A Very Long Post About Me

My dad just sold the house we grew up in, which could lead to posts about my dad, except I don't go there, or to posts about losing the house you grew up in, except that is such a cliche (and he hasn't even lived there for most of the past 20 years, so really we lost it long ago, except that a lot of our stuff was still there).

No, I am not going to wax frustrated or melancholic. Instead, presumably to nobody's surprise, I am going to write about books.

I had boxes in the basement of my dad's house, boxes whose contents I couldn't even recall. My dad had been nagging me about them for years, and I had been ignoring him and them, because I clearly didn't miss them so they might as well be in his basement as anywhere else I could schlep them. But with the house sold, they had to be dealt with. So yesterday, S and I rented a U-Haul (which really we didn't need, but it was only $25 and made everything much easier) and picked up a set of dining room chairs, a bed, a marble-topped coffee table, a mini-cuisinart, a watering can, several boxes of wine glasses, a painting for my mother, and my boxes (there will be more to pick up next week, after the last tenant vacates, but that will be then).

I got a little freaked out just checking the boxes in the basement, trying to figure out which were mine. There were four boxes with my parents' books, and I remember those books so well. Our living room was very big--we took down two walls to make three rooms into a long room with the dining table at one end, the piano in the middle, and the couch and chairs at the other end--and around the perimeter of the room was a baseboard heater with a single bookshelf above it (there were also floor-t0-ceiling bookshelves in my mother's study, and the front hall). For some reason, the book that always most intrigued me, though I never actually read it, was Richard Farina's been down so long it looks like up to me (the copy we had is the one at the top right). I opened one of the boxes and there it was, right on top, and I immediately visualized just where it went on the shelf: to the right as you came in from the front door, behind the canvas chairs (were they red and orange? or was one yellow? it scares me to lose these details, but then I wonder why they matter).

I decided not to take my parents' books. We already have 20 boxes of books in the attic that we don't yet have shelves for, and I had my own books to take. But those boxes set the themes of the day: revisiting my childhood, and deciding what to keep.

The thing is, I am basically a keeper. I have every letter ever sent me, and virtually every piece of paper the girls scribbled on between the ages of birth and kindergarten (by fourth grade I've gotten ruthless, and most of M's stuff goes straight to the recycling, but I'm still keeping E's, so she won't feel bad that I kept M's and not hers). I once threw out a bunch of papers from grade school--and I regretted it.

At the same time, do I really need the John MacDonald mysteries? outdated Renaissance History textbooks? my college physics notebooks? The answer to all those questions was no: I got rid of Judith Krantz and Ken Follett novels, a veritable bibliography of labor history books (oh wait, maybe Elizabeth wants those), all my college notebooks (though not my folders--there's an important distinction), and, alas, my mother's torn copy of Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, which I so remember reading, but nobody is ever going to read it again, because it is in two pieces with the pages falling out, and an intact copy could easily be found at the library or bookstore.

Yet even as I know it was the right thing to get rid of all that stuff, I still rue the fact that I will never again stumble upon it and be reminded of all the nuclear freeze organizations I wrote to about internships in 1982 (drafts of letters in the back of a class notebook), or the fact that I used to love Travis McGee. Then again, what difference does it make if I forget?

And lest anyone think I went overboard, I kept an awful lot: my collection of movie star biographies (my collection of movie star biographies! I love my collection of movie star biographies!), the original paperbacks of Tales of the City and More Tales of the City, my children's chapter books for M (except I kept my old Mallory Towers books for me, because she has all new ones, the first several bought when we were in London, the rest commissioned from my dad when he is in London, all read dozens of times over), the few picture books plus chapter books M already has for E (whose teacher just started reading Stuart Little to them yesterday, so she was ecstatic to come home and discover her very own Stuart Little!), my cookbook collection (Libby, I had a copy of Mrs. Beeton!), Bill Lee's autobiography (I actually had that one on the discard pile, but S took it off), art books, novels.

But what made me most excited was finding three books that I loved and have remembered ever since, weird unfamous books whose names I'd forgotten. One is The Bishop's Mantle by Agnes Sligh Turnbull whose cover blurb says it all: "The best-selling love story of the rector of St. Matthews--a man of God, and of the earth." Another is The Shining Tides by Win Brooks, which is about a striped bass--really, it is, at least in part--and which I just loved. The third is Blue Treasure: The Mystery of Tamarind Court by Helen Girvan, which is about a Vermeer painting, and it totally pissed me off when Vermeer books hit big a few years ago and nobody mentioned it, though maybe there was a reason for that.

I have no idea if these books are any good, and I don't even know if I'll read them to find out. But just having them again makes me so happy, and they'll definitely go on my bedroom bookshelf, once I get a bedroom bookshelf.

Yes, it's definitely time to boost the bookshelf capacity.