Books and Life

A dozen boxes of my Mom’s books, stacked in the garage since her death two years ago. I remember them in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that covered one wall in the living room of the house where I grew up, the colors of their spines, the illustrations on their dust jackets, the titles read sideways. As an only child I gazed at them in the vacant time I seemed to have. I am sorting them now. To keep are the sets: my Mom’s Anthony Trollope novels, the political novels and the ecclesiastical novels, in the Oxford World’s Classics edition. They are small, just 4 inches wide, 6 inches tall (not quite octodecimo in book sizes). Hardcover but lightweight, they fit in the hand, easy to read despite the small print. Their jackets not as bright as I remember them, but still multi-colored. Next is the complete Jane Austen novels in the London J.M. Dent edition with Brock illustrations---all were ordered from England. Then there are her old college books inscribed with her older brother’s name; he’d passed them down to her. Their mottled buckram spines and musty smell uninviting now but in the 1930s a world of learning to a young man and woman able to go to college when so much of the population was struggling to survive. Her father had only a grade-school education, but ran a hardware store in Portland, Oregon. Barrels of eight and ten-penny nails, cans of paint, tools and lawnmowers---the store produced enough to pay for private tuition for my Mom and her brother. And for these books.

My sorting project migrates to my own bookshelves, to old books I’ve been meaning to cull---Signet Classics marked 95 cents in the upper right corner; I can barely read the print any more, at least not for pleasure. Notes edge their pages, angled obliquely to the text which itself is underlined in the days before highlighters. I had been enthralled by these books in graduate school; they had been my life of study and intellectual exchange. What was I tracking as I read Anna Karenina? Some analysis demonstrating that it wasn’t really a love plot, it seems. Shabbier are the books bought in communist Poland with cheap paper and ink; weak glue in the spines. They fell apart like communism, only faster.

One year, after my income had improved, I decided to invest in some quality hardbound editions---In Search of Lost Time in 6 Modern Library volumes in the translation by C.K. Moncrieff-Terrence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright. Twenty bucks or less a book. I read up to volume 5 the first year my Mom lived with me. Having the set stacked at my bedside got me through the day, anticipating the night when I could finally be alone with the next chapter. While perhaps not elegant, they were sufficiently handsome, a pleasure to hold. Then a year or so ago, I learned that there was a new translation of Swann’s Way by Lydia Davis, part of a project to re-translate the entire Remembrance of Things Past, with six other translators, each for a different volume---the twenty-first century “Penguin Proust.” Maybe the publishers worried that a single translator might die during the lengthy project, or maybe gearing up for 2013 and the centenary of the publication of Swann’s Way. I ordered the Davis translation and discovered a new world, fresh and direct. I’m hooked on another set.

The first week in December brings The New York Times Book Review with Holiday Books, “100 Notable Books of 2010” followed the next week by “The 10 Best Books of 2010,” and then The New Yorker’s “A Year’s Reading. Reviewers’ favorites from 2010.” Publishers are pushing for strong Christmas book sales, but for me it’s an extended winter project: mark the ones to review online, which ones to peruse at Borders, which ones to sample on Kindle.

There are drawbacks to the Kindle, of course. Why is it hard to remember what I’ve read on a screen? Somehow I can’t visualize the place on the page where I recall a certain passage. Not having page numbers displayed disconcerts. And it’s easier to quit reading a book on Kindle. It seems to work best for short fiction and essays. On a plane, its bright yellow zippered cover promises an hour or two in my own bookshelves. At my bedside it reminds me it’s not true that I’ve got nothing to read.

Sitting on the floor, I add my own books to my Mom’s. It’s our common project now, hers and mine, this cull from both our lives. I shift books from her boxes into bags, along with some of my own---re-read the inscriptions, smell the pages, and stack them into bags marked for the Flint Public library and UM-Flint Thompson library, choosing what I think would be good for each. They will dispose of them according to their own lights, of course. Hers here, mine there, a few to save for a while. I mark the calendar to haul the bags to the loading dock manned by the understanding volunteers from “Friends of the Library” on the first Saturday of the month. Why don’t I sell the better ones on Amazon or explore this website book exchange thing? When I’ve bought from an individual seller some books come in thrice used jiffy bags, former addressees blacked out, my name in crabbed handwriting; I visualize some strange book hoarder. Others come in fresh, new bags with a computer generated label. A pretty professional set up. Neither appeals.

