Anniversary Toast

On Friday, my husband and I will have been married 21 years. Last year, impatient (why wait for 25?) and feeling more than a little pleased with ourselves for having so well enjoyed our first two decades together, we threw a big party. This year, we'll probably take the kids to the coast. But I've already received a gift. My wonderful aunt, who saves things, sent me an early draft of my grandfather's wedding toast to us.

My grandfather was a great spinner of yarns and an enthusiastic, if idiosyncratic, typist. I've long had a prettied-up copy of his toast, on good quality paper and with all the spelling straightened. Now, though, I've come into possession of the writer's manuscript. I feel like an archivist, a keeper of jewels. Misspellings, uneven ink (this was a manual typewriter), a few handwritten corrections in blue ballpoint pen. The paper's thin, long folded, a little torn. Soft around the edges with age. Rereading it, I hear my grandfather's voice in my head, see him standing at the reception, a little stooped. I imagine him at his desk. Was he a two-finger typist? I don't know.

We were married on my grandparents' 56^th wedding anniversary. Graciously sharing "their" day, they also shared advice. When they were married in 1935, my grandfather was county agent in Bear Lake County, Idaho. His hard-won advice: Don't post a dead calf or expect a gooseberry pie on your honeymoon. The source of this wisdom? His ill-considered decision to perform a postmortem on some farmer's calf on the way to a dance, thinking he could do his work and keep on driving. Except the work meant packaging up the calf's organs and shipping them off, and the groom and his car were far too smelly for his bride to want to go dancing once that was all done. The pie-promised gooseberries in turn went up in smoke when my grandmother, unused to cooking on an electric range, turned the burner on high before accidentally locking herself out of the apartment.

We have followed Grandpa's advice to the letter. It has worked like a charm. 

Family Business/Sharing Books

Winter's Hill Vineyard

UNO Press

Last week, visiting my family's winery, one of the wonderful women who often works special events there told me she'd bought a copy of Beyond the Islands for a friend of hers who would be diving in the Galápagos. What should she tell her friend about the book? Pirates, I said. Pirate treasure, and small-town boosters, and scientists amazed at the varied and impossible life of the islands. Poets and teachers and tourists. 

Book sharing is a family tradition, part of our daily lives, part of the family business. How many wineries sell literature in translation in their tasting rooms? Probably not too many. For me, it's been a wonderful way to get the books to people who might not otherwise find them, to make connections that might not otherwise be made.

I doubt I would have embarked on the same teaching/scholarly career or perhaps on translation had we not spent 15 months in northern Ecuador when I was in middle school. I would have been writing, but I might not have found my way to Latin America, to Ecuadorian narrative, to the Galápagos Islands and back. I might never have learned Spanish.

The classroom may be a more traditional space than a tasting room for literary connections but there, too, the specific links can be unexpected. A student recently approached me before class with a copy of Beyond the Islands. "This is my mother's favorite book," she told me. "Will you sign it for her?" Naturally, I was delighted--I only wish Alicia Yánez Cossío had been on hand to sign it, too. If I hadn't had a lecture to deliver, I'd have done a little happy dance, too.

What am I reading this week? Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card. It's one of those (too numerous) books I'd meant to read for years. I finally picked it up when my daughter, who read it for school, pronounced the novel, "Not my all-time favorite book, but close." I haven't yet reached the chapter that tipped the book from "really good" to "close to all-time favorite" status for her, but so far, so good.

Does your family share books?