A Grandmother's Gift

On a frigid February morning, Simon awoke in his cardboard castle with a smile across his face. Today was going to be the beginning of his new life.

Of course, he always thought that before getting out from underneath his newspapers. His ragged layers of jackets and sweats would still keep him warm, and with a deep breath, he forced himself from under his papers and crawled out the duct taped front flap. Beneath the I-926 bridge, he was sheltered from the flurry of heavy snowflakes outside. Unlike his neighbors, he didn’t mind the snow, even when he had to trudge through it to survive.

Down the powdery, cloud like path, he made his way to the Food Bank on Hemingway Boulevard. His rough knit red cap kept his head protected from the plummeting crystals while he nestled his face into his tattered navy scarf, warming his face with his breath. The scarf was made for a child, a gift from his mother when he was seven, but he kept it as a reminder of her homely love. Through it, she was still with him, keeping him in a close embrace.

With the heavy snowfall, only some ten people were in line to break their fast at the Food Bank. Even on such a chilling morning, the volunteers still came to provide their sustenance, bless their souls. As he took his place at the back of the line, a thin faced mother and her scrawny daughter came up behind him. “You can go ahead,” he told them, smiling though they could only see it in his eyes. They said nothing, preserving their energy as they nodded graciously to him before they moved forward.

As he stood waiting, his gaze shifted to the trash can beside him. It was filled to the top with bags, but the top most was left open. At the top, he noticed a small black notebook resting above the garbage. Letting his curiosity guide him, he picked up the book and opened it up. He imagined some secret within, some designs of an amazing invention or a heart warming tale or the journal of a great person. Instead, he found the pages blank, not a word written on the two hundred pages within. Only at the very first page was anything noted. May this small black notebook help make your dreams come true. Love, Grandma. Simon had never met his grandmother, but his mother had told him stories about her. She was a passionate woman and wrote every day of her life. Though improbably, he imagined that it was she who left it for him.

The pretty, kind woman at the Food Bank handed him a bottle of water and a loaf of bread. “Thank you very much,” he said, making sure that all inside could hear him. Before he departed, he turned back and asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have a pen I could borrow? I’ll bring it back once I’m finished with it.” The woman at the front shrugged as she turned back to look at the others.

A lanky, gray haired man emerged from the back and pulled a fine, ballpoint pen from his pocket. “Use it ‘til it runs dry, lad, but make sure it’s worth it,” the man said. Simon beamed, gently taking the pen from the man’s jostling hand and nodded to him before departing.

On his way back to the bridge, while quenching his thirst with tiny sips in between nibbles of his bread, he tried to remember the last time he wrote anything. In high school, he’d written letters every week to Sarah when she moved to Anchorage, but he’d stopped receiving them junior year and thus stopped sending them. There was also the creative writing class he’d taken sophomore year, when he wrote about space pirates and knights hunting dragons, but nothing since then. He remembered that feeling of creating a world and wonderful people that overcome tragedy with reverence. He figured he’d try to awake that feeling again.

He collected his solar powered lamp before crawling back into his cardboard castle. Positioning the lamp overhead, he clicked it on and set the small black notebook down in front of him. The first page glared up at him, the long black lines begging to be filled, but he didn’t know what to write. He looked around at his surroundings; a worn, wrinkled copy of The Old Man and the Sea, a clear plastic bag filled with coins, a runners trophy he won for the hundred meter dash freshman year, a stinky pile of discarded clothing, and a cracked, framed photograph of himself and his mother. There were plenty of ideas in his head, but he didn’t know how to begin.

“What did Mrs. Miller always say?” He asked aloud. “Put pen to paper and let the words flow. Become a world shaper and just let go.” Putting aside all his worldly distractions, he let the ink mark the first line of the first page and made his story real.

Hours passed by like minutes until he needed to rest his cramping hand and recharge his lamp. Unfastening the light and setting aside the pen, he crawled out of his cardboard castle and stood up. With a resounding roar, he stretched himself as he went over to place the lamp where it would at least get some light. “Alright then, I suppose I should see what I wrote,” he said to himself, shielding his small black notebook from the snow.

When he opened the notebook to the first page, he didn’t find a lined page filled with his words. Instead, where the page had once been, rested a one hundred dollar bill. He stared at it bewildered, trying to fathom where it had appeared from, until he noticed ten more of the bills. He’d filled ten pages to the period with his writing and they were now gone, replaced by one hundred dollar bills. Even the back side of the page had become their own bills. Taking hold of the first bill, he pulled it out of the notebook, unsure of what he expected until it rested in his hand. He held it up to the sky, recognize the watermarks that bled through. It was real. He didn’t dare question how, but all ten of them were real.

With a burst of energy, he hopped back to his cardboard castle and took out his pen. Taking a seat beside it, where there was light clear enough to see, he continued to write his story.

Hours turned into days turned into weeks as Simon continued filling up line after line of his small black notebook. During the day, he sat out in the daylight and wrote, and in his cardboard castle he wrote under lamplight at night. He slept only for as long as he needed to, for his excitement wouldn’t allow him to rest a second longer. His own world, his life like characters, his own creation poured out of him onto paper without resistance. His neighbors slowly took notice of his trance and rather than bother him, they instead brought him the food and water he needed. As he continued to write, he found himself reciting the words as they were put to paper and his neighbors would gather around and listen. He’d never felt so free in his life.

On a sunny day in March, Simon had flipped to the last page of his small black notebook. He wrote to the very last line until the story was finished. Before he could punctuate the finale with a big The End, the pen finally ran out of ink. All the neighbors were around him when he finished, even the volunteers from the Food Bank had come down to witness the end of his story. Apparently, the neighbors would take shifts listening so they could retell it to each other throughout the days. When he closed the book and held it against his chest, they all applauded him, some where even brought to tears. He bowed graciously to them all, but his fatigue finally fell on him. Without a word, he stood and crawled into his cardboard castle and quickly fell asleep, the small black notebook cradled to his chest.

When he finally awoke late into the next day, after filling all two hundred pages, he had twenty thousand dollars.

* * *

One year later, Simon regarded how that day had truly been the beginning of his new life. After he awoke, he gave a bill to all those that sat with him and kept him nurtured while he wrote. Then he gave a handsome sum to the Food Bank and to the volunteers, with some extra to the old man who had given him the pen. Without that pen, he couldn’t have written his masterpiece.

He’d gone on to get a small apartment down the street from the Food Bank and, though he kept his trinkets and even his old newspaper blanket, he got a bed and a desk. Every day, he kept writing in small black notebooks. He hadn’t found another one like the first, that had turned his words to money, but he filled them with his stories and shared them with the world. He hoped that, wherever she was, his grandmother was glad his dreams had finally come true.