Beginning in January, the Flint Public Library will close on Mondays, holding on until finances from a successful millage take effect. Branches of the Library will be open only 2 days a week. Even when the millage kicks in, the Library tax revenue will be almost 20% less than what it was in 2009.

Books from another person’s life and from a past stage in my own. Four bags ready to go. I get out my checkbook and join the library Friends, a small contribution to help out the library. But it’s more like Charon’s obol, the coin placed on the mouth of the dead so the ferryman would take them to Hades. An offering out of respect to these books, hope for their safe passage to another life. It makes the parting easier.

See also http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

No pawnshops for old stories

I turn the key in the lock and gaze distractedly through the lowest pane of the back door window. A slight but unaccustomed disorder in the dining room.  Chairs at an oblique angle to the table, the rug somewhat crooked.  Now that I’ve walked in, why are the winter draft rolls in the middle of the room?  The hall door to the upstairs unaccountably open?  No one seems to be here, but I feel a sense of someone having rushed by rapidly.  I call out my son’s name questioningly---the only other person with a house key and who might enter at any time.  Maybe an emergency search for tools or auto parts still socked away in attic and garage.  And then it hits me; someone else has been in my house. 

I stare hypnotized at details not yet part of a picture, like a gawker at a highway accident. Treading carefully through my own house as if not to disturb it more, I move from the dining room, through the hall to the bedroom.  Why are the dresser drawers open, underwear and socks rising like yeasty bread dough overflowing the sides of a baking pan.  Of course:  this is where ladies’ loot might be tucked into little private places, or nestled in sateen-lined boxes with lids that snap shut, or laid out in the efficient squares and rectangles of the burgundy faux felt compartments that organize everything. 

On top of the mahogany dresser sits the pottery dish where the jewelry most a part of me was dropped each night---empty.   Pearl earrings received at college graduation, my dad’s signet ring, a watch fob from my grandfather made into a pendant.  What else had been there just hours ago? Each piece was bound to a family story.  Everything was old, laden with memories.  Only this morning everything had been tangled in the dish, linking my life to those now dead but daily remembered.

I reach out but can’t touch the disarray, its surfaces tender like a wound. I retrace my steps and exit, but this time through the front door.  I need to tell someone that my things are gone, grabbed in haste by someone who did not know them. I stride with purpose across the street, ring my neighbor’s bell, and blurt out my distress.  She and her daughter are more alarmed; could someone still be in the house?  We call the police there and then return to my house.  A kind of post mortem begins, though the body is gone. 

The next morning I sit at the dining room table, trying to list the missing items, to describe their shapes, name their materials, and estimate their ages. Their identities derive from their history. In my grandfather’s time, gentlemen wore stick pins and had monogrammed watch fobs; they carried small penknives, engraved with their initials, relatively useless but indicative of elegance. One stickpin had been made into a ring for my mother and a watch fob had been mounted as a pendant.  New sorrows emerge as lost pieces come to mind that I hadn’t remembered initially.

Unlike princes and warriors of the ancient world, we are not buried with our treasure; it is handed down. My grandmother and mother would give me some small piece for an important birthday, a coming of age gift. Closing the tale of a ring or pin I admired, they would say, “You may have this when you are older.”  And so it was that the story melded to the object.  A ring or a bracelet marked the passage from childhood, to adolescence, to graduation, to marriage. Small pieces just lay in the drawer, waiting perhaps for another young girl to grow into them.

The household insurance did not cover these losses; I had not lost enough, it seemed.  The agent needed valuations in the thousands. The city police station sergeant, impatient and patronizing, had much more serious, life and death issues in his office distant from the front desk.  I should just leave my list of items with the somnolent officer behind the cage.  In any case, the goods were probably long since out of the area, on their way to Detroit.  Pawnshops might help---although they aren’t supposed to deal with hot goods--- but I could take my list around to them. 

Steeled by loss, I set off for the local pawnshops, remembering their locations out of disdain and now fearful in their parking lots.  Weaving through dusty tunnels of tools and tvs at the entrance, I make my way to the back and the jewelry counter.   The clerks vary.  One takes my list to the backroom, perhaps smokes a cigarette and returns: “no descriptions match.”  Another, more conversational, confides that he has so much jewelry in the back safe that every three weeks some of the stuff is just shipped off to be melted down.  Once chosen with care, engraved, presented as gifts marking important occasions, my family jewelry might return eventually to its original state.  A fate more appalling than theft.  Sold at market price, re-cast into ingots, my family jewelry could simply revert to its elemental state and re-join the world supply of precious metal.  

