We remembered differently where the giant, beautiful books came from, my sister and I. What we both remember clearly is that our mother called them, “those damn bird books.” They were so big and so heavy and we were told to be so careful looking at those watercolor pictures of beautiful brightly colored birds.
My sister, the only child of my mother’s first marriage, remembers being told her father had sent them to her after I was born, the product of my both my mother and father’s second marriages. I remember being told, my father had won them in a poker game.
What we both remember clearly was my father passing out in an overstuffed chair and a smoldering cigarette igniting, ever so slightly, the arm of the chair. This would have been around 1959. My mother took two tablespoons of water to put out the fire while my father slept. She then filled up a bucket of water and threw it at him. He woke up with a start and left the house in the suit he had dressed up in for my sister’s all important interview with the committee to decide whether or not she (and therefore we) were worthy of her becoming an Honored Queen of Job’s Daughters.
The whole thing is the stuff of sit-coms if you had that kind of mind but we both clearly remember the terror of the clock and the fury of my mother. In her haste to throw the bucket of the water at my father, who was sitting in the overstuffed chair in the corner of the living room, she hadn’t calculated the distance of her toss. The bookshelves behind the chair were now dripping with water. The committee was due in half an hour.
We grabbed bathrooms towels and started mopping and drying the books and the walls and hardwood floor. We both remember spending extra time on the spines of the giant bird books. Shortly thereafter my mother divorced my father. My sister became an Honored Queen and I eventually joined 4-H (to the horror of my family) instead of following the royal lineage of all the women in my family for generations. My sister (eight years my senior) got married as soon as she turned 18, just to escape my mother. When my turn came, I escaped to college but married at 19.
We all forgot about the books.
Years passed when I forgot I knew a songbird from a mallard. Pigeons at the San Francisco Zoo were a fascination for my kids and no one told us in those days popcorn wasn’t part of their natural diet.
Decades passed and Linda and I had little communication with one another. We were never a close family and there were never holidays spent together. Not once. A few years ago when my mother’s health started to fail we were forced to work together to provide care for her. And we learned in quiet lunches and dinners in hospital cafeterias, our mother had lied to us about many, many things. And she never wanted us to be close. So we made it a point to care for our mother but to care for each other even more.
When the time came to pack up mother’s house we surprised ourselves in both wanting to find out what had happened to “those damn bird books.” We never did find them and we suspected no matter who had the right story, the books represented one of our fathers and Jean most likely just threw them away, as she did with many things she associated with her “mistakes.”
A few months later, my sister confessed she taken some of the unexpected money and found online, a set of those old books. Not the originals, mind you, but still a rare enough copy. I did the same thing and ended up with a set from a bookseller in Grass Valley, Calif. When my set came, it included a letter from the publisher which had been sent prior to the publication of the new set. The set could purchased in 1966, for $37.50, half of its $75 value. I had paid about three times that price but was so glad I had. Linda and I talked about those books and those missed years for hours between talking to doctors and caregivers for my mother. We had both remembered the books as taller somehow but we confessed we were much smaller then.
My sister died two years ago, a bit unexpectedly but not really, when you factor in her lifetime of cigarettes and obesity and addiction to pain meds. I have no idea if her two sons kept those treasured bird books or put them on e-bay.
In Jan of 2012 I caught a news story that stopped me in my tracks. “The Original Water-Color Paintings” by John James Audubon, from the early 1800’s, those 3 and1/2 foot tall books (of which we had purchased those copies of, from the Sixties) had been sold by Christie’s auction house for $7.9 million dollars.
Just what books had disappeared? Were they actually as tall as we had remembered? Had we tossed water on those precious books? I’ll never know. My mother has been in a home for dementia for nearly five years now. She has not recognized me for the last two. In the past year, she has become non-verbal and has been in hospice care. The bird books are one of hundreds of stories I will never learn about my childhood.
Last weekend when The Grands came up we filled all the many, many bird feeders in my yard. I could name the finches, the magpies, the sparrows, and the robins. But there was one beautiful bird, brightly colored, I could not name. When we came in the house, I pulled those giant bird books out (those copies of the legendary originals) and I set about to find the proper name of what turned out to be… a glamorous woodpecker.
The Grands are fascinated by those books. And I can’t explain why that pleases me so much and at the same time it makes me so sad. Some years, some holidays lack the perfect greeting card sentiment. Happy Mother’s Day to all the children and all their mothers this Sunday in the Park…
Teri Orr is a former editor of The Park Record. She is the director of the organization that provides programming for the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Center for the Performing Arts.