Upside Down

Well, the move is accomplished. I am nestled into my space and my comfort zone of bookcases can continue to insulate me from the world.

The twelve six feet by three feet cases are stuffed with their books and it was done in a sort of logical placing. The Joan A. Cantin Memorial Library is placed in the living room area surrounding the little niche where Grandmother Leona's Necchi sewing machine table stands. One of my large screen TVs fits perfectly on the top of this little table. On either side are three of the russian cherry bookcases filled with my mother's history books and biographies.

Michael unpacked and placed these books, getting a feel for the contents of the library. The library is basically covering three periods in history -- colonial, civil war and mid-20th century current affairs. The biographies range from Ben Franklin to Franklin Roosevelt. I have personally collected a shelf on Eleanor Roosevelt.

The other books are a mixed mash of American and English literature and popular novels of the 1940s and 1950s. There is a shelf with philosophy books from a little leather bound book of Epicurus and his flying atoms to a tome of Descartes and his doubts. There are three shelves for the 'Great Books of the Western World' collection. There is a shelf for gardening books, a shelf for mechanics on how things work and some natural medicine books. There are old Rand McNally atlases, some cloth bound and some just tattered and well-used cardboard covered.

The books overflowed my 12 bookcases and had to be place up on the build-in shelves surrounding the upper half of all the other walls in this living space. There is a long shelf of men's mysteries from the 1940s -- Chandler, Stout, and Queen. A long shelf of children's books -- Black Stallion, Tom Swift, Cherry Ames and the Bobbsy Twins.

Two memories come to mind concerning Joan and her library.

The first has to do with Joan's bi-annual trips to San Francisco to Books Unlimited. These trips were family events. On the designated Saturday morning all four of us girls were dressed in our finest outfits, matching hats, coats, purses and gloves. We got into our sparkling clean Ford station wagon beige with the wood sides. We drove across the Bay Bridge and then to the San Francisco Aquarium. We were dropped off with our step-father Harvey and my mother drove off to the book store.

We moved around the aquarium never touching anything to ensure that our white cotton gloves received not a speck of dust. We held our purse in one hand and a sister's hand in the other. Two by two we moved around. We were on parade, a spectacle for viewing and we knew it and preened in the spotlight of the 'cute little group of girls with that nice man' game.

The next step of this ritual continued with meeting my mother at an appointed time on a corner. We got into the car and were inspected for any flaw in our appearance. We drove to a fine dining restaurant. We were seated at a large centrally located table covered with immaculate linen and small vases of fresh flowers. We slipped off our gloves, putting them into the pocket of our coats, we unbuttoned our coats and slipped out of them. The waiters went around and hung the coats on the back of each of our chairs.

We girls watched our mother for every clue of behavior and spoke not one word. My mother made light conversation with my step-father about the books she was able to order and about the books she came away from the store with. We had soup, salad, bread, entree and desert. We used every spoon, knife and fork correctly. And we remembered to break our bread before we buttered it with the small butter knife.

We remembered that 'little pictures have big ears' and that we were the pictures who should have ears and not speak.

It was like a big pretend day. We came home, knowing we had put on the "Joan-is-a-wonderful-mother-of-four-cute-little-girls" Show. Sometimes it was a disaster. Someone would have made mistakes and embarassed her or something. We would either get the lecture in the car on the way home or in our rooms before we were put to bed. Sometimes it was not a disaster and we would end up in a drive-in movie theater watching some adult movie like 'Gentleman's Agreement'.

In the back of the car would be boxes of the books my mother was bringing home from the book store. In the 1940s and most of the 1950s these books were popular and historical fiction. In the middle of the 1950s, the real history books started to show up.

This leads my into my second memory regarding the Joan A. Cantin Memorial Library.

My mother went back to school when I started junior high school. She went to Oakland City College and took general lower division courses. When she transferred to California State University at Hayward to do her upper division work, she decided at first to do a sort of two major thing -- History and English. She was not confident that she could ultimately be a history teacher so one summer she decided that I was going to become her 'test subject'.

She picked out the current 10th grade history text and made me read two chapters a day and write out essays for the discussion questions at the end of each chapter. Needless to say, I felt like I was not having much of a summer vacation with all this written 'school' work.

She reviewed what I wrote and made me stand for an hour or so in front of her footstool in the living room while she went over every spelling error. She asked questions to ensure I had memorized important features of each chapter and then required me to tie events together politically, economically or socially.

The book was Hofstatder's text. I will never forget it.

Based on this experience with my mother, she grew confident enough to eventually teach at Earl Warren Junior High School in Castro Valley, California and she was the chair for their history section. I went on to straight A's in all my history in high school. I took the advanced placement History SAT test and came out in the 91st percentile.

I never did another damn thing with all that history. However, I did have to take several sociology courses for my degree and I mostly just turned up for a few beginning lectures to get a feel for the teacher and his or her style and emphasis. I took the midterms and final test and I walked away with easy As. I had no respect for the material. It was just too damn easy.

So, now I look at all the books in my living room space. I know almost every one of these books. I have either flipped through them for some school work or I have actually read them from cover to cover. And you know what? I still have no respect for the material.

Several times I was away on business when my ex-husband moved us from one rented house to another. In these moves, he had no respect for my books and threw away all of my college science texts with cribbed notes filling margins and fly-leaves. These books I loved and when they were gone, I had a sort of disassociative personality experience. I felt no respect at home for the work I had accomplished in these subjects. The mathematics and science courses like chemistry and physics made me work and exercise and stretch intellectually.

When I took concurrent courses in calculus for the first and second semester material, I felt like I had been crucified and that my blood splattered every test page I wrote. None of these books are in my library. There is no testimonial to me on my shelves. It is mostly my mother's labor and some other odds and ends I have collected over time.

I care and keep these memorial history, literature and philosophy books as a sort of legacy for a future generation. Maybe they will find the treasure in them.