The Library of Amy

My friend Rachel (of middle school ice skating tomfoolery fame) was as into clothes and fashion as I was into books. I had lots of books and regularly lent them to her, and she occasionally lent me clothes (though I'll admit, I wasn't as into clothes as she was into books). And there is at least one book on my shelves that she has read and I have not. In fact, we referred to our respective collections as Rachel's Boutique and The Library of Amy.

This morning I saw there was a new post up on Lois Lowry's blog, which I follow. Since she lives in my neck of the woods, she speaks here often and even spoke on my birthday a few years ago, which I dragged my sister to. Today's blog topic was about how she is downsizing her possessions in preparation for moving. While reflecting on moving into her house many years ago, she says that she unpacked her books "in an orderly fashion, as if I were a librarian."

It made me think about my own current personal library. The Library of Amy has had about 95% turnover since I was a kid (I have kept my E.B. White box set, The Giver, Tuck Everlasting, and a few others, if you were curious) and has been repeatedly downsized with every move (last count was nearly 30 moves over the past 12 years). There was exactly one attempt to organize my shelves in some logical way that other people would understand, because they lived in a common space in a former apartment. The effort involved putting all the fiction together, alphabetically by author, then kids' books, and then nonfiction. It was tedious and didn't make me feel like I could find things any more accurately. For example, I know that Cervantes wrote Don Quijote, but that doesn't mean I associate his story with Robert Cormier or Malcolm Cowley. I do associate DQ with War and Peace and Brothers Karamazov, as Big Impressive Books I Have Read.

So in all other unpackings, I have made very little attempt to organize my books at all. The only thing that guides me in any way is my gut. I know I put The Giver next to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Ender's Game, because although one is a kids' book, one is fiction, and one is science fiction, they are among my top favorite books. They also live in my room, close to me, as with all other important things. On the upstairs hallway bookcases (built in!), I stuck all my books from undergrad together, fiction and non, and my grad school books are sequestered together too. But mostly they are all jumbled together on the shelves, several of which would really benefit from a bookend. But if working with books has taught me nothing else, it's that books are not built to last, even hardcovers. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the reverence that my friends have for books, and wish that all library users treated them better, but I do not expect mine to stand the test of time.

Probably there are lots of librarians and would-be librarians who get great satisfaction from organizing their books. I am not one of them. Does this mean I'll be a bad librarian? I hope not. I hope it just means that I will not be the kind with my hair in a bun, shushing kids and yelling at toddlers for pulling DVDs off the shelves willy-nilly (though don't get me wrong, that is annoying). I don't really see that as the future of librarianship anyway.

But still... don't tell my boss I don't organize my own books!

Donald

There are very few rules in my house growing up that I outright broke. One of these rules was not crossing one of the four main roads that create a boundary to my neighborhood, and I crossed it fairly regularly with a friend to go to the drug store on the other side. So we could buy candy. Which was another rule broken.

One Saturday morning, Sarah and I set out on such a mission. I remember lots of things about that day seeing as I got hit by a car and broke my wrist. There are some things I do not remember at all, like the time right after falling and before Sarah's mom arrived in her station wagon to pick us and our bikes up, or the ride to the emergency room. (Did we go to the emergency room? I have no idea.) But I do remember that our mailman was at the house when we pulled up in the station wagon.

Donald was our mailman for many years. He must have come in the late afternoons, when I was home from school. He delivered tons of letters to me from my various penpals over the years. I was penpals with our next-door neighbor's niece. I was penpals with kids I went to camp with. I was penpals with my grandmother. I even wrote away for a penpal from a magazine. I also got magazines and birthday presents and cards in the mail. I would open whatever was addressed to the whole family, even if it was junk mail. I was extremely interested in the mail being delivered, and even jealous when all the mail was for my parents, even if it was all bills (though as my mom promised, that feeling faded when I started getting my own bills). I'm sure Donald and I had conversations about my penpals and whether there was anything for me. Mostly I remember that he seemed to look forward to talking to me and the words we exchanged each time were pleasant and funny and made each of our days better.

