When your mother is a book-a-holic

There were so many books in my house in Mentor.  All my college books.  Not being much good at anything at the time, I majored in English literature in college.  I sold the sociology and history text books back to the bookstore, but I kept all my English books.  After I was married I went on for an MA in American Literature.  All those books.  After I was divorced I got a BS in accounting.  All those books.

As it turns out, if I had known some things I might be good at, I’d have majored in old things.  Anthropology, Dr. Johanson and Tom Grey and Lucy.  Archeology, all the sites of the history that fascinated me as a child.  Mary Jemison.  Every Indian Nation from the Atlantic to the Rockies. Roanoke.  Virginia Dare.  I bought all the books and read them over and over.

My girl’s bedrooms were stuffed with books.  Mom passed on my childhood books; I gave them books for birthdays and Christmas.  One Christmas they even approached me as a united front, “No more books, Mom.”  They didn’t say what they did want, and they got more books anyway.  Neither remembers that confrontation and say I made it up.

I had bookcases built for their rooms.  I had a bookcase built for the dining room.  There were still stacks of books.  Not charming stacks, like ads for contemporary home décor.  No, there were stacks like my Dad’s stacks of National Geographic, behind his chair.  I never liked the look of that kind of hoarding and cast about for a solution (short of getting rid of the books, of course).

There was all that floor space in the family room in the basement.  My sister had lived there when she ran away from home for several years, but when she went back to be with dad, it was cavernously empty.  I seized the opportunity and bought cartons of industrial shelving, just like library shelving!  The girls and I assembled three rows, back to back, six feet long, five feet high.  Three foot aisles.  It was enough!

Beth and Christina, her best friend next door, started shelving the books alphabetically by author.  They did it after school, for days and days.  The shelved the Bible under God.  That made me chuckle when I came across it and puzzled it out.   I could go find old friends, shelve new books.  There was room for the girl’s excess books, although they had near and dear books that didn’t leave their rooms.  It was pretty near perfect.

Both my girls grew up and went off to college.  Beth majored in something and went on to take a master’s in social anthropology.  (I called it her degree in diarrhea in Bangladesh, and how she got from there to today, from mom’s point of view, might be worth a post.)  One day she called me, desperate.  She needed The Panda’s Thumb for a paper due tomorrow and every copy was checked out of every college library.  Would I please, please, please see if there was a copy at the Mentor library and get it for her.  She would wait right by the phone until I called her with the news.  It was long distance to the Mentor library for her, but not the house.  This was a ludicrously long time ago, I see.

“Have you considered asking your mother about her library?”  She drove right out and got it.

Addicted to reading

After Heidi, I couldn’t stop reading.  I couldn’t get enough words.  I became addicted in the third grade, and converted what I considered wasted time in class to reading time.   The time between writing one spelling word in a test and waiting for the next, I read another page in my book opened on the seat.  Mrs. Schultz knew what I was doing and never stopped me, although I was sent to the corner once for some other infraction, and my mother came into the room in some volunteer capacity.  As my back was to the room, I didn’t know until I got home that she knew I’d been bad.  At least I wasn’t in the closet with a bag over my head.  When we were in second grade, moving up, that was the word in the hall…hope you don’t get Mrs. Schultz, she puts you in the closet with a bag over your head.  We never knew anyone it happened to, but the rumored threat must have deterred all the behavior worse than my infraction.

I read walking home from school.  My feet knew every sidewalk crack and I did stop and look both ways before crossing the streets, I hope.  At home I lay on my stomach on my bed and read.  In the winter I got under the covers (no heat upstairs in the bedrooms!).  At night I used a flashlight I kept under my pillow.  As my mother made my bed every morning, my habit was no secret.

My ninth grade biology teacher was no credit to the profession.  My class was the first after lunch and he would come in, reeking, assign us a chapter to read, sit at his desk, tip his chair against the blackboard, put his feet up on a drawer and sleep.  I would read the chapter, then go to my latest book.  I never heard him come down the aisle.  He slammed an envelope on my desk, said “Give this to your parents and bring me the answer tomorrow!”  The bell rang.

I gave the envelope to my mother, who read it and said nothing.  My dad read it when he came home.  We ate dinner.  Finally dad said, “Show me your trashy dime novel in a brown paper cover.”  I had no such thing.  Dad suggested it might be the book right on top of my pile of school books.  “Dad, that’s your copy of Life on the Mississippi.  It had that cover on it when I took it off the bookshelf.”

Dad gave me a letter in an envelope to give to my biology teacher.  He suggested I make my own decision about reading in class, when my other work was done and the teacher otherwise occupied.  Each of my brothers had the same teacher for biology and each said “No” when asked if I was their sister.  When Jan got up to ninth grade biology, he had been “dismissed.” 

When I was on the road driving to shows I addicted myself to audio books.  I’m not a great fan of movies, especially adaptations of books I love.  The characters in my head are not the ones I see on the screen.  Stories are abridged, plots modified to cover the gaps….on and on.  I’m seldom disappointed in the reading of an audio book.  The few times in the last twenty years one has fallen short, I’ve donated it to the library and found a recording by a different narrator.  So, I no longer walk down the street reading, but you can find me at the gym or in front of the sewing machine with my trusty MP3 player.    To everyone who never interfered, Thanks.  As for the biology teacher, what the heck.  He made my dad chuckle.  I wonder what dad wrote back.