MOMMOM'S STAPLER

“She did not mess around, that lady.”

My grandmother—we called her Mommom—lived on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She had that very strong Maryland accent, almost Southern. We’d go down to visit her a couple times a year. She was a very organized person. Everything about her was meticulous. She either wallpapered or painted every surface of her home, even the lamps. Every single surface had something on it. Nothing was bare.

She liked to be busy. When she came to visit us in Pennsylvania, she’d get so bored and restless that she’d start cleaning. Once, my brother woke up in the early morning to go to the bathroom, and by the time he got back to his room to go back to sleep, she’d made his bed. She liked us kids. We played a lot of cards with her. Gin. Fish. All those kid card games.

She’d divorced my grandfather before I was born. Even before that, though, she was an independent woman; she had a job in the tax department with the state of Maryland. After her divorce, she did have a friend, a partner—Mr. Gene—who she was with forever. But she was extremely independent and proud of the fact that she could support herself. She drove faster than anyone I’d ever met, even when she was old. She liked to make good time. She kept a Tupperware container under her car seat in case she had to pee. She would pee in the container, dump it out the window, and carry on. She did not mess around, that lady.

When she moved, very reluctantly, out of her house—that house she'd bought with her own money, as a single woman—to go into an old folks’ home, we all went down to help. She asked us to take whatever we wanted. I took a few things—her spatula and some other kitchenware, her old bike.

But I was most excited about her stapler, because it was old-school and cool-looking and because I knew I’d use it. I am not someone who keeps a lot of knick-knacks. I don’t like clutter. But three years after Mommom’s death, I still use her stapler all the time—like she did, at her desk at the tax office for years and years. When I told her that I took it, she said, “Ah, that was bought and paid for by the state of Maryland.”

—Jeremy Lejeune