The two sides of my family had little in common.   For well over half my life to date, that was my perception, and it had much to recommend it.

       My father’s people were farmers in post-Civil War Alabama, moderately successful for perhaps one generation but increasingly pinched after that, and by the time my father came along, they were cloaked in the mantle of failure. 

       Daddy’s mother, his father’s second wife, died in childbirth, the same fate that had claimed the first.  That left my paternal grandfather, John Miles Cunningham, a twice-widowed father of four when only in his early thirties. He would go on to marry yet again and have three more children while neglecting the four already in existence.  Mean and lazy, he allowed the family to sink further into poverty and evidently cared little for the welfare of his children who for the most part were supported and cared for by aunts, uncles, grandparents and other relatives.  From an early age Daddy was determined to escape all this and make something of himself, and he did.  After working his way through college and law school during the depths of the Depression, he eventually became a practicing attorney and later a circuit judge.

       Mother’s family, on the other hand, were upper middle-class, at least by the standards of their time and venue.  Mother was the younger of two sisters, and their parents would live until their forty-ninth wedding anniversary, a stark contrast to my Grandfather Cunningham’s much-married ways. 

      Grandmother Holladay had grown up in a rich family, or so I interpret the descriptions passed along to me: a large house in Birmingham with lighted tennis courts and a third-floor ballroom; a hand-carved rosewood piano and a bearskin rug in the music salon; a French cook; a chauffeur-driven limousine; train trips to New York to see the sights and buy the fashions. 

       Granddaddy Holladay, while not quite as materially well off in his youth, came from Chambers County, Alