Books have significantly written my life.
The past two months have been hard. My husband, Crouse, who has a congenital heart condition, has undergone three dangerous but life-saving surgeries, and has suffered three Transient Ischemic Attacks (TIAs, mini-strokes), costing him heart-breaking losses in his capacity to articulate, and some difficulty keeping his balance. For the 30 years Crouse and I have been mates we’ve professed we’d rather die than live diminished physical or mental quality of life. But there’s a powerful will to live default in the human psyche. With each new health challenge, we find ourselves desperately clinging to life, in any form, and being thankful for it.
We all have life challenges on an almost daily basis, but facing death so closely will make you especially introspective. This week, when not conducting the astoundingly demanding job of advocating for my husband’s hospital care, and keeping up with my work schedule, which is intense, I’ve been reading a book about the Los Angeles Central Library arson in 1986 (see my below review of The Library Book by Susan Orlean), which has made me think a lot about my mom and her books, my books, and how books have been a constant in my life.
Another recent incident inspiring memories of my mother and her love affair with reading was the death of a mother of a childhood friend. The last time I saw Helen Wright, she and Marie Smithson, mother of another childhood friend were at my mother's funeral, and told me a lovely story about my mom that I’d never heard. My family lived in a small west Texas town surrounded by “oil camps”, which were clusters of homes out in the more remote areas provided to the families of men working in the oil fields. Helen and Marie told me that in the early 1940’s, years before my mother successfully led efforts to get the county to establish a library in our community, she maintained an informal lending library in our home, and loaned books to the oil camp wives who came into town every two weeks to buy groceries.
That triggered other book-related memories. In my childhood home, unlike my friends, I was surrounded by books newspapers and magazines, but I never thought of it as anything extraordinary. Then, when my high school sweetheart took me to his family’s ranch to meet his mom, I fell a little more in love with him when I saw his mom too was living in a home library – books cluttering practically every surface.
I also recall, as a young bride living on that ranch, seeing an article about Jacqueline Kennedy, post-White House, when she was a consulting editor for Viking Press. There was a photo of her in her Manhattan living room, surrounded by stacks of books. I remember wanting both my beautiful country life and the innately smart people I shared my life with there, AND the Jacqueline Kennedy cosmopolitan lifestyle, surrounded by books and “the intelligentsia” of New York. Although life doesn’t always take you down the path you imagine, and indeed, mine has been circuitous, in a way I have achieved that ideal. My children all live on their family ranches, where I can visit and enjoy the many unique benefits associated with the country lifestyle, in addition to the urbane lifestyle Crouse and I enjoy here in Austin.
The retirement and legacy I hope to live and leave is significantly about books as well. I’ve been buying books for about 20 years, and my plan is to read every one of them again when I retire, and then donate them to my hometown library in honor of my mother. It is also gratifying to know that all three of my children are readers – and doubtless they will pass that on to their children, who will pass it along to theirs. And that is my mother’s legacy, and mine.
In May 1994, John Kennedy Jr. announced his mother’s death to the press, saying she had died, “surrounded by her friends and her family and her books, the people and the things that she loved". Hopefully, someday my children will say that about me too.
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