On releasing books

In September, 1975, I was seven years old, a second-grader newly insistent on wearing pants to school, reluctant to comb my hair, snaggle-toothed, and inclined to read anything with print in it.  My dad took me out of school for a week to go with him on a business trip to Chicago, where three-fifths of my grandparents lived (some of us lucky people get an extra grandmother).  I am not sure why I got to go, why my mom and brother stayed home, but I think it ended up causing some kerfluffle, because all of us went back at Halloween that year.

It was a magic trip for me, going with my dad.  First, there was the airplane.  I got pin-on wings from the flight attendant.  My dad let me play with his calculator, his graph paper, and his Pentel pens in red, black, blue, and green.  I thought it must be pretty amazing to get to carry that stuff around in a briefcase all the time.  We played gin with the pack of cards the airline gave us and I’m sure that my dad discarded cards I needed to beat him.  At some point, I got out my orange binder and my number two pencil to write the “log” Mrs. Skillman had assigned as my homework for the week.

We stayed with my mom’s parents, my Nana and Poppy.  My dad’s mom lived with my aunt in a strange, dark little house with evil schnauzers named Bounce and Poppins, but Nana and Poppy had space for us in their house with the big, unfenced back yard, the basement with its two slot machines adopted from some long-defunct speakeasy, its shiny piano, and its stash of toys for my cousins, my brother, and me to play with.

My cousins are all boys.  Nana, as a result, spoiled the heck out of me.  I arrived to a beautiful new doll with curly red hair, a pink and white dress with a skirt that twirled, and a stack of books.  In exchange, I let her put my hair in curlers, said please and thank you, and thought she was the best ever.

There was a darker side to all of this, but my seven-year-old self didn’t see the narcissism that made my Nana manipulate everything to be about her or the rigid perfectionism that insisted on appropriate gender roles and impeccable appearance at all times.  Perhaps it helped that she lived 2,000 miles away.

That rigid gender roles thing affected which books she gave me.  At some point, she bought a set of ten “classic” books for children, intending them for my cousins, my brother, and me.  It turned out that none of the boys particularly liked to read, so I eventually ended up with all of them (all books still tend to come to me… it is my superpower.), but it took a little longer to get Tom Sawyer and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Robinson Crusoe.

I devoured Little Women and Black Beauty and Heidi and Five Little Peppers and How They Grew and The Little Lame Prince.  I wasn’t ready for Alice in Wonderland; I didn’t follow the funny conversations.  I read Hans Brinker, but I couldn’t tell you what it is about (I have put it on my to-read shelf to find out).  Robinson Crusoe utterly defeated me (multiple times.  I finally finished it not too many years ago and never need to read it again.).

When it came time to tidy my bookshelves yesterday, I found myself, as usual, a little short on space.  I had always, for sentimental reasons, kept the set together.  The thing is, I hated Robinson Crusoe.  This edition of Little Women is abridged and I have a full version.  I have multiple other copies of Alice (annotated, purse-sized, extra fancy, and as part of the complete works).  The time has come to take a couple of photos and release these particular volumes into the wild to find other children.