So Donald was just crossing our lawn that May day when Sarah's mom pulled into the driveway to drop off a slightly mangled girl and bike. I don't remember what I said to him, but I'm sure I was hysterical and crying and dreading telling my mom I had broken a rule. I don't remember what Donald said to me, but he seemed genuinely concerned about me and for the following month or so we talked about my wrist. I realize now not only how long he had been part of my life, but also that I had been part of his life, intersecting it in this very specific context. Now that I'm an adult with somewhat regular interactions with some kids, I understand this better and wonder if the kids will remember me at all, or if Donald wonders if I remember him. I do.

The Tushy Song

One of the little monsters I used to spend my days with was a little guy still in diapers. We had a rocky beginning where we would spend a large part of the day distracting him from realizing he was away from his parents, sister and former nanny. As with many kids, one of the most traumatic parts of being little was having his diaper changed. Frankly, I don't blame him - you're wet and smelly, and then all of a sudden you're cold too, and all things below the belt (above too, if you're wearing the kind of overalls that just kill me with cuteness) are exposed. Not my idea of a good time, either.

So I started coming up with all sorts of ways to keep this little one from screaming his head off, especially during one of the least pleasant parts of the day for both of us: the cleaning up of the poop. One day when changing him, I started singing the first song that popped into my head, which is called Tishialuk Girls, an Irish Canadian tune. I honestly can't remember if I thought of it because Tishialuk sounds a bit like tushy, but anyway I sang it and he quieted down. I started calling it the Tushy song and we sang it whenever I changed him. Most of the lyrics aren't anything that would make sense to a 20-month-old (or to me either, if you must know), but here are the last four lines:

Aunt Rae wants me to wed her daughter
Takes me from my heart's delight
Give me a girl from down in Tishialuk
Shines in me eyes like diamonds bright

I would substitute "Benny" for "girl from" and would pause after "shines in me eyes like" and after a while he would grin and say "diamonds bright!" I heard this song on the way home tonight. I still can't hear it without putting Benny's name in there and pausing before "diamonds bright"! Gets me every time.

Signs

About 2 weeks ago, not long after I emailed my friend Anna about my new writing resolutions, a very curious thing happened. I voluntarily copyedit Anna's blog - because I'm anal, and because I love her enough to want to slay her typos ninja-style (and yes, I fancy myself a grammar ninja - far better than a grammar nazi, which I am on my crankier days), on a blog that is part of her professional life as a freelancer. I copyedit for her because I love it, and would never ask for anything in return, yet she insists on sending me something every year as a thank you. Often it's a novel, but perhaps she's caught on to the fact that, despite her picking out really interesting-sounding books, I really don't have much time to read stuff I've never heard of, when school and three book clubs and my own, ever-growing book list are clamoring for my limited attention. (The one exception was two years ago, right after Helen died and completely unaware of that fact, she sent me Let's Take the Long Way Home, which I devoured in one very sad, but ultimately cathartic, evening.) So this year, I had just sent Anna a whole email about my New Year's resolutions to write more and asking her advice as a friend who makes a living from writing. She wrote back a lengthy, thoughtful response, and concluded with an offer to treat me to, instead of a book, a subscription to Poets & Writers magazine this year. Wonderful! I responded. So it was settled.

Less than a week later, I received a little love note in the mail from Poets & Writers, offering me 75% off a one-year subscription. To my knowledge, I have never corresponded with this magazine before, so I found it very curious that, just at the time we had been talking about them, they sent me something asking me to subscribe. I asked Anna (among asking her if she wanted me to take advantage of this fantastic offer, which she declined) if she had anything to do with it. Our best guess is that they now have my information from her buying the subscription and mixed it up in their mailing department by mistake. If that wasn't the explanation... then it's just serendipitous!

Today at the library I came across another magazine I have occasionally perused, called Writer's Digest. It happened to be last February's issue, whose cover story is titled "How to Submit Anything (& Everything!): Your step-by-step guide to getting published: novels, short stories, freelance articles, nonfiction, memoirs, scripts, poems, picture books & more!" This magazine is not normally so targeted to my needs and interests, especially when I had just been wondering about how I was going to figure all this out on my own and have written things that fall into more than half of these categories. I take this to be another sign.

