Page 32
While I was in Florida, I followed through on a scavenger hunt I’ve dreamed of for several years but haven’t had the opportunity to pursue. These two pages of comics do a good job introducing the idea:
In short, Grandpa Andy was a big reader, and Grandma Rose volunteered at the library. This system of marking the page 32 helped them keep track of which books he had already read so that she wouldn’t bring home repeats. Fun fact: it was page 32 because Grandma Rose was born in 1932.
In 2022, when she would have turned 90 and he would have turned 96, and 3 years/6 years after their respective deaths, my dad and I went through Grandpa Andy’s favorite sections of the library to see if we could find any books he had read.
After a shelf or so with no results, we started to worry that maybe the library had weeded most of those out. After all, Grandma Rose wasn’t making trips to the library for him anymore in the last few years of his life, on account of her Alzheimer’s. That would mean that any books with a chance of him reading them would probably have to be at least a decade old. That, or maybe some of the best ones are always checked out.
But then we found one! And then two! And then three! In total, we found an even ten scattered mostly throughout military history, the American West, Florida, and travel:
Ice Crusaders: A Memoir of Cold War and Cold Sport, by Tom Wolf
Some Kind of Paradise, by Mark Derr
Frederic Remington’s Own West
The Tropic of Cracker, by Al Burt
The American West, by Dee Brown
Return to Midway: The quest to find the Yorktown and the other lost ships from the pivotal battle of the Pacific War, by Robert D. Ballard
Sunshine States: Wild Times and Extraordinary Lives in the Land of Gators, Guns, and Grapefruits, by Patrick Carr
Campaign in the Marianas: The War in the Pacific
Hitler’s Soldiers in the Sunshine State, by Robert D. Billinger, Jr.
Pigboat 39: An American Sub Goes to War, by Bobette Gugliotta
The whole experience was a confluence of emotions and actions reaching between that moment and the distant past.
Small revelations (they underlined the page number rather than circling it!? An explorer himself, he loved reading about exploring too!)
Questions (which ones didn’t he like? did he underline the page number or did Grandma?)
Concerns (did some of these books feed into cultural prejudices that sprung out of wartime?)
Patterns and rituals (the last time I was in here was to pick out YA books with Grandma before getting ice cream and today I’m looking for the books she may have picked out that day, before my dad and I get ice cream.)
Surrealism (I drew this space and these shelves with a lot of guess work and that became how I imagined it. Walking through the actual space felt like walking through my imagination but with things that didn’t match.)
Handling objects with innocuous monetary value but heaps of sentimental value.
Exercising my slowly growing familiarity with the Dewey Decimal system as I aim to work at a library, like my mom, dad, and like Grandma Rose.
Collaborating with my dad as he exercised his expert knowledge as a career reference librarian, and hoping one day I would possess the same practiced hands.
Wondering how far is too far in my tendency to mythologize my grandparents and the lives they lived outside of my awareness. Couldn’t these books just be books?
Each time I opened a book and saw “32” had been underlined, I felt a pang of regret, joy, and reassurance. Regret because, despite being such an avid reader, time had passed and so few books now remained that would have crossed their paths – a true example of the fleeting nature of one’s interests, impact, and curiosities in life. And because this book was so small and insignificant a relic compared to the shelves and shelves that our memories of them fill. And yet I still felt joy in that I had discovered something small about them after their deaths. Glee in the knowledge that I was handling something that they had both handled, considered, spent time with; as precious, as informative an artifact as the traces of an ancient civilization, at least to me. And peace, to hold the physical remnants confirming the stories we tell each other about them, so often told that we might start to wonder if parts were imagined or embellished.
With their house long since sold to new owners, filled with different belongings, and lacking the lush foliage and palpable sparkle of potential as we drive past now (was that only ever imagined? or has their property dulled without their attentiveness?); and with their belongings dispersed to different parts of the continent – inherited by the kids and grandkids, or purchased by customers at the local Good Will – these little surprises are few and far between. Each one is a perfectly preserved footprint from a day (a life) they shared together.
It was so important to me to hold these books. But when we left, I realized that the same doubt I felt while struggling to find them, I might feel again if I had nothing physical to hold onto of our ultimate discoveries. So we went back the next day and found all the books all over again, just so I could photograph each one’s cover, spine, and (most importantly) 32nd page. Assembling the physical evidence of the people we’ve lost, writing stories about them, retracing their steps – all of that may seem aimless. But in practice I can feel it reassert the impact they’ve had and continue to have on my life, beyond the everpresent impact of their absence.
