City where he worked. Dad preferred our house to be organized and probably didn’t particularly like the fact that papers frequently spewed from that corner of the living room and, from a certain vantage point in the room, the entire untidy cubby was fully visible with stacks of papers on the floor, some leaning precariously. But I never heard him complain.
No matter how The Office came into existence, he was clearly tolerant of it, and maybe even accepting, or it wouldn’t have remained her office. Mom didn’t fight him on much or for very long so they must have reached an accommodation and from then on, we had The Office, never Mom’s Office, as if the room stretched a full 20 x 15 feet and contained several desks and file cabinets.
The Office was painted mint green, the original color of the living room. When I was around 10 or 11 years old, Mom and Dad had the living room repainted, but The Office stayed mint green and, over time, became quite scuffed up. No doubt Mom didn’t want painters in that space and no one wanted to move all those books and records, so The Office stayed its original color, probably something the builder bought in bulk and used in every house on the block.  
A single overhead fixture, a faux brass cone-shaped pendant light hung from the ceiling by a thick, beige cord, providing minimal illumination. Mom supplemented the light with a black crookneck desk lamp that she somehow rigged to her typewriter stand. She sat on a rickety old office chair on wheels, secretary-style with no arm rests, its frayed black cushion slightly lopsided on the metal strut that connected it to the seat. The chair rested on the same beige wall-to-wall carpet that was in the living room so it didn’t really wheel around very well. Not that there was anywhere much to go. Eventually, Mom acquired a hard plastic chair mat which undoubtedly helped her move around more easily and provided great entertainment for Jeff and me.  
Mom’s typewriter sat on a portable metal stand and faced the back wall of The Office. Her jet black Remington Rand was heavy even for an adult to carry so it rarely moved. Several keys were so well-used that the white lettering was worn off though Mom didn’t need the lettering. She was a fast and accurate touch typist. Thousands of tiny blows from her fingernails had scarred the keys. Her speed belied the power it took to push down those keys. As a child, when I fooled around on the typewriter, the keys were incredibly hard to activate and tangled at the top of their arc just as they were about to hit the page.  
Built-in shelves set back on the right side of the closet opened up the space and made it livable. Rather than having two floor-to-ceiling walls closing in at each elbow, the wall with the shelves was about waist high and opened up into a counter that stretched back to the wall of five bookshelves filled with albums and books.
On the counter sat the record player, stacks of papers, and several books or records that hadn’t been re-shelved. An old white plastic tray contained pencils, most with lead and erasers worn down, pens that might or might not work, paperclips of all sizes, scotch tape,  a heavy metal ruler labeled with the name of a local hardware store, and odd items that never returned to their original places like a screwdriver and hair clips. Bolted to the counter’s far-right corner was a faded, scuffed red hand-crank pencil sharpener similar to those in school classrooms which is probably where it came from going back to when Mom taught eighth grade before she was married.  
Jeff and I liked handling several random keepsakes scattered across the counter: a clear green class Japanese fishing float, a sandstone paperweight with a commemorative medallion on top, and a miniature bronze statue of a boy peeing – the Mannekin Pis of Brussels. I loved feeling the heaviness of the bronze statue in my hand or the lightness of the float. Jeff and I felt free to go into The Office and play a record, browse through the books, or look for a stapler which was rarely there and even if it was, usually didn’t have staples.
For a short time, Mom moved her typewriter and its stand against the left wall of The Office, close to the cubby’s opening where, if she raised her eyes from the page and looked left through the floor to ceiling living room windows, she could gaze across Richardson Bay to Sausalito, and, if she looked further left, see The City and the Golden Gate Bridge across the San Francisco Bay. That view provided a continual parade of sailboats, motor boats, and fishing trawlers in the near bay; larger sailboats, oil tankers and ocean liners in the distance, often framed by cumulous clouds during the day or obscured by fog in late afternoons and early mornings. The view was likely too distracting because before long, Mom returned her typewriter to its usual place facing the back wall and a scuffed Toulouse-Lautrec poster of the Moulin Rouge.   
When I was older, I learned how important Mom’s writing was to her and that she was frustrated she hadn’t been more widely published or hadn’t had that parallel life as a full-time writer, as impossible a concept as that was. However, when I was young, I had no idea that anything else came close to being as important in Mom’s life as Dad, Jeff and me.  
But in her own subtle, gentle manner, in an era when being a mother was valued above all else, Mom made writing a priority, slipped it seamlessly into our daily lives and worked at it steadily, year after year.
                                         
First published in Inscape, vol. xxxv, 2010.