The third sign was reading an article from a friend's Facebook post entitled "6 Harsh Truths that Will Make You a Better Person," in which the author makes an example of, among other aspirations, writers who don't write. Wong says:

"Being in the business I'm in, I know dozens of aspiring writers. They think of themselves as writers, they introduce themselves as writers at parties, they know that deep inside, they have the heart of a writer. The only thing they're missing is that minor final step, where they actually fucking write things.

"But really, does that matter? Is 'writing things' all that important when deciding who is and who is not truly a 'writer'?

"For the love of God, yes."

My new mantra. Thanks, Universe!

Letters

When I was thirteen, my mom presented me with a packet of about ten letters, printed, three-hole-punched, and fastened into a blue Mead folder, that she had written to me, one every year on my birthday since I was a wee tyke - about four years old. In them, she describes my typical day and my relationships with the other members of our immediate family: herself, my dad, and my sister. She concludes with a bit about my personality in general and other milestones that have come up are sprinkled throughout. They are usually 3-5 pages in length. They are among my most valuable possessions.

When I graduated high school, I got another set of 5 letters, from the intervening years. When I graduated college? Yup, another four. After college, with no next obvious goal in sight, she started mailing them to me. Because I had so loved reading the others, I read them right away for a few years.

Then I started to realize that what I had loved about them was their unexpected nature, just going through my life and using the letters, my mom's observations of me, to help me reflect on how I've changed and grown. I realized that I couldn't do that if I was constantly getting a letter about such recent history. One particularly poignant example was reading, less than a year after the breakup, about how my mom thought one boyfriend would have made a good son-in-law.

So I stopped. I told her, of course; I thought her writing had changed when her perception of her audience changed - for the first set of letters, she could not imagine where I'd be five or ten years later when I read them, but the later letters had more of a sense of immediacy to them. I also didn't want to talk to her shortly after my birthday and have her expect me to comment on the most recent letter. I have five letters, largely unopened and entirely unread, burning a hole in the third blue folder. I wonder like crazy sometimes what's in them, but I'm looking forward to some milestone event in the future in which I will tear them open and gobble them up - maybe when I get my master's degree, or buy a home, or get married, or have a baby and start my own letters. Time will tell what that milestone will be.

In the meantime, I have taken to writing my own letters to a couple of youngsters I'm close to. The letters follow roughly my mom's format, describing their relationships with their family members, as far as I can see from my perch on the periphery of their family, and recently, from afar as well. When they lived closer by and I saw them more often, even spent day in and day out with them, I felt more qualified to comment on their daily activities, but now my comments are more general and any specifics are derived from their parents' reports or my infrequent visits. I tell them stories and offer them (hopefully useful) advice, and they are generally 1-3 pages long (mostly because I don't spend nearly as much time with them as a parent does). I, too, have visions of these letters being b'nai mitzvah gifts, but am realistic that such celebrations are up for debate in their family and so don't mind if they wait until another milestone - maybe graduating middle school, or even high school. If nothing else, the letters are good ways for me to hold onto these memories of them, and to practice writing in general and letter-writing-to-special-little-one-in-my-life specifically. But maybe, just maybe, these guys will find these letters as meaningful and precious as I find mine.

I'm thinking about all of these letters a lot since I'm finally making time while on semester break from school to work on the ones I'm writing, but also because I'm reading a memoir by someone I went to high school with. I remember her (and her siblings) as good-looking, smart, athletic, nice, and generally good at whatever she put her mind to, and it doesn't at all surprise me that she wrote and published a book already, but the content was unexpected. When she was 24, her husband died suddenly in an accident, leaving her alone and five months pregnant. Her memoir is wrenching and beautiful (all the more so because I can picture her and various people she mentions, and the locations). It opens with the day of the accident, beginning as abruptly as her life changed, and goes through until her son's first birthday. I'm about a third of the way in and she's about to go into labor. I can't help but think of this as a sort of letter to her son, as well - chronicling everything she was going through, and about him as a tiny baby, which he will be able to cherish once he's old enough to read it.