Do you have the first book you ever owned?
I kind of doubt that I do, because none of the books I own were of the Little Golden Books variety, and I know I read some of those when I was very young. But it may be possible I have the first real book I ever owned.
I came to me from a man I never really met, at least not at an age I could remember him.
My father, who gave meaning to the saying that any man can be a sperm donor, but it takes a real man to be a dad. He abandoned my mother, my baby sister and me at age 25, when I was still a couple of months from turning 3. We never say or heard from him again.
I never met my grandparents on that side either. My father’s parents divorced in 1934. His mother died in 1948 and his father and stepmother died in a car crash in January 1949, 11 months before I was born.
I have nearly nothing to remember them by. My grandfather Charles Whitcomb was a salesman who lived in the Atlanta area and died in Georgia. I have a picture of him in his office and another of when he joined the Army in 1917 to fight in France in the First World War.
My grandmother Blanche Northam Whitcomb is a complete mystery. No letters, no pictures. In fact, the only proof I have that she even existed is in that first book. It was a fairly famous book for its time, Jane Porter’s “The Scottish Chiefs,” published in 1921.
“Bright was the summer of 1296.”
Back when olden times were really olden times. I could posit a pretty good argument that day-to-day life changed less from 1296 to 1921 than it has changed in the 102 years since the book was published.
And while that may be an exaggeration, go back to 1871 and it might not be.
Blanche must have given the book to her son to earlier than 1935. It was published in 1921, he was born in 1927 and there is a publisher’s logo in the book that says 1935.. Then there is her inscription.
The funny thing is, I know I have had this book since I was. very little. But it had been in my parents’ home since we moved to Virginia in 1963. I recovered it after my mother died and we were sorting through things before selling the house.
I brought it home to Georgia, which was when I first noticed the inscription from my grandmother who died 75 years ago. She is the one person in my universe about whom I know the least and wish I knew more. I know when she was born and when she died and that’s just about it.
That’s one of the differences between life now and life before everything was on computers. This might sound almost inconceivable now, but I was born in 1949 and didn’t even have to get a Social Security number till I got my first summer job in 1967. These days kids get the SSN when they’re born.
Of course back then, the only reason for the SSN was to keep track of payments made into Social Security accounts. Now the nine-digit number is used for all sorts of identification.
That doesn’t help me. The truly depressing part of it all is that I could have learned so much more about so many of the people I wish I knew now. Yes, my paternal grandparents died before I was born and my father left when I was 2, but I had an aunt — Blanche’s baby sister — who sent me birthday cards till I was 18. If I had made the effort, she could have told me a lot.
But she died more than 50 years ago, and if my father had lived, he would be 96 next month.
All I’ve got is the book.
I guess I’ll read it again.