A neighbor tried to console me with urban lore.  Every once in a while, a local drug bust turns up a cache of stolen jewelry.  The stuff never makes it to pawn at all.  Dealers hoard it, give it to favored women; the goods are traded internally. Just hang in and wait.      

It’s been several years now since the break in. From time to time, I stop in at the pawn shops in town, following clerks’ advice that the stock in the cases changes every few months. I’ m almost a regular. Now comfortable, I slowly walk the cases.  Bending over the glass, I see bracelets and necklaces, mostly gold, their designs clichéd and rarely distinctive; perhaps their lack of originality makes them easy to move on the pawn market.  Twelve to fourteen feet of wedding ring sets arrayed in rows, the rank and file of failure.   Engagement rings with sad, small stones; the purchaser could afford little, but wanted to be proper.  The recipient was thrilled at the new stage of life this tiny diamond signified.  But now through disappointment or desperation it’s in pawn along with the wedding band.  Sadder stories than my own.

Some of my losses I can still visualize quite clearly, their color, engraving, detailed filigree, or how a ring felt on my finger. Thinking of the objects fondly, I wish that I could tell their stories to the new possessors---it’s the stories that can still pierce my chest.  Other losses I’ve forgotten.  No longer a young girl anticipating the occasions of adult life that they marked, I wait to pass down what is left.  With their stories, of course; that’s the most important part.  
See also http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

Turning 60

For Jan at 60

Round and full

complete in itself

Eternal.

At the top of a column

you climb and climb---a decade’s worth of years

then pause

at rest in the equilibrium of a perfect number:

a year of evenness and self-sufficiency.

Moving down the column (although up in numbers)

even at midway---it’s nothing, really,

not very far from the top.

But then close, close come those latter years that crush together

and I forget which one; I am just older until

another symmetry is attained, again a cause for celebration.

Now on the right hand of the ranks,

Columns approaching the edge of the ledger

March toward a double perfection, entirely theoretical.  

November 14, 2009
at Steady Eddy’s
Flint, Michigan

April Drama: the Tulip Tree

It’s really a saucer magnolia, magnolia x soulangeana, or tulip tree, or Japanese magnolia. This year in Flint they bloomed the last week in April, flamboyant and glorious when all other trees are still bare. Only the willows have begun to look like yellow-green spaghettini. One discussion in Flint this spring concerns community gardens: volunteers plant in the vacant spaces left from demolished houses close to downtown. Their empty rectangles rapidly greening in early spring reveal the outline of century-old landscaping. Dogwood pokes through vines and brambles marking the perimeter of a city lot where a house once stood. Although the old houses were multi-storied, the average city lot in the early twentieth century was small by today's standards. Ideal for planting.

By the first of May the Flint magnolias are past their best; the petals are falling and their glory is fading. They still overwhelm the weeping cherry, a more delicate and thoughtful tree, prissy when pruned into umbrellas. Here and there dense clusters of deep magenta poke through---crabapple? Near Hurley Hospital tulips stand erect and optimistic in front of an empty house, the red and yellow bulbs that have returned are large; someone tended the beds around the foundation not too long ago. Now the metal siding hangs askew, peeled back. Faux brick siding shows underneath, an earlier attempt at modernization to cover wood and avoid painting. They've survived another winter, these hulks of houses with their flaking paint, vandalized metal siding, cracked steps, sagging screens.

Urban decay now appears in the context of mortgage crisis. Commentators intone that we’ve gone too far with everyone wanting to own their own house, with becoming a nation of homeowners. What utter folly; we should have been renting all along.

My parents and their friends in the early 1950s were very tired of renting. During the Depression and then in wartime they had moved a lot. Family businesses were lost; colleges closed their doors when tuition could not be paid. They moved from hometown to jobs---and grateful to have them---elsewhere in the state or the country, to a navy port or army base, lucky when taken in by a relative on one of the coasts. Always room for another relative or friend in three-story houses like those now being demolished in Flint. Pillar to post, they said. “We met new people from all over the country, we lived in walk-ups with Murphy beds, not enough room to swing a cat, went roller skating on dates, dined for a few dollars in North Beach---wine included.”

