I received a questioning (literally – ??) comment on the post Dagmar below. I suppose it is not immediately apparent what is going on to someone who does not know the trails my mind can take. Sunday I wandered into the mid-part of a showing of “I Remember Mama” on cable TV and I watched it while doing other things through to the end. I had seen it several times before and knew the plot quite well. And, of course, I am old enough that when I was young the references to the radio show “I Remember Mama” were numerous.
Later while lounging on the old north porch with the early evening’s western sunlight filtering in the windows, I thought of the cozy and welcoming place I feel when I think of the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse. It simply came to me to have a nice Norwegian young woman come to stay. Dagmar was a young girl in the book – I Remember Mama – sister to the main character who was played by a young Barbara Bel Geddes (Think Miss Ellie of Dallas if you are old enough).
And then I just thought about characters in general . . . Well, those characters don’t sit static in the unopened books – I’ll bet they do all sorts of things and grow older and whatever while their nature stays the same. Then, when they sense the book being opened, they scurry back to their assigned roles and look as if they have not been doing anything else at all.
So, when that book fell off the train, and Dagmar fell free of the destruction, I chose to make her more of her oldest sister’s age. You see, she would have those years that were not already outlined by the book. She could come here a blank slate fashioned by the atmosphere of the book.
I can see the Peanut Butter Cafe & Roadhouse in my mind’s eye; I can smell the woodsmoke soaked in the beams; I know it is a place where screen doors slam in the summer ann where people hurry into the warmth in winter. A place where we adapt – another table? Well, run and bring down that one from the attic and drag in those caned chairs we have been storing in the basement. A place where we put’s today’s gadgets and yesterday’s keepsakes on wide window sills – the blue glass insulators from old telephone poles next to the charger for the ipod. The Depression China catch-all dish next to the acrylic seasonal glass.
But you can’t call it quaint, because the air we breathe in the cafe is fresh and of the 21st century. It is now in the memories of back then. It is a place where butter can catapault out of the side-by-side refrigerator that I often call the icebox and hit the floor with a major splatter – eliciting a response common to The Sopranos and never heard in B&W movies.
And sometimes I toy with my mind, playing with the idea that I am just a figment of someone’s imagination myself, maybe a wandering character from a book. But it is just a game and I know who I am. Why, I’m AmeliaJake.
