A Mysterious Object

 Everyone in the family knew the object, even if no one could say with certainty where it had come from. The older siblings remembered it on the mantel above their grandparents’ fireplace, as fixed to that living room as the house itself. It looked ancient; the wood it was made of had been polished by time, and its sharp edges had been rounded by the passage of years. It was older than memory. Its brass plates on each of the side pieces were polished and, at the same time, marked with little dents that added to what had once been decorative symbols engraved in it. Each of the wooden side pieces was about forty centimetres long, three wide, and about one centimetre thick. 

The two side pieces were attached at the top by a bolt. Their extension was guided at the bottom by a fine curved piece of wood attached to each side. The curved piece had a little bolt attached to the side pieces that made the two side pieces wider or shorter through a small guide cut through the centre, allowing movement along the guide. At first glance, the item looked like a triangle with small legs. It had a brass plate attached to the curved guide, though whatever practical purpose it had once served no longer applied. The piece had small marks and numbers long faded from the object and from the family’s knowledge.

Their grandparents treated the object with reverence, as if it were something precious. After they died, at the respectable ages of ninety and ninety-four, the object passed from one child to another, and eventually from one grandchild to the next.

By the time it reached the great-grandchildren, interest in it had nearly vanished, until one day someone saw one of the children playing with it and grew concerned that the kids could harm themselves. That day, it was put in a box and forgotten. Once in a while, they saw it leaning inside the garden shed beside Uncle Dave’s garage or, later, sticking out of a box at Aunt Celia’s place, as if Granny’s object, as little Ricky, the youngest of the great-grandchildren, called it, moved from house to house on its own.

One day, Myriam, Ricky’s mom, who had seen it all her life and never asked what it was, finally turned to Aunt Celia and asked why the family kept moving it around. “Its shape is so odd that the box to keep it must be bigger, making it hard to store.” She said, “Ricky was asking what it was, and I didn’t know what to say. What is it anyway?” Myriam asked.

Celia sighed and rolled her eyes, as though she were digging through a distant memory. “You know,” she responded, “of all the grandchildren, Ricky reminds me most of myself, with that inquisitive mind of his. I once asked my father what that thing was and what it was for.”

“What did he say?” Myriam asked, more curious than ever. But Celia, already deep in memory, went on. “Dad was never interested in that heirloom, not the way I was. He only said, ‘Ask Mom,’ meaning my grandmother, so I did. But Granny was already in her nineties, struggling with dementia or Alzheimer’s. To make matters worse, Granddad had just died, and Grandma was distressed. Thus, asking her questions was a delicate process, to avoid upsetting her. However, our curiosity was stronger then, and we wanted to know what the object was and what it was for, something no one seemed to know or care about.”

“How did you do it?” Myriam interjected.

Celia continued, barely noticing Myriam’s interruption. “So, I asked your Uncle Dave to help me. He took the item from our parents’ house and put it in the garden shed behind his place. We thought that if Grandma saw it out of context, she might speak about it more freely than if we questioned her directly.”

“Of course, involving Dave was a mistake. He was no more reliable then than he is now,” Celia said with a chuckle.

By then, Myriam was growing impatient. “Aunt Celia, I only want to know what the heirloom is and why it mattered so much. Did Granny ever tell you?”

But Celia was no longer answering Myriam so much as reliving that afternoon, the one when she and Dave took their grandmother out of the house, hoping memory would do what direct questions could not.

“The plan was simple enough. We would spoil Granny with her favourite cheesecake and let her smoke cigarettes at Dave’s place. Your mom and your other aunt didn’t allow sweets or cigarettes in the house because of her diabetes and the risks to her health. But by then, I thought denying her those small pleasures only made her more anxious. Dave was convinced that if we made her happy, her memory would loosen and she would tell us about the object.”

“I picked Granny up and drove her to Dave’s. Naturally, he had cigarettes and coffee, but instead of cheesecake he bought pecan pie, his favourite, not hers. Even so, she enjoyed the visit, smoked with Dave, tasted the pie, and said it was very good, though not her favourite.”

“When we finally asked her about the thing, she only smiled and said, ‘When you grow up, you will understand and value it.’ That was all. Our great conspiracy collapsed right there, and we still did not know what it was.”

Tired of the long path to the answer, Myriam finally asked, “Did you ever find out?”

“Of course,” Celia said. “It is an octant, an antique wooden octant. Your great-grandmother was the daughter of a sailor who had used it while navigating the Atlantic even before Canada existed.”

Myriam stared at her. “Have you ever valued it? We could get good money for it, Aunt,” she asked. “No, not exactly,” Celia replied. “It is an heirloom that reminded us that our ancestors came from people who crossed oceans in ancient times. The octant is a symbol, and that mattered more than the object itself. It is priceless.”

Celia’s response put the heirloom in perspective. Myriam was about to ask something, but she was interrupted by Ricky walking into the room carrying a plastic sextant he had just made on his 3D printer.

Ricky began to explain that the name octant derives from the Latin octans, meaning an eighth part of a circle, because the instrument's arc is one eighth of a circle.

Continuing Ricky said: “A wooden octant is an 18th-century maritime navigation instrument primarily used to determine a ship's latitude at sea by measuring the altitude of the stars above the horizon. It was invented around 1730 and served as the historical predecessor to the modern all-brass sextant. The octant was constructed out of dense woods like ebony or mahogany to resist warping from moisture, it combined a relatively low price with high utility, making it a vital precursor to modern global positioning systems.”

“The octant is the precursor to the sextant. The sextant is what I just printed.” Ricky said. “Now  the one I just printed is nowhere near as accurate as the one the great-grandparents owned.”