After the war, what was there to go back to? A small town banker took a chance on a mortgage for a veteran. And so it began: decades of gardening, slow improvements---from septic tank to sewer, concrete steps poured with a neighbor, a room added on. No furniture and hardly any light (so it seems in the old photos), but enough space to raise a child and bring impoverished grandparents to live with them. I saw my grandmother's social security card recently; she and my invalid grandfather were saved by a postwar house. Those old Flint houses, many on their way to demolition, deserve respect. They did service to generations in their day; the least we could give their plots is a nice garden.

Re-connecting with my skis

It’s been several years since I was last out on cross-country skis, since before I got a partial knee replacement.  I’m not as confident as before.  Never having really learned how to scoot along properly, my motion is awkward until unexpectedly the skis fulfill their design and I begin to glide.  The movement doesn’t seem practical until I think that having this much snow for half the year and few other means of transport would make it logical.
 

I live on a corner in Mott Park, across from the golf course. Whoever built this house must have been a skier. There is a rack of dowels in the basement from which to hang skis and poles. In winter when we have a foot or so of snow I can go out my front door, snap on some cross-country skis and be off.  Usually I head down to the cul de sac, unhitch my skis, and walk down a hill too steep for my skills to a meadow alongside the Flint River.  The days that I try this cannot be very cold; my baseline temperature is about 20 degrees and no wind.  The exertion warms me up and in the meadow it is very quiet.  Bending over to clamp down the baffles back onto my duckbilled ski shoes, I can see little web shaped indentations from animals and two long swathes cut by midnight skimobiles.
 

My skis are old---bought more than two decades ago.  Åsnes tur-langrenn are among the last wooden skis produced before the switch to fiberglass.  Wooden cross country skis were constructed from a composite of woods; mine seem to be hickory on the bottom. The poles are bamboo. Flexible and resilient materials. Wood has its devotees; people even make their own birch skis. On the internet dedicated craftsmen, woodworking offspring of Mother Earth News and Foxfire, plane away.  Or see the process of treating the skis in six steps, three kinds of wax (including the enigmatic, never translated from the Norwegian, klister), and pine tar, the application of which requires a hot air gun or a propane torch with a fare tip. Easy. Once this is finished, you can carry different kinds of wax for changing temperatures with you in your back pack; gracefully pull up to a tree and re-wax your skis en route.
 

The skis date back to my marriage, from its closing era when we thought that doing some family activity together would improve our lives.  After dinner we could ski under the lights of the nearby park---even take the dog with us; we would warm our hands around mugs of hot chocolate afterwards looking like the people in an Eddie Bauer winter catalog.  We might still make it. What happened?

Endless fiddling with wax, debates about the temperature and which wax to fiddle with.  The dog was not an eager to please golden retriever (catalogs must have entire kennels of goldens), but a beagle mix who shot out of the garage and disappeared for hours.  The flatness of the park got boring.  Snow soaked through our socks (it was in the days of low cut ski boots). We came back to the house mid-way to apply more wax and change socks.  Second trip back to the house the project sank into disagreements and not very good hot chocolate in front of heaters festooned with wet socks and jeans.   The skis dripped in the basement. 

Plans for gaiters and more authentic (and presumably more comfortable) clothing faded, eventually subsumed by divorce. Somehow the skis made it from broken family to apartment storage, and finally to a house in Mott Park where as if by some omen (that I only now recognize) a basement ski rack was waiting. There my skis have hung, clapped together with a bungee cord but without, alas, the requisite block between them to maintain their camber---the arc beneath your boot that presses to the ground. 
 

Last week, when we had fresh snow and the temperature was in the mid-twenties, I remembered my skis. With a quick waxing the skis slid along pretty well, or at least as well as I could manage.  I still need to get my wax tins organized and find an old iron to melt in the klister. My son, a former snowboarder, says ironing is the trick. The pine tar base layer is another story---that propane torch deal.

If I can convince my partner Dennis, we might drive north to a cross country ski place and seek out a native to apply a new coating of pine tar. One of those bearded craftsmen from the internet. 
 

Leaning in the corner next to the back door, the skis remind me to do a little scraping and waxing. I am less impatient with the care they require and more respectful of their nature. This week the house creaks and groans; the temperature has dropped and it is too cold to ski.  I can wait. We have survived, these skis and I, from another era. 

