Bookshelf

Day 65: Bookshelf

This bookshelf was exactly the right size
 for National Geographics, but now we don't
have any National Geographics to store on it

Funny how strongly sentiment plays into keeping stuff around. I've got many pieces of family furniture, mostly from my Dad's side, where there were few in his generation. This bookshelf is the only piece I have from my mother's side. Grandma Betty made this when she and Grandpa John lived, briefly, in a trailer (can that be right?) in the Ozarks.

My mother took my sister, my brother and me on a road trip to visit them. We drove through the mountains, crawling around the car without seatbelts as kids did in those days. I suffered from car sickness; we stopped often so I could barf on the shoulder. I remember seeing the arch in St. Louis as we drove through. I remember collecting bits of scrap metal off the hot streets of their small mountain town, and trading the pop tabs and tin foil for coins, and trading the coins for Necco wafers, wax bottles, bubble gum cigars and candy buttons on paper tape. We each came home with a golf tee triangle game - Grandma Betty made them for sale to tourists - each with a stamp on it that said "One peg - genius! Two pegs - smart!; Three pegs - dumb!; Four pegs - ignoramus!" And "Souvenir of the Ozarks!"

Grandma Betty also made me a dollhouse and this bookshelf. When I was 14, she sponsored me for a job at Kline's Department store on Main Street, where she worked for decades as a bookkeeper, and where I proceeded to work for seven years as a sales clerk. When she caught me smoking in the break room, she didn't tell my mother. She let me buy stuff for cost plus ten instead of the mingy twenty per cent most of the sales girls got. And she made me peanut brittle for Christmas.

I no longer have the golf tee triangle game or the dollhouse, or any peanut brittle in aluminum tins. Grandma Betty was really my step-grandma. My mom didn't grow up with her, and after my grandfather died and Grandma Betty remarried her first husband, we lost touch. Now that I've written down these memories and taken this photograph, though, I think I can finally let go of the bookshelf.

Maybe Elizabeth or Karl would want it.