from the sprigs* archives: spines
August 18, 2008
*I’m working on piece today that I hope to share here tomorrow. I’m also doing a bunch of poetry-related stuff, namely coming up with grand ideas on how to manage Postal Poetry with my new partner in that endeavor, Dave Bonta, and working on a post for Read Write Poem.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share another post from my first blog, Sprigs, which I wrote Nov. 8, 2005. A few of the paragraphs are kind of long and I could probably do some editing on the piece, but whatever. I’m not doing that. I am just posting it, k? OK, fine. I fixed the paragraph lengths.
Last Sunday on PostSecret, a new postcard was added that confesses: “I never read to my children.” This got me thinking about my childhood and about our bookcase that had no books in it.
My parents weren’t big on reading in general, and they certainly weren’t big on reading to me. But carpentry was one of my father’s hobbies, and having built several sheds and two bars (one of which was in the back of the family’s van, but that’s another story), he was running out of things to build. So he started in on a different kind of project. It wasn’t something to park your lawn mower in, and it wasn’t a place to display your wine glasses in front of a mirrored surface. But it seemed important anyway, even if it wasn’t quite as practical as his previous do-it-yourself projects. So it was settled. He was going to build a bookcase.
Because he was a man who did everything big, it was no surprise that he built the mother of all bookcases. Suspended from the long wall of our den, it spanned the entire length of that wall. In the center, he positioned the room’s most important asset: a television set (which I must say is a most-appropriate choice for a bookcase). Back then, there weren’t flat screens, just large, unwieldy box sets. He insisted on a big TV for that big bookcase, but the bookcase wasn’t deep enough to accept something so deep.
So my father was left with only one option. He had to cut a hole in the wall of the house so the back of the TV could poke through. (There was a utility room on the other side of the wall, so the hole wasn’t too big of a deal. But it was a little strange walking into the utility room and being greeted by the backside of the television. It was as if the set as constantly mooning the room’s entrants.)
Once he’d finished the piece, he put my mother and me to work gathering up knick-knacks from other areas of the house. We then loaded these items onto the thick oak shelves of the new bookcase. One item we gathered stood out from the rest: a twisted-wire tree that came in a kit. You had to twist the trunk and branches into shape and, if I recall correctly, hook the end of each wire around a metal leaf to make the tree appear full and, well, leafy.
My mother and I bought it on sale at Anthony’s so we could build it together. It was one of those projects that seemed like a good mother-daughter endeavor when we first embarked on it. But soon after we’d removed the contents from the box, we knew we were in trouble. The tree pictured on the box looked perfect, like that fruit-bearing tree in the Garden of Eden (without all the religious baggage). But it would have taken an act of God to make the tangled metallic mess spread out in front of us into any semblance of the image on the box.
In the end, our tree looked like something straight out of hell. There weren’t enough leaves, and the branches were deformed. We twisted and twisted those wires, but simply could not make it look like any tree we’d ever seen, except perhaps a tree that had been struck by lightning one too many times and needed to be cut down for safety’s sake.
This project wasn’t only hard on the twisted little tree; it also brought tensions to the surface between my mother and me as we bickered over how to remedy the problem and make the tree a pleasure to behold. She thought we could turn it so the best angle would be displayed. I argued there was no best angle; we should return the monstrosity and get our money back. But it was a clearance item, so we were stuck with it.
We put it on a shelf, along with some other equally pathetic tchotchke. These items were lost against the mass of the TV and the dark wood of the bookcase. The bookcase needed something more, but what?
It came to my father a few months later: encyclopedias. He purchased a set of 1979 Encyclopedia Britannicas, all bound in faux brown leather with blue and maroon bands on their spines that indicated in gold lettering what part of the alphabet you were about to dive into.
They filled out the space rather well. They weren’t books, exactly, but it was a start. They even made the mangled tree glimmer a little more brightly. And even though I never saw my parents look anything up in those encyclopedias, at least I knew they had the option. I always hoped they’d crack open a volume between mowing the lawn and hitting the liquor cabinet. Hell, maybe one day, they’d even read an entry or two to me.
Comments
8 Responses to “from the sprigs* archives: spines”
Got something to say, toughguy?
This is my blog wherein I, Dana Guthrie Martin, write things and stuff. Most of the time, writing and I hobble along in a sort of three-legged race where there is no finish line. (more...)
When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said "Let us pray." We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land. — Desmond Tutu
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beg, borrow, but don't steal
This work is licensed under Creative Commons. If you don’t credit Dana (by using her full name and preferably by linking back to the appropriate post) for however you copy, distribute, transmit or adapt her words, you are being bad. And naughty. And she will have her servant monkeys hunt you down and cut your hands off so you can never copy, distribute, transmit or adapt anyone’s work again and call it your own.
(Unless, of course, you were to use your butt cheeks to manipulate your keyboard with the copying, distributing, transmitting, adapting and whatnot, but Dana fortunately has only met one person whose butt cheeks are that talented. He could play a major third on a piano using nothing but his ass. She kids you not.).
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flick, flick, flick
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i cannot be bought
“struck by lightening” An enlightened tree?
Crap! I knew I should have proofread it!
I love the image of this tree from hell, by the way.
Now you’re just trying to be nice, since you made fun of my slepping. I mean spelling.
I still believe that a home without books is like a house without a soul. I used to think that about houseplants, too, but I find that books are easier to live with than houseplants.
Leslie, yes. Unless you water the books, which gets them all riled up and then they are no fun at all to live with.
my parents weren’t into books either and i was really bitter about it growing up. it wasn’t until later that i realized that with 5 children and books in english (imported from the US) being so expensive, they really couldn’t afford it then.
thanks for sharing this story.
[...] thought I should follow up my last Sprigs archives post, in which I allude to the bar my father built in the back of our van, with the actual post about [...]