My Father’s Books

Victor P. Ehly

So there I sat, in the middle of the floor of my office, exhausted and surrounded by stacks and stacks of my father’s books representing a lifetime of study, preaching, teaching, and ministering.  “What now?” I thought.  I began randomly picking up one book after another, holding it in my hand, opening it to the title page, then noting the publisher and the date of publication, then scanning the table of contents and flipping to the back to see if there was an index.  I smiled at myself for applying the habitualized rules of approaching books that I had been teaching my students for so many years. 

But this was different.  What was I looking for?  Was I looking for my father?  If so, why?  He is still very much alive and healthy at eighty-nine. I can pick up the phone any time I please and discuss politics or social issues with him. I know my father. I know he loves me, and I, him. Yet, I found myself examining the handwriting as he had penned his name in a book in 1934, 1942, or again in 1961.  I was also studying the occasional signatures of those who had given him one of their books. I was looking for names of familiar authors I had known as guests in our home when I was a child. I was looking, perhaps, for clues to the mind of the preacher, to whom I never listened, even though I had sat in church week after week, year after year.  How could I listen, when I saw only the real man, my father with all his frail humanity, while I was surrounded by parishioners, who saw him as their revered spiritual leader?

I was at the end of a long journey that had begun months ago in the planning stage.  Dianne and I would fly to St. Louis, where we would spend the night with my sister and her husband before driving the next day to Columbia to be with my parents for three days.  I would drive Dianne back to St. Louis, from where she would fly to San Francisco for a conference.  I would join her there on the final day of the conference for a few days in the city before renting a car to travel to northern California to visit her uncle and aunt and family.  We would then board separate planes, Dianne returning to Vermont, and I, landing in St. Louis, then back to Columbia with a rental car, which I would load with the fifteen or so boxes of my father’s books he would have otherwise given away or thrown away to be shredded for recycled paper.  As I sat their on the floor of my office I recalled the horror I had felt ripple through me two years ago, when I heard him say that word “shredded.” I felt somehow violated and had to suppress a gut-wrenching scream, “No! Don’t do it! I want them.”  Later, however, upon more rational reflection, I realized how few of my father’s books would be of any use to me whatsoever and probably deserved to be recycled. For many of his books were of the genre of what I would call “how-to books for the preacher.”  Not my cup of tea and even something of an embarrassment to me. 

So that summer, now two years past, I sat down with my father in the garage of their home, where the boxes of books had been stacked — many since his retirement over twenty years ago.  I picked up the first box and set it between us on the floor and opened it. I had the idea that we would go through each of them together, and I would stack the books I wanted on one side and the books for which I had no use on the other.  I would take a book, perhaps for sentimental reasons because of something noted on the back of the cover in my father’s hand, or because of its historic value, or simply because of its enduring quality to be read later.  After three hours and two stiff backs, my mother poked her head out of the kitchen door into the garage and asked, “Isn’t it awfully hot out their without air conditioning?  Are you about done?”  We looked up and smiled sheepishly.  We had gone through one small box and I had placed each book carefully on the pile I would save after my father had spent ten to twenty minutes with each book, telling me how he had happened to come by this particular volume at that particular time in his life and ministry. Each time I found myself unable to cast a book aside after such a loving dissertation, even if I knew good and well that I had no use for that book.  We went inside for a cool drink and never returned to this project.  The next day, I hatched my plan to bring all of the books to Vermont.  Somehow I thought that, though forfeiting the hours of wonderful stories of the books, I would be out from under the pressure and, with less emotion, could choose the books I wanted more objectively.

But here I sit unable to make any decision at all. No wonder, I thought.  After two days of driving, coming straight to my office at twilight of the second day, and carting fifteen heavy boxes of books up the back fire escape of Howland Hall to my third floor office, with Bill, the security guard, looking on in wonder, how could I expect to do any more?  So I drove home, unpacked the rental car and slept fitfully, mixed emotions churning up my sleep.  Still on vacation, I let an entire week pass before returning to my campus office.  With our house already full of our own books, Dianne had reminded me in the very early stages of my plan that there was simply no more room at home and that she would only agree to it if I promised to bring these books only as far as Montpelier!

Six weeks later, I returned to my office and spent some wonderful hours looking through my father’s books.  Most of them are now shelved, even though there is relatively little organization of them. Just last week I pulled yet another book from a box and was stunned to read the title: The Art and Practice of Magic!  I opened it to find a printed name sticker on the back of the cover: “A. M. Ehly.”  Unexpectedly I burst into tears.  This was my grandfather’s book and somehow his lifelong hobby of performing magic tricks had long since escaped my consciousness.  Suddenly it all came back.  When I was a small child he would enchant me with his magic tricks and I would whine and whine until he would finally give in and show me how this particular trick was done.  Then he would rehearse it with me for hours behind closed doors until I was good enough to spring it on the rest of the family.  Of course, everyone was enthralled, even though it never seemed to occur to me that they had all seen this trick many times before and knew full well how it worked.          

 I still do not know why I am so invested in this project.  I have only become more comfortable with not knowing.  And I am becoming more comfortable with more and more of my father’s books.  I treasure them all.