My mother's books
My mother has decided to give away half her library.
She announced this on the phone in September the way she announces most things, as a decision already made and partly carried out. She is sixty-seven. She is in excellent health, as she would want me to say. She simply looked at the shelves in the den one afternoon, she told me, and realized she was keeping a great many books for a version of herself who was going to reread them, and that she'd met that woman and she wasn't going to.
So she has been sorting. Her method is exactly what you'd expect from a school librarian. Every book got a slip of paper. Keep, give, or Tess. Eleven boxes went to the library sale. A few went to her friends, by request, with notes. And six came to me, by media mail, which is the slowest way a box can travel in this country and which she chose on principle.
They started arriving on Tuesday. Each box was taped exactly square and labeled on two sides in her hand: what was in it, the date, and "Seattle" underlined, as if the post office might otherwise have doubts. Inside, every book still had its slip. Most of them say only "Tess." Some say a little more. Her Dorothy Sayers, the Gaudy Night I read in June in a library copy, says "Finally." A battered Agatha Christie says "You read this under the covers in 1996 with a flashlight. I knew."
The Chandlers aren't in any of the boxes. I asked her on the phone, a little worried, and she said they're staying on the shelf, because those are the ones I'll want when she's gone and she isn't gone. Then she changed the subject to the weather, which is how I know she'd thought about that sentence for a while before she said it.
My apartment is small and the books are many. I've had to give up a chair. The new stacks are along the wall by the window, still in their boxes, because I haven't been able to bring myself to shelve them yet. It feels like moving my mother's handwriting into my house, which in a way it is.
What's a book you've kept for a version of yourself who's never going to read it?