Michigan Women

Here they are; three generations: Tina, Nikki, Emma. Mother, daughter and granddaughter. Flanked by helpers Ewa and Gina at Nathan’s Place. Their skill and capabilities are amazing. They create the Thanksgiving holiday for their adult foster care residents, an extended family come together in the frailty and desperation of old age. They produce a community out of American traditions. It is the Michigan women’s first Thanksgiving as an adult foster care home.

Wikipedia’s history of Thanksgiving shows how constructed this American holiday is, created out of relief at having survived, having had enough to eat or having escaped being killed, having found dry land, or being able to stop trudging and rest. For Anglos, the Virginia colony and Plymouth plantation; for Spaniards, St. Augustine, Florida, and San Elizario, Texas. They were all just glad to be here and be in one piece and not too hungry. All stories of desperation.

Of course, Thanksgiving isn’t the only holiday of deliverance, of being spared by the Almighty; Passover precedes it by millennia. But in addition to its etiology shared with ancient religions, Thanksgiving has had a special national utility. Witness the Wikipedia-cited proclamations from Washington and the Continental Congress, through Lincoln and the Civil War, FDR and the Depression, to Truman and the turkey pardon. No American president can omit Thanksgiving which enjoins even the most dysfunctional family or nation to practice an hour or so of mealtime civility.

And so here we are, my Mom and I, along with several other adult children and their spouses and elderly parents. We have been desperate too. Trying to find good care for a surviving parent. And now the Michigan women have put together a Thanksgiving meal that rivals most I had growing up or helped prepare myself. My mother (in her younger years critical and demanding) would have been impressed. Food is laid out artfully in the small kitchen, plates and silverware all to hand. Tina serves the residents who cannot fed themselves; a system for everything. One resident has snoozed off, another claps and sings, my Mom periodically calls out with the involuntary cries that result from stroke. Bonnie, the violinist, plays carols and Bach. The most alert resident smiles in enjoyment at the grandchildren who move so effortlessly among in this collection of humanity.

Several weeks later when I was packing Mom’s things after her death, I had to bid Tina a temporary farewell. Her words as I left were, “thank you for trusting us with your Mom.” I thought, thank you for the nicest Thanksgiving of my Mom’s life. My life too.

First in line

Some weeks ago a student in class mentioned to me that his daughter was disappointed about school being cancelled because of snow. Why? That day was her day to be first in line. Cupcakes were involved as well. I can recall grade school life and these “firsts.” The elation of leading everyone else, of being called by name and moving to the front of the line.

Now that my Mom passed away the idea being first in line seems entirely different.

I now realize how close to death my Mom was in the last weeks. Seeing her often, I noted small degrees of decline, but somehow thought she was really as she had been, only diminished. The hospice physician listed coronary heart disease as cause of death. My mother suffered from chronic hypertension, a symptom of cardiovascular disease. Medication helped keep her blood pressure down. After she’d retired, she sold her house in Mill Valley, California, the 1980s. She returned to the city where she grew up, Portland, Oregon, where as Virginia van Hyning she graduated from Washington High in 1934. She moved into an apartment with a panoramic view of the city and the river. Life was good.

Then suddenly she learned that the new owner in California was suing her over damage from cypress trees on the property during a storm. Mom was beside herself; she went to court and during the hearing suffered a stroke. Mom recovered and the case settled, but damage was done. Chronic hypertension remained and became her nemesis. No longer able to live on her own by 1998, she moved to Michigan---and so began ten years of life with Virginia for me and my son Chris.

Calling elderly friends proved difficult. I have to speak loudly into the phone, repeat my phrases. Then the phrases have to be abbreviated. No modifiers, nuances. Details of my Mother’s decline are lost. The conversation is too simplified to satisfy my need to convey to Virginia’s old friends how it was for her. The elderly high school classmate in Portland sounds both philosophic and forlorn. She too is unable to share shades of feeling. It’s unsatisfying.

The days since Mom’s death vary. Small stabs of grief or loss or loneliness unpredictably puncture the last days of the semester. Just get through; I know that Christmas is coming. It seems like a custom from another culture. More importantly, Dennis arrives December 17. The initial disorientation is passed. People remind me that a new life is beginning. I am first in line.