a glimpse into the future...

A few weekends back, I answered my mother's emailed call for help. She'd heard about a possible crackdown by the owners of the building where she lives.  One of the neighbors had been forced to give up one of the building's storage lockers that she was renting.  Mom, as the keyholder to three of the damned things, was worried that the boom was about to get lowered on her and decided to go proactive.  Her building is under new ownership and, along with the gaudy (even gauche) new furniture in the lobbies, new tenants are actually filling up some of the formerly vacant units.  Before this infusion of fresh cash customers, my mom probably could have rented a whole apartment for a song to store her extra jun...er...treasures.   That's a scary thought because she'd've done her damnedest to fill the thing up to the same bursting point that her three storage lockers are at.  But that was then and this is now.  The new tenants will require storage lockers of their own; she's been forced into a different sort of crisis management mode.  I spent six hours with her going through carton after carton of old books from just one of her three storage lockers.  We didn't clear that one out completely but we did the worst of the heavy lifting that will be inevitable after the sheriff's deputy arrives with an eviction notice.

I know that my opinion was a matter of public record, that most of those books should never have made the move from 254 Macalester to 1910 Graham 10 years or so ago.  They'd been sitting, mostly untouched, ever since the day in about '66 that they'd been poured onto the shelves at the back end of 254's dining room.  I have no idea where Doug had been keeping them in a succession of houses and apartments before we moved into 254.  But there they were. Old Macalester College textbooks (and not from when I went there), Literary Guild selections of the month, the occasional recent (relatively speaking) acquisitions like three volumes of Robert Caro's LBJ biography that I'd given Doug over the span of 20 years, my mother's collection of 19th century childrens' readers (if it's old, it's gotta be valuable, right?), not-so-current events titles from the '60s.

I'd been pulling plums from those shelves for years.  I got my starts on John LeCarre and Bruce Catton and Ernie Pyle in books that I borrowed and never returned.  I know that I still have some of those books.

That wasn't all.  Books had materialized from all over the house to get packed for transport to the storage lockers at their new home.  Cookbooks of every size, shape and diet craze.  Gardening books by the dozens.  Books on sewing and knitting and miscellaneous needlecraft and decorative arts and antique furniture and home improvements and Native Americans and Scots and Minnesotans and travel.  Macalester and Kaehler School of Nursing and Windom High School yearbooks.  Dear God, I now know why I stumbled into a career (of sorts) in the book business.  It had to have been some sort of a contact high from formative years of rubbing elbows with all those old, slowly disintegrating books.

I got to Mom's apartment a little after 10:30.  After she introduced me around the place a little (the mail carrier and a couple of the residents) and a few muttered curses about goddamned rosaries as we walked past the crowd gathering in the chapel for Mass, we hit the books.  Yes we did.

I had to clear a path in the locker (actually a plywood cube about 4' x 8') and then wriggle around a structural column that rises inconveniently from smack dab in the middle of the floor plan to get at the books.  Out they came, one or two boxes at a time.  Marj plunked herself down in a lawn chair and pawed thru the contents as I shoved the boxes up to her feet.  We made pretty good progress for the first half a dozen or so; she set a few from each box aside for distribution to friends and family or for keeping or for further consideration.  But the sight of the growing stack of cartons on my faithful Hamline Bookstore two-wheeler, prepped for transport to the back of the Tahoe and, after that, to God only knew where must have had a sobering effect on her.  She seemed to reconsider, to imagine the horror of not knowing what the future held for her stuff, to dig in her heels and to start making careful decisions about who in her inner circle should have these books, her books.  We slowed to a crawl.

Mom catching up on a little of her reading.

Granddaughter Anna had never had home-ec in high school so she should have a huge-ass stack of sewing and knitting books.  The tall, skinny cookbook dedicated to beans got rerouted to granddaughter Keely because she "lives on beans; she eats very frugally".  Anna's two kids were awarded a couple of titles, one of them a Sacajewa biography, which will irretrievably turn them away from any other literary pursuits for years.  My sister Susan got the lion's share of the gardening books except for the one on shade gardening.  That went to Keely because her new house has so many trees in the back yard.  Grandson Brendan's bride Natalie got a couple of outdoorsy items, right up her alley as a nature educator.  Marj struggled long and hard over the little book about Isle Royal until she came up with the inspiration of consigning it to Natalie and Brendan because "they might go there some day".

On and on it went.  Marj and I both did pretty well when you consider that our relationship has tended to contentious over the last few years.  Maybe decades.  I only rolled my eyes maybe 18 or 20 times and I don't think that she caught me at it.  She accused me of being the one who would pull the plug on her life-support.  To which responded that I sure as hell wasn't because I was going to make her come back from any imminent demise to help me clean out the rest of her crap from the storage lockers.  Well, it's not like it was Mother's Day or anything like that.

I made three trips to the Tahoe with the two-wheeler piled high like back in its glory days.  I knew all along there'd eventually be a reason that I'd let it clutter up our garage for the last seven years.  Among the booty (no pun intended; you'll see) were three plastic milk cartons full of meticulously arranged-by-date Playboy magazines, most of them still in their USPS Manual required opaque plastic mailing sleeves.  The Post Office goes to great lengths to protect the morals of its personnel if, at the same time, sacrificing something of their morale.  How and why Doug got started on those, I will never know.  I'm pretty sure, though, that Old Saint Peter met him as he was trying to get thru the Pearly Gates and vouched for him with a a roll of his own saintly eyes.

I drove the truck up the alley behind our house and laid out a couple of  2x4's to keep the books off the floor of the garage.  And then stacked the boxes (and don't forget about the plastic milk crates) back in the corner by the barber's chair.  I think that there are about 10 boxes out there; I'd dropped one off at Nan and Dan's house and one at Anna Morley's and one got hauled into our house and I poked thru the contents of a few of the others.  Mom has since told me to go out to the garage and find some books for the Morley boys, sports and American literature and such.  Good luck with that.  I found a few possibilities but their value will be in Doug's bookplates inside the books rather than any content.

These books had, at some earlier point, been my inheritance.  The mishmash of furniture which Mom had collected over the years was to get split between my sisters.  That stuff had held it's value and some of it has maybe even appreciated.  The collection of books was slated for me.  I don't think that a single one of those books has increased a penny in value since long before Mom and I were poking through them.  In a world of 1¢ books for sale on Amazon, they've turned out to be not much of an investment.

I've still got a pile of work ahead of me, sifting thru those things to decide what's not too musty to donate to the Goodwill or a library.  Most of 'em literally aren't worth the paper they're printed on.  Culture and knowledge have become so disposable lately.

Apart from this story's entertainment value, I recognize that it'll be me sitting in that lawn chair after just a few clicks of the fast forward button.  The jun...er...treasures I've piled up still hold a world of potential for me.  Books, CDs, records, collectibles of all sorts are witness to the strange trajectory of my life.  I suppose that everyone's stuff bears similar witness to their owners' lives.  And I can foresee not only me clinging to my belongings a few years up the road but Liz and Kate cracking the whip and pushing me to pass 'em on.

Anybody interested in a 10-year run of '80's and 90's Playboys?