Transcript
The Dot
Small things can hold much bigger stories.
It is a very hot late Saturday afternoon. It is so hot that I decided I was going to do my recording from inside the house, from my rocking chair sitting in front of the big window here. Now, I pushed the window open so I could continue to listen for the birds and have some cool at my back.
But now, being indoors, that meant that my cat Grayced thought he could join the whole enterprise here. And he’s sitting right next to me, and I can see he wants to pick a paw up and pat at my microphone here. But I looked at him and shook my head no, and he put his paw back down.
He’s a very small cat. Small paws, small tail, small head, small.
You know, smaller things may hold bigger stories.
For instance, for my dinner tonight, I put fresh-ground peppercorns on my sweet potato. Now, peppercorns are small, but they have a lot of spice to them. And they made that sweet potato all that much better. The peppercorns and butter and sweet potato. A small thing that held a bigger story.
Small things.
I was looking through some photos earlier today, photos that I made down on my parents’ farm. Oh, back, I don’t know, probably the late 1990s, thereabouts. And in one of those photos, I could see my mama. She was in the bedroom. She was sitting on her rocking chair. And she had in her lap my daddy’s favorite shirt. I mean, his favorite shirt. And somehow it had gotten torn.
Well, there was nothing to do but Mama was going to fix Daddy’s favorite shirt. So there she sat. She had gotten out her needles, she’d gotten out her thread, she had out her scissors. And she put on her middle finger, on her right hand, a thimble.
Now, some of you might not know what a thimble is. A thimble is a small metal cap that’s got little dimples all over it. And it goes on the middle finger, so that when you’re hand sewing and you need to push that needle through some tough material, you use that cap on your finger to push the needle through.
A small thing, making life easier.
And I have no idea how old that thimble is. Got it downstairs in Mama’s cedar chest. And I got upstairs, here, mine. Handy little gadget. Small things to make bigger stories come true. Like Daddy’s shirt getting fixed.
Small things.
Do you know what a doodlebug is? In the sandy, dry places around here, you’ll sometimes be walking along and you’ll see in the sand what looks like an inverted funnel. So you’re looking down where, like, somebody took a funnel and they pushed it in the sand and they made the imprint of the funnel. They took the funnel out. Now they have an imprint in the sand. And at the bottom of that funnel area, there’s a doodlebug.
That’s a larva. It’s a larva of the antlion. And the doodlebug has set a trap for ants, which is what its favorite meal is. And when ants come walking along the edge of that funnel-like area and they start to slip and the grains of sand start to slide down, the doodlebug will throw more sand up to discombobulate the ant, and the poor ant slides down and ends up being the doodlebug’s dinner.
Now, growing up, we used to go doodlebugging. We would get us a piece of grass or a very fine little stick, and we’d try to tickle the sides, top sides, edges of that sandy funnel, trying to trick the doodlebug into coming out so we could see it. No. Doodlebug wasn’t going to have anything to do with that. After a while we’d get tired.
But there’s a very small thing, a doodlebug, about half the size of a green pea. Tiny, but a whole big story, a whole big world right there.
Then, of course, there’s Carolina wrens. But I have to bring them up because there’s one sitting out here on the porch, and I don’t know that you can hear it. He’s making a chirp every now and then. Carolina wrens, they’re small, but they are full of themselves. I mean, yeah, they will sit there and they pump up and down and they will talk and they will chatter and they will sing. I understand that Carolina wrens have got over 20 different songs, okay?
And I do believe that little tiny bird — they’re not quite as small as a hummer — that little tiny bird is sure, I mean absolutely sure, that he is bigger than a bald eagle.
Of course, Carolina wrens do serve a good purpose in the yard. If they see a hawk, they let the yard know. If they see a squirrel, they let the yard know. If they see a dog coming, they let the yard know. If they see a human being coming, they let the yard know. They’re sassy little birds. They’re small, but they have bigger stories to tell. Don’t say.
And I just glanced over at the door, my front door, and hanging from the knob is the key to that door, a very long key. I mean, it’s a good two and a half inches long. But I’ve been talking small things, and that large key made me think of a very, very, very small key that belonged to a jewelry box.
A jewelry box made out of ebony, shiny black. And the top and the sides of it were inlaid with stones and painted with lacquer. Beautiful thing. The box was about 12 inches long, about 4 inches front to back, about 4 inches top to bottom. My daddy bought that box for my mama, brought it back on one of his trips overseas.
And the key that opens that box is a small, tiny key, barely an inch long. And Mama had a long string on it. And I’ve kept that long string on it because I don’t want to lose that key. Because inside that box there’s much bigger stories.
There’s the pearls that Mom inherited from her mom. There’s the opal earrings that Daddy brought Mama back from overseas because her birthstone is an opal. There’s several different coins in there.
Small box, smaller key, and much bigger stories.
And thinking about Mom and Dad and Dad’s travels all over the world, I got to thinking about downstairs I’ve got all the letters that Mom and Dad wrote to each other through 30 years of being in the Marine Corps. Whole cedar chest full of them.
Writing, handwriting, that is sometimes a very small exercise that we don’t do much anymore. We might jot off a note to ourselves on the back of an envelope. But mostly we depend upon our devices.
When I want to write poetry, I want to write stories or essays, I write them by hand. There’s something about moving that pencil across the paper and then getting to the end of a sentence and putting one of the smallest things that we’ve ever considered onto that paper.
I put a dot, a period, and that period gathers up all the information before it and holds it.
A tiny little dot holding maybe a 1,500-word essay, a 30-word poem, one of my parents’ 500-word handwritten letters on onion skin during the war.
And there is that ubiquitous little tiny dot. A tiny symbol that controls a whole story.
A very small thing holding together a much bigger story.
Thank you for coming through the open door today. Thank you very much.
When you get a chance, pick up a pencil, scribble yourself a note, and at the end put a period and think about all the notes and all the periods that you have put into those notes and letters through your life.
A period. A dot. A very small thing that holds a much bigger story.
Take care. Be safe.
