Lilianna23
All that glitters ✨️
- Joined
- Aug 19, 2023
- Posts
- 12,080
She's been living rent-free in your head all this time. Glad you finally evicted her!I like gizmoes. Old stuff. Cars, motorcycles, guns, farm equipment, machines, houses, and old books. My grandfather used to say that they don’t make them like they used to. It’s true - they don’t. A lot of stuff is better. Cars are safer. Houses are more energy efficient and safer, too. But I learned a lot from my grandfather about older things as well as many things in general. Mom always said that he wasn’t all that mechanical, but he certainly knew a great deal about how stings worked. And he had the gumption to tackle a project without necessarily knowing precisely how it worked or was going to turn out, and this was well before the advent of Google.
He was into an obsolete brand of cars. He was driving a 1949 model when he died in 1981. I learned how to work on cars with him when I was younger. In middle age, I was looking for (another) hobby and I found a 1947 coupe of the same brand for sale for what seemed to be a reasonable price. It’s mine now. It’ll be my retirement project. I may ditch the job but I’ll have plenty to do. And I have thought of getting something from the teens also. Talk about anvil technology. And it makes me think of a set of books that he had.
Granddad (we all called him by an old family nickname) had a secretary in his living room. My parents had had one when I was little and they had junked it. They’re not the most practical piece of furniture, but they were a thing once, and he had his. The top portion is a set of shelves behind glass doors. Smack in the middle of his was a five volume set of an encyclopedia of car technology. His set dated from 1920. During the time I lived with him as a teenager, I would explore that set of books. I was fascinated by the old ways of doing things and the discontinued designs. It was a good education on the evolution of car form and function.
He died about 10 years later. He had married wife #3 by that time. She did nothing to endear herself to many of the rest of the existing relatives, and in fairness, many of us many not have been as welcoming as we might have. Anyway, we all gathered at the house for the funeral and memorial rites and the dividing of the loot at the reading of the will. That was for the children, and as a grandchild, I wasn’t included. I do recall the last time I saw that set of books was the last time I stood in that room. Last I had heard, she had a roll-off dumpster delivered and she had emptied the house, which he had left her life rights to, into its maw. Apparently that set of books as well as a lot of other keepsake-type things of his wound up in the landfill.
I have held it against her - and her ghost - from then until today.
Something made me think of it today. I was chatting with a friend about old books. Remembering that Google is a trusted friend, I decided to try to remember the name of the series and to see if I could find a set for sale online. I should have done this earlier, but we don’t know that we don’t know until we know that we don’t know, and then we can ask. Honestly, it took an entire 10 minutes. My guess at the name was almost exactly right, and it seems that even though his set didn’t survive, that m,any others have, and many of those look like they have languished safely in a secretary for longer than half a century. A very nice version was an option at an online vintage bookstore for just under $100, and not much over that with shipping. This set - my set - is from 1919, but they’re the same bloody books. Good enough. They arrive late next week.
I felt a kind of weight lift. I was able to forgive a self-absorbed old woman for her sins, real or imagined. I let her go. Hell, I didn’t know I was still carrying her around. So she is now forgiven and well on her way to being forgotten. And if I ever do buy a 1916 Orphan-brand, I’ll have the research material to figure out how it works, and as it turns out, I wanted access to the knowledge all along. I’ll have it soon and in my favorite format - old books.
