My
first bookcase was a simple affair: four shelves made of boards of pine stained
a reddish brown. My father built it one weekend; I would have been nine or ten
years old. It held my Golden Book
Encyclopedias (purchased one a week by my mother at the A&P grocery
store); my Hardy Boys
stories (usually placed in the vicinity of my Trixie Belden mysteries);
several Tom Swift books;
and the books I ordered each month at school through the Scholastic Book
Service (oh, my barely contained excitement to see the monthly SBS box
sitting by the teacher’s desk).
The
first bookcase ended up traveling; it followed me to Texas, and then it
followed my wife and me to St. Louis. It was joined for a time by the college
student’s need for cheap bookcases (cinder blocks and board, again of pine but
unstained), then by the set of three-you-could-buy- fairly-reasonably at the
furniture store (the set you knocked together yourself).
Actually,
it was followed by several sets of three over the years. Some of those sets
have come and gone; others still reside in our basement, holding a host of
non-book things. The good bookcases are upstairs, occupying most of one bedroom
and part of another. Oh, and there’s that small shelf in still another.
The
original bookcase, now more than half a century old, sits in our basement. It’s
still just as sturdy as it ever was. It’s never needed repairs. And on its
bottom shelf sits that same set of Golden Book Encyclopedias that my mother
bought at the A&P. (If you look closely, we can see them in the picture
above on the bottom shelf, to the right of my high school “Warrior” yearbooks .)
Years ago, when we were visiting my mother in New Orleans, she asked me if I
still wanted them. If not, they were headed for the next garage sale. Since the
Hardy Boys and Trixie Belden had already walked the plank at one of her garage
sales, I took them back to St. Louis.
I
suspect that the only reason she didn’t set them out to be sold was that she
remembered buying them a volume a week at the A&P, trying to remember which
volume to get, occasionally marking it down on her grocery lists, sometimes
buying the wrong one and having to return it. Yes, she had a lot invested in
those encyclopedias.
The
bookshelf they sit in, that bookshelf they first sat in, is a bit worn, sitting
rather quietly as it does in the basement. I can still remember watching my
father build it. I can still remember my excitement. I can probably imagine my
mother’s relief at having a place to put my books.
My
father and I did few things together, outside of working at his printing
business. The bookshelf project was one of them, even though my participation consisted
of watching him. But that was sufficient; he was building it for me.
And
those encyclopedias – they’ll likely end up eventually as a donation to Good
Will, or sitting in a box on the driveway as part of a garage sale. But not in
my lifetime. They may be meaningless to my children, but I know what attention
and focus my mother brought to their acquisition. Just as I know the effort my
father put into that bookcase.
In
Finding
Spiritual Whitespace: Awakening Your Soul to Rest, Bonnie Gray talks about a bookcase, one
she kept in her bedroom until a friend convinced her to move it to the living
room. The bookcase represented safety and escape. It blocked memories of bad
experiences. Moving it was an act of embracing vulnerability.
And
there’s my bookcase, sitting in the basement, holding those encyclopedias,
among other things. It’s a reminder of things my parents did for me, ways they
recognized that they had this voracious reader in the family and weren’t quite
sure what to do with him, but they would at least build him a bookcase to hold
his books.
