I didn't really go anywhere or do much today; I had to do a home medical test that the doctor gave me to do -- in January -- so I pretty much stuck around the house. Not a big deal, I assume, but he's given me this thing to do at the end of every physical I've had with him, so that's about 30 years, but this time he seemed to really mean it. Heh. So, done.In the meantime, I spent the morning shuffling some things around and getting the new bookcase in place and vacuuming the family room three or four times. Each time I moved a piece of furniture, I had to vacuum again, and then Boo left bits of white fur everywhere, per usual, so it kept me busy. Getting this all done also means that I can finally get to the books there easily, so I added about 80 titles to my library thing. (That widget down at the bottom is supposed to take you to my catalog.) A lot of these were children's titles and children's sets, including The Charlie Brown 'Cyclopedia, which R read incessantly before she could actually even read. If you have little kids, btw, I wholeheartedly recommend supermarket encyclopedias for them. You never know what it could spark an interest in. I really think that these books are what got her hooked on reading and learning.
(Classic family story, which I may have told before. The kids were little; we hadn't moved into the house yet, and were sitting at the breakfast table one morning. R must have been about three and a half, by which time she really could read. K was in her highchair, and R was reading a volume of Charlie Brown while she was eating. The Hubs came in to say good-bye as he left for work, and as he leaned over to kiss me good-bye, we were frozen in mid-air, as R, in her baby voice, read from the book in a very matter of fact way: "Oh. It says here the fertilization takes place when the sperm and the egg meet in the fallopian tubes." Except she wasn't saying "r" sounds yet, so it came out "fuhtilization" and "fawopian". Boy, you never forget a moment like that.)
So I have the Charlie Brown, and I have the Value Tales, which were simpy biographies of famous people, each designed to promote a particular value. (E.g., Marie Curie and the Value of Education. Albert Einstein and the Value of Inspiration. And so on.) These were weird and cartoony, but had their place. My big surprise of the venture came when I started to enter my uncle's poetry books.
I had this uncle; he was actually my mother's uncle, who was only 10 years older than she was because he was the youngest of 14 or so, and my grandmother was closer to the top. She, his sister, was actually also his godmother, which meant that when he arrived in America at 13, orphaned, she took him in and raised him. His name was Aaron, and listen: he was crazy. I don't mean this in the cute way we say to someone "You're crazy!" or even in the way that I refer to my former boss as The Psycho. Aaron had mental illness issues, and would commit himself to a hospital from time to time. Knowledge of his condition did not make him pleasant to live with, however. But I digress.
He was also brilliant, although he had never had the opportunity for formal education. He was a translator, going without effort back and forth among English, Hebrew, Yiddish, and Russian, although Yiddish was his bread and butter. He was also a poet, and I always saw a shelf of his books in my house while I was growing up, each of them inscribed from him to my mother, or to my mother and father. One would think that he hadn't spent a series of years trying to eliminate my mother and her brother from the picture so that he could have exclusive rights to their mother's love, but, whatever. We had the books.
I was always very intrigued by the fact that he had "written" these books, although I wasn't quite sure what that meant when I was small. I saw his name on the title page, and for some of them, his picture on the back of the dust jacket. His later books were published by Parthenon Publishing, with his home address given, so I knew he had had those privately published. These days, private publishing has become a valid enterprise, but then, it only meant that you couldn't really get your stuff published because no one wanted it. Even so, there are a good dozen books with his name on them, about half published in a more mainstream way, and then the others.
What happened this morning was that I put his name into the Library Thing search box, just for laughs, and all his published titles came up. He's actually listed on Amazon. I was pretty much astonished. My mother had always said that he was well-thought-of as a poet in the 1940s, and I guess maybe he was.
You're wondering if I read any of it. Well, I did years and years ago, and I liked some of it. As the years went by, and the mental illness took a stronger hold, his poetry was not as good. But I think he did have something, once.
I think I've already told the story about how he changed his name and stuff, which was pretty weird; maybe I'll tell it again tomorrow. But for now, here you go:
