Harold

My father was a design engineer in the sixties when I was in high school. He worked with a crew of design engineers and draftsman whose mission was to transform ideas into the drawings that would go to the machine shops to direct the minds and hands that guided the lathes and drill presses and other tools that turned an idea into an object. Any mistakes made at a drawing table would harden into a worthless piece of junk at the machine shop, so the design engineers had to work carefully and with great concentration.

They worked in a world of buzzing fluorescent lights, wooden drawing boards and desks, ashtrays and coffee cups. The sound of graphite pencils being ground to a fine point and then run against T squares, straight edges, green templates of circles and hexagons, French curves, triangles. Calculations made with slide rules and the scrabbling of pencil on paper. The whirring of electric erasers and horsehair brushes sweeping away the lapse of attention, the wrong thought, the bad measurement before it was passed along to the machine shop. The sound of large rolls of paper smoothed out and attached with thumbtacks to the soft wood of the drafting tables.

 

Work was a long line of details that all had to be perfect, decisions on how to make a group of parts fit together in the smallest space, what to put in, what to leave out. Some projects could drag on for months as new ideas caused chain reactions and endless revisions. You had to find a way to enjoy the process or you would crack under the stress.

 I imagine that my father’s friend at the office was toiling away at some small decision at his drafting board one afternoon when Harold first came into his world. Harold didn’t have a name the first time he dropped in but he did have a great entrance.

Harold inched into Bob’s field of vision first as a tiny shadow on the blueprint, followed by the graceful landing of eight fragile legs thinner than the lines of the drawing he was now walking on. Bob, grateful for the chance to focus his weary mind on something new and interesting, did not brush the spider away or escort it to the nearest exit. He stared in fascination at the thin barely visible filament that went up to the ceiling. A few moments of pondering the life of this spider gave Bob the break his mind needed and when he looked back at what he was trying to figure out, the answer became obvious. Bob and the spider were now buddies.

He let the spider wander freely at the top portion of his drawing tablet and would glance up now and then as he worked, to have his mind renewed by the antics of this comical alien. After a while, the spider would hoist itself up, up and out of Bob’s field of vision until it was back on the ceiling.

This critter gave new life to the routine of flattening blueprints, pondering problems, making marks on paper, and after a couple of weeks Bob named the spider Harold. It became one of the office jokes- “Harold drop in on you today?”  “Not yet.”

It’s funny how little things like a spider crawling around on your drawing table can bring new life to tired routines, a warm and light hearted feeling, a sense of friendship into your life.

Bob didn’t realize how much he looked forward to Harold dropping in until one Monday in late November when he realized that it was time to go home and Harold had never shown up. The same thing happened the next day. And the next. Finally on Friday, Bob got up on his chair and looked around and discovered Harold on top of a cabinet next to the window. Harold was curled up on his side, and did not scamper when Bob cautiously touched him. Harold was dead.

Bob gently wrapped Harold in a piece of tissue paper and put him in a matchbox. He confided in my father that he took Harold home and buried him in the flower garden.

Everyone at the office eventually learned that Harold had died, and it was awkward to try and deal with the sense of loss for engineers trained to be logical, not emotional. There were a few “sorry to hear about Harold” comments and then as the pressure of deadlines and projects to complete mingled with the general buzz of the Christmas season, Harold quickly faded away from the conversation at the water cooler.

But on the last day of work before the Christmas vacation, among the cards and presents, everyone at the office found a little envelope from Bob. Inside was a card with a drawing of a spider with wings and a halo above its head and a tiny black oval for a mouth.

Inside the card read, “Hark the Angel Harold Sings!”