This post is contributed by Barnaby Porter. Read the previous post here.
“When is a door not a door?”… “When it’s ajar.”
That was just about the first joke I ever heard. I didn’t get it.
In fact, it was a long time before I understood what “ajar” meant, but since I had heard my older sister tell that joke any number of times to a chuckling audience, I figured it must be a good one, so I found myself trying it out on my friends too. It didn’t go over so well though; they thought I was crazy, and for good reason I suppose.
To me and my friends, a “jar” was a wide-mouth glass container with a screw-on lid, a very important commodity indeed, because you could put things in it, live things, and watch them and keep them and carry them around. Mostly we needed big jars, and good ones were hard to come by. Until the peanut butter or mayonnaise were all eaten up at home, their containers weren’t worth a damn. As a result, there were a lot of hounded mothers in our neighborhood who were pressed daily to “keep on cooking.” Actually, one of the best sources of big, institutional size jars was the Red & White Store around the corner. I was on a permanent waiting list for the beauty that held the big dill pickles on top of Larry, the butcher’s, meat counter. That one was a prize – big enough for a bullfrog.
There wasn’t a creature that lived in our neck of the woods that didn’t at one time or another see the inside of a jar. From snakes and tadpoles to walking sticks and fireflies, from salamanders and newts to minnows and mice, they all learned the confines of a round, glass world, while we in turn learned about them – about their noses and bellies and the bottoms of their feet. I lined my windowsill with jars and lugged them to school, yet no matter how conscientious I was to regularly set my captives free before their confinement got the best of them, there just were never enough jars to go around. Lord, there were a lot of bugs and critters in the world!
By the age of nine I had punched more breathing-holes in jar lids than any kid alive. I knew a lot about natural history by then too, but there was always the nagging problem of jar supplies. Whenever I needed one, I had to go scrounging and begging, wishing the whole time I had a good dependable cache of them somewhere.
Then one day I was down in the cellar of the big house I grew up in. There were several rooms down there, dark and gloomy rooms with scary, black corners lurking behind curtains of cobwebs. It wasn’t a place where I felt like spending much time, but since my mother had started growing mushrooms in flats in the far room with a brick floor, I was often sent down with a basket and a knife to collect them for supper.
On one such trip, I got curious about an old closet that had stood forgotten and unopened for ages. I creaked the door open, expecting… what, I didn’t know. And from that moment on I was the King of Jardom!
There were dozens and dozens of jars in all sizes and shapes, all with lids and even spare lids tied up in cloth bags. There were gallon jugs too, for pond water collections, and bottles with glass stoppers, for storing precious items and liquids and such things as dry turtle food. Never again would I have to go looking. I had jars enough now for probably the rest of my life.
It was quite a feeling, coming into that kind of wealth. And though it might have taken me a while to get the meaning of that dumb joke, I knew that a door was a door and a jar was a jar.
Artist and author Barnaby Porter has had a varied career in marine research, aquaculture, and woodworking, among others. Most recently he partnered with his wife Susan as co-owners of the Maine Coast Book Shop & Cafe in downtown Damariscotta. In October 2021, Barnaby completed his tenure on Coastal Rivers’ Board of Trustees after six years of service.
