The ottoman at the foot of my grandmother’s chair was always stacked with books. Novels, history books, all dressed in their shiny stepping-out jackets, neatly cosseted in plastic by the staff at the Carnegie Free Library. She visited the library on Wednesday so she would have books for the weekend. My dad visited on Sundays, a quiet lull amid all the noise at home. I often tagged along and helped carry the huge photography books encasing all the atrocities of World War II or Mathew Brady’s grainy images of Antietam and Gettysburg.
No one at my house seemed to think this was unsuitable material for children, and we pored over those books, our legs gone numb as we sat side by side with them on our laps, turning with solemnity the heavy pages.
I accumulated my own stack of books, those Arrow Books we ordered a few times a year at school. I loved to watch my little pile grow on the end of my desk as my teacher sorted and delivered the books, always a little frazzled and put out. She never loved book delivery day as much as we did. I kept my little pile by my bed, reading under the covers, and sometimes sleeping with a particularly good one next to my pillow.
I still do.
My pal, Alice, though, raises the love of books to a level that borders on worship, or adoration, or personification. Maybe all of it. She thinks books have feelings. She will tell you she knows they do. Out shopping, she frets if she picks up a book and puts it down, worrying she has hurt its feelings by rejecting it. I used to think she was making a joke. I have come to realize she believes this on some cosmic, bizarre or daft level.
Her books are her friends, and she is at peace and her breathing slows when she is surrounded by them. They comfort her, the very sight of them, and when she looks at her books lined up on shelves all around her, it is as if she is looking at her loved ones, for she is. She doesn’t just see the covers and titles, she sees deep into the pages, knows her books like she knows her grandchildren, knows their first words, their first steps, hesitant or sure. All the ways big and small we know and love a thing, a child, a life.
She inherited her love for books from her parents, her mother, especially. As an adolescent her mother, Fannie, was assigned “Les Miserables” by Victor Hugo as a summertime punishment for her behavior in school. She devoured it. She quoted from it all the rest of her days.
Alice would take her mother a book she had just read, even if it was late at night, especially if the book made her “squall.” Alice and Fannie loved to squall over books. They returned to their books like old friends, noting on the back the date and time they turned the last page. Fannie, wrote in ink, Alice in pencil. They re-read them often. They included the page numbers where they marked passages against the time they might grow lonesome for their friends, or wanted to remember, exactly, the beautiful words.
One winter’s evening I sat with Alice, trying to remember the name of a book we both read and loved. She went to her bookshelf, a big and heaving thing, and found it, brought it me. Yes, it looked like the book, and I flipped the pages looking for something familiar to assure myself she found it. In pencil, almost too faint to see, were paragraphs marked, sentences underlined.
I read them, then read them aloud to Alice. Listen to this, I’d say. After, we looked at each other, stunned, or moved, or both. Minutes went by, or did they? The room seemed to hold just the books, and us, and the thinnest of light to read by.. And in the back, Alice’s name, and date and time. And someday, perhaps another signature, a date far distant, or near. A good visit with an old friend on another winter’s night. But more than that, too.
Greta McDonough 