April 25, 2008
Friday

Xmas 1971 – For Jettie: With so much love, and with the hope that your career will be filled with excitement and your life filled with joy. — Aunt Estelle
         — inscription inside a copy of You Might as Well Live,
             a biography of Dorothy Parker published in 1970,
             found on a table of used books at Ganser Library, Millersville, Pennsylvania

I visited my undergraduate university last week, the one where I earned my bachelor’s degree in English in 1969, the one which will, two weeks from tomorrow, confer a degree in biology on my daughter. I was there for the kickoff event of the capital campaign to raise funds for the renovation of Ganser Library, the structure seen at left that I still call “the new library.” It opened in 1967, at the start of my junior year, and I participated in what is always called “the historic bookwalk.” Students acted as a human conveyor belt and moved the books and other materials armload by armload from the charming nineteenth century building that I still call “the old library” to the imposing new structure that rose above everything else on campus.

The old library had served the needs of students and faculty for more than a hundred years. The new library, designed with state-of-the-art technology and built for expansion (the stacks echoed every footstep along the rows of metal shelves still nearly empty after all the books had been arranged), was outmoded after thirty years. The last ten years the facility has struggled to accommodate its burgeoning collection, the growing student population, new technologies, and new regulations regarding accessibility. Change is long overdue.

I didn’t really know anyone at the reception. I’d been invited because I am a donor to the Friends of Ganser Library. I talked briefly to the man who had organized the bookwalk, whose name I vaguely remembered. It was his first big project after he was hired. He’s retiring soon, forty-one years in the same place. I had two glasses of wine and some bite-size turkey sandwiches. I sent an e-mail to a classmate from a computer in the area where the card catalogue used to stand. He remains an important friend and is part of every memory I have of those times, whether he was there or not. I think of you often, I said, but never more tenderly than when I walk this campus. And then I left.

In the lobby I stopped at a long table laden with used books laid spine up that appeared to be left over from the Friends of Ganser used book sale. I ran my hands along the covers and read the titles. I stopped at You Might as Well Live, a popular biography of poet and critic Dorothy Parker, published in 1970. I have a copy in my collection at home, bought when it was new. I remember reading it in my drafty, poorly-heated first solo apartment, huddled under the covers in the bed I’d pushed as close to the radiator as I could.

I picked the book up. The flap of the dust jacket was tucked in at page 121, not quite half way through. I found the inscription quoted above on the title page. Who was Jettie? the fiction writer in me wondered. What career was she headed for in the waning days of 1971? Did she find the excitement and the joy her Aunt Estelle hoped was waiting just around the corner of the new year for her? And how and why did this book, surely chosen with love and care as a gift, come to be culled from Jettie’s collection and offered in exchange for pennies, perhaps, at a library fund raiser?

These things are on my mind today — the things we give and why we choose to give them, the things we keep, the things we lose, the things we deliberately part with. I am writing this from the living room of my daughter’s first solo apartment, which she moved into yesterday. She has class and work all day, so I’ve come down to await the delivery of her new dining table and chairs.

Lynn doesn’t have a full-time job yet, but she has prospects and a Plan B. She has a six-month lease on an apartment in a complex three miles from campus that was new when I was an undergraduate here. I had friends who lived here, newlyweds whose phone number ended in 6868, the date of their marriage. The bridegroom had arranged that, a gesture I thought particularly romantic. I lost touch with them after graduation, and when I read his obituary in 1995 I saw that his widow was not the young woman on whom I bestowed a Corning Ware heating tray in 1968, and I felt doubly sad.

Much of what Lynn owns is in boxes and bags stacked here and there. Enough stuff is in place that I can see how her personality will shape and be reflected in this space. I can see some of the things I’ve given her over her four years at school — the plastic plates and Martha Stewart stainless steel flatware I bought at a K-mart in Vermont in 2004 with Lynn in mind but to use first in the poorly-equipped efficiency apartment I rented that August; a framed print of a picture I took in 2002 of a municipal trash can in Lynn, Massachusetts (“Keep Lynn Clean!” — she hangs it in her bathroom); a rubber duck in a cowboy hat I brought from Wyoming (she’s daffy for ducks and collects the traditional rubber bath toys).

And I’ve brought more stuff, part graduation gift, part housewarming gift — a dream catcher made by a Benedictine sister from native materials in Wyoming, a framed Brian Andreas print, and, of course, some books. One is called Someday, about raising a daughter and watching as she walks out into her own life. The story follows the daughter from her infancy into her own later adult life, when the mother will no longer be there to observe and to comment. It is my practice to sign a gift book not on the flyleaf but at a meaningful part of the text. I signed this one at the point in the book where the mother waves to the departing college grad daughter, and slipped in a bookmark that says “Follow your dreams.”

I hope that Jettie had what her Aunt Estelle hoped for her. I hope for Lynn the same things, excitement and joy, exactly what she has given me.

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