A Satur(Daylight Savings Time) Letter #2
My Father's Library, Pt. 1
So I had this big idea.
My brother Jonny and I recently came into joint possession of my father’s house. Jonny, because he lives around the corner from the old homestead, has been mostly in charge of clearing out the accumulated detritus of the decades (Anyone interested in a stove from 1948?), and getting the place ready for a possible renter. He wasn’t sure what to do with the hundreds of books, though.
“I’m just trying to figure out something besides burning ‘em,” he said, tongue only half-in-cheek here.
The books, went without saying, were my responsibility, and this is where the big idea comes in. It just so happened that the annual conference I’ve been attending for 14 years was held last month just up the road from where we grew up (by “the road” I mean Interstate 70 and by “just up” I mean 65-ish miles).
What is the central preoccupation of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference? Books! And the portion of Dad’s estate which it is my duty to dispense with? Books!
And here came the big idea. Caitlin Thornbrugh, Caitlin McGill and I were organizing a reading (one of thousands that weekend) at a bar called The Ship in Kansas City’s West Bottoms. For my brief portion, I decided, I would write a piece called “My Father’s Library,” drive out to the farm, grab Dad’s books, pile them up at The Ship invite the fantastic community of book lovers to take what they wanted.
An elegant and even poetic gesture, if I did say so myself.
I met my friends Marc and Sarah at the brand-new Kansas City airport, piled them into into the rental car and drove out to the farm, whereupon we encountered the first snag in this performance piece.
Jonny had helpfully boxed the books up in eight or nine of these large (four feet by one foot, maybe?) egg cartons, but with our bags taking up a good bit of trunk space in the smallish rental we were able to fit … two of the boxes.
Nevertheless!
We loaded up the little bit, stopped at Dad’s new headstone, and headed back to Kansas City.
That was on a Wednesday. The conference commenced. I spent three days hobnobbing gossiping drinking networking, and tripping over the boxes in my hotel room every morning and evening. Finally, Saturday afternoon arrived, and with it the big plan.
We got to the bar early and piled the books on the tables, to the mild confusion of the patrons, especially those who hadn’t know there was going to be a reading. I hoped, after my reading, it would all be clear. What I read is below the photos.
My Father’s Library
Here’s what I remember: tiptoes, edge of the sofa. Shiny silver, gun-metal grey, a crimson eye. I’ve opened one of the three glass-fronted doors on the floor-to-ceiling bookcase that takes up one wall of what we call “the blue room” or “the computer room,” in a farmhouse in rural Missouri.
Reaching, I put my hands on it, pull it down. A mass-market paperback: Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October.
I am 10 years old. I’m a precocious reader, but not of the books in this room, in this case — some history, some economic theory, a lot of sweeping historical fiction (Michener, Clavell), hundreds of spy thrillers and detective novels.
What I think I know, at 10, is that these books are off-limits.
What I also know, at 10, is that, that blood-red eye — a stylized periscope target — is hypnotizing. And, on the back, Ronald Reagan — the President! — has called the book “A perfect yarn.”
The President!
Grown-up stuff.
Lately, after school, in the several hours between the time the bus drops me off and a parent gets home, I have clandestinely claimed Clancy from the top left corner of the overstuffed bookshelf, where it sits, cover out, leaning against the glass, reading as much as I could — Curse words, murder! Communism — before carefully replacing it in its original position.
One day, Dad comes home early. I’m so engrossed — will Jack Ryan help the Soviet submarine captain defect to the U.S.? (spoiler alert: yes) — that I don’t hear him come in.
“Hey buddy,” Dad says, “You readin’ that?”
I say yes, and he goes to make dinner without further comment. Tacit approval.
In that house 60 miles or so east of where we stand right now, on a farm five miles outside our tiny town of 400, my father, save for a few years in Tennessee in his 20s, lived out his entire life. In that house, in the room next to the room he died in, my father built a library.
This had not been the plan. He’d escaped. Off to Memphis, never again to milk a cow. His father’s brain tumor brought him home. In short enough order, he took over the farm, quit farming, sold real estate, went back to school, stayed in that house, and began, slowly, to fashion a different escape. He began amassing his library.
The house Dad grew up in had three books — Luther’s Small Catechism, The Lutheran Hymnal, and the Bible. Seventy-one years later, the house he died in — that same house — teemed with them.
Shoved, stacked and stashed, books bulged out of thr wall-sized case in the blue room, spy novels spilled off lesser bookcases in other rooms, potboilers piled up at Dad’s bedside. Invariably, there was a book face-down — spine broken, but Dad’s place marked — on the bathroom counter next to the toilet.
Here’s what I remember: My father with a book. My father at night with a book and a cigarette and a tumbler of bad bourbon on the rocks. My father in the morning, every morning, for two hours before breakfast with a book and a cigarette and pots of coffee, weak.
My Father’s Library was indiscriminately-acquired and indifferently-maintained. He read voraciously and without direction, and sometimes he acquired books due to that indifferent maintenance, as in this slip we found in a public library copy of a Michael Connelly hardcover after he died:
“Patron 9220184311
Excessive Stains and liquid damage”
This did somewhat skew my perception of what a reading life looked like and smelled like. Indelible in my mind is a Lawrence Sanders novel stale with ancient cigarette smoke, a smell that went well with the scene of, as I recall, the detective’s interviewing the antagonist while the guy got a haircut and simultaneously received a surreptitious hand job from (I think) his sister?
I was 12 and very confused.
Sixty miles east of here, in a room next to the room he died in, my father built a library. That library gave me my work and my life and this community.
I’d like to invite anyone who wants to pick over this sampling of Dad’s library to do so.
—
Many people said really nice things. One guy even posted about it on Instagram:
I was feeling great.
I got rid of roughly four books. What now?
Next week(-ish): My Father’s Library, Part 2: What We Did With Them.
Just fabulous. Thank you, Sebastian!
I loved reading with you--and loved reading this!!