By Cindy Bailey, Waynesburg, PA
When my father-in-law was getting ready to move out of the old farmhouse where he and my-mother-in-law Lil had raised three boys, he started giving things away. At different points, I’ve been an educator, librarian, journalist and writer; of course he thought of me first when it came to his dusty collection of books in the attic. Chester and I may have disagreed on many things, but the love of books, history, and the quest for knowledge were our mutually respected common ground.
He taught school for 42 years, starting out in a couple of one-room schools shortly after the end of the second world war. From there he moved to the new centralized elementary school built around 1950, where he stayed until he retired. Through all those years, every time the district purchased new textbooks, he took the old ones that were headed for the dumpster. Many came from the one-room schools and have copyrights dating back to the early 1900s. They are way too beat-up to be worth anything, monetarily, that is.
“I just couldn’t see throwing those good books out,” he explained as I began rifling through the old readers, science books, mathematics, geography, and on and on–some of which he had a dozen copies. “There’s a lot of information in there.” And of course I had to agree. And of course I couldn’t toss them out, either.
After I was sure the other two families involved in this de-householding project had collected what they wanted, my group started in. Annie the scientist took the biology, anatomy, mathematics, algebra, and physics; Julie the humanitarian picked up old readers, plays, history, geography and politics.
Me, I loved it all. I was like a dog in lovely pile of fresh, bloody bones–each one delectable! I went back again and again, stockpiling more and more as I dreamt of the possibilities....
Maybe one day there will be grandchildren....Maybe I would be working with kids again (which I later did as a library director)....Maybe I could create book art with them, especially with the quaint pictures of little children in the readers and the still vividly colored maps in the geography books.
But of course, I just CAN’T cut a book to pieces, no matter how old and ratty it is. My hands just freeze up on the scissors. It’s like telling Superman to eat Kryptonite. If I did it, I think my heart would break in two and that would be the end of Cindy. Sometimes I scan some pages and print out copies, but it still makes me feel like I’ve stolen something from a toddler.
But then I came across Pap’s nearly 90-year-old assortment of very old ones with personal inscriptions inside. Who could toss out a Mother Goose book with this: “With love from Aunt Flo to Lilly on her 5th birthday.” Aunt Flo was a librarian at West Virginia University and someone who had major influence on Lil, whose mother had died young. Lil also became a librarian. I also found also a wee picture Bible of Chester’s, a Christmas present from his parents when he was a small boy.
My husband was torn about this whole process. Of course he was glad I was interested in his family, but not that crazy about all these sentimental tentacles that were tangling around in my brain, plus he was sweating and grunting as he dragged box after box down the skinny attic stairs, hoisted them into the car, and finally dumped them in the basement where we all tripped over them until I found them homes.
As we pulled out of the driveway with all those boxes shoved up against the windows, Chester was smiling from ear to ear as he saw his little bound friends being passed down to unknown generations. It is one of my fondest memories of him.
Later, after he was gone, the house STILL hadn’t been emptied, but now I was working in a library and volunteered to finish off the books, one way or another. I catalogued quite a few and put them in the library’s collection, and put some in the book sale, but of course, this was AFTER I had picked through them again. What I had not yet perused were his religious and local history items. They made me sad because as long as he lived, he would not have been able to part with these, the most important volumes he owned.
I hoarded every single piece of Greene and Washington County, Pa. history that I could grasp in my greedy, gnarled claws, and then I started on his Christian works. Meanwhile, my husband and his aching back soldiered on until my rescue was completed.
This Exodus of the Tomes was not just about the books; it was about keeping a connection with people we loved who are now gone.
Sometime later, I dug through the boxes and cleaned my treasures up and examined them for inscriptions and even old photos tucked inside. (I knew there was no possibility of a single dollar falling out of one - Chester was one of the best stewards of money I ever knew, with the exception of Annie, who is definitely her grandfather’s granddaughter....) And so I put them away and tried to move myself on from the past.
A couple of weeks ago, I thought I might work on writing some devotions for women. I knew I had two books called, All the Women of the Bible, one by Herbert Lockyer; the other by Edith Deen. I soon had them in hand, and certainly one of the joys of collecting books is reflecting on where (or who) they came from.
I recalled buying the Lockyer book several years ago when I was leading a women’s group. But the Deen book was significantly older and I couldn’t place it until I opened the cover where it says, “Happy Birthday, Lil, from Iva Lea and John.” Copyright date is 1955, close to the year some of us youngsters were born.
And I wanted to cry because I was wishing Lil had been around to see our girls grow up (Julie is so like her, especially when she starts humming if there is trouble afoot, but I digress.... ) But then I couldn’t help smiling thinking of Lil looking for things in these same pages, like she was always looking for the scissors or scotch tape....
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| Chester Bailey on his 90th birthday. |
And I can’t really put it into words, but there’s something almost miraculous about my search, just as my mother-in-law’s before me, through these sketches of Bible women, gleaned from the Ancient Words, both of us trying to understand whatever it is that God wants from us daughters of Eve.
And I think she would be proud of me and Bob and her granddaughters.
And Chester would just be glad nobody threw out a book that cost his sister $8.95 fifty-seven years ago.
Cindy’s Wind also has a Facebook page:
https://www.facebook.com/CindysWind
