The Life of Books

I stopped at an estate sale in Lake Highlands this afternoon, even though I had far more important things to do. I only stopped because I noticed there were boxes and boxes of books stacked outside. As I perused, the son of the owner of the books, deceased three months ago, entertained those of us staggering around in the heat and humidity, sweat rolling off the end of our noses and splattering the spines of the books in the boxes.

“Anyone need a copy of, ‘Meditations on Wine as a Cure for Gout’” the son offered.

“”I’ll drink to that,” a neighbor called out, without looking up.

“Dad didn’t even have gout…” the son lamented with a laugh.

Having cleaned out the houses of several late family members, I understood his surrender to laughter. The acquisition process of someone who clearly already has more than enough of everything and is no longer present to explain themselves, leaves us pondering the great unanswerable, “Why?”.

The book digging was hot and rough and not all of the books were in good shape. I almost gave up early in the hunt. Then, I found a pristine and odorless copy of, “The World of Paul Crume” edited by Marion Crume. This book is a collection of 254 columns from Crume’s almost quarter of a century at the Dallas Morning News.

In the forward, Texas historian Lon Tinkle wrote of Crume, “If his targets were hypocrisy, cant and bunkum, his weapon was laughter, and his ammunition was ironic, rarely sardonic, tolerance of the human frailty…The humor comes from a broad, generous understanding of the gap between what dream promises and what reality forks over…”

My grandfather was often tickled by Crume’s pearls and would insist on reading the column aloud to whoever was around. I wasn’t very old when I too started to read Mr. Crume regularly.

I remember “Teaching a City Dog to Swim” and “What to do about Dandruff” turning my giggle box over and I thought this grown man seemed to have a fine sense of not taking things too seriously. Yet, Crume’s column that I read to my family every year on Christmas morning, “To Touch an Angel”, always brings a tear, well, just because it does.

Since Crume lived on the same street as my grandparents in Casa View, we felt a kinship toward him like a famous uncle who we rarely got to see. Occasionally, we would see him riding in a car with his wife driving, or walking home from the bus stop. It seemed a humble life for someone so incredibly famous. I recalled all of this in an instant, and held this treasure close.

“How much for this one?” I asked the son of the deceased.

“Well, here is the deal, it’s a dollar a book, or, if you grab one of those boxes, you can fill it up with as many books as you can carry for five bucks.”

I grabbed a box and got serious about mining the five or six hundred books stacked in the sun and the two or three hundred others under the tarps in the backyard.

You learn a lot going through people’s books. The departed was clearly someone I would have enjoyed knowing, throwing his newspaper or mowing his lawn. Judging by the tools, electronics, and chaos of his garage workroom, he was a retired engineer, turned tinkerer. He had a huge number of hardbound engineering books and old photographs revealing a man who had been important in the construction of major power and sewage treatment plants. “Arithmetic of Sewage Treatment Facilities” was one of the more esoteric titles.

Beyond his profession, this gentleman had been an avid reader of politics, war history, and literature. I found evidence he had been a New Deal Democrat and had kept the faith, maintaining collections of newspapers from Bill Clinton’s election. He was a true renaissance man before they became obsolete or at best, highly endangered.

My box began to fill with titles, a play by Eugene O’Neill, the autobiography of Kit Carson, “Landscapes of Texas”, “The Best of Will Rogers”, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, the classic, “Up Front” by Bill Mauldin, “Lonesome Dove”, and a biography of Winston Churchill.

I also picked up a copy of old favorite North Dallas Forty and couldn’t resist a paperback copy of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E. #3, The Copenhagen Affair”, with cover art of the actors David McCallum and Robert Vaughn.

One title, which is possibly the most unfortunate book of the late 20^th Century, is “Richard Nixon, The Man Behind the Mask” by Gary Allen. Allen’s 430 page treatise on Nixon was published in 1971, near the end of Nixon’s first term. It is hard to imagine a book about Nixon that is totally devoid of mention of Watergate. That’s like a book on World War ll that fails to mention the atomic bomb. Allen clearly didn’t like Nixon, he was a Goldwater/John Birch Society man and must have kicked himself at the premature publication of his best shot at Nixon, less than a year before we first learned the word, “Watergate”.

Wandering through the tangible artifacts of the life of a neighbor I did not know, particularly his books, carries mixed feelings. I am glad to give some of his books a decent home and a proper place on a shelf. Yet, I would rather have known him and heard his stories and impressions of all that he read and experienced.

I drove the few short blocks to my house wishing I knew more of my neighbors. Like old books, they are treasures waiting to be shared.