Children’s Corner

Back in the late sixties or early seventies, I went calling with my mother to the home of Mr. and Mrs. Patterson.  They were “Hugh and Adele” to my mother who knew Mrs. P through AAUW, but I never made it to a first name basis.  They had been high school teachers of mine – she Algebra I and II; he Plain Geometry in the year between.

I don’t remember much about the visit except that they had retired and that their new house was out in one of the spiffy developments north of San Rafael.  And the books!  Hundreds of them!  They were piled everywhere, on every flat surface.

Books in the Kitchen

They greeted us at the door and while Adele bustled around clearing off seating space for us and getting coffee, Hugh settled himself back in his comfortable chair, almost entirely hidden by the stacks and stacks of books.  And there were magazines.  Towers of magazines.  On the kitchen table and counters and perhaps even on unused burners on the stove.

They both seemed smaller than they had when they held forth at those high school blackboards but, surprisingly, not much older.  They had always been old to me – too old to have married just the year before I was a Freshman.  It was his second marriage, her first.  As I looked around, taking in the pottery and paintings done by their teaching colleagues (was it Mr. Day who taught art?) I wondered if I, too, would eventually reach a time when my life was enclosed by a mountain of reading material.

Books in the Bedroom

The short answer: yes, indeed!  Here I am in a house that holds in its various rooms and in its many bookcases, the books of four generations.  By the time I retired we had run out of bookshelves and spaces to build more.  The library – our fabulous Timberland Regional Library with a branch right down the road in Ocean Park – became our BFF.

Full Bookcase

And with the entire Timberland system plus their inter-library loan network at our disposal, we are never without mountains of books.  Nyel can browse blacksmithing books (much like many people I know ‘read’ cookbooks) to his heart’s content and I can dabble in four or five biographies at a time, all the while knowing that we don’t need to find them permanent housing. Are we thinking about the advantages, space-wise, of ebooks?  Not in the least.  Not yet.

The other day when former student Daniel Cox came visiting, I wondered what he thought.  Did we look smaller, still ancient and like we would soon be buried in books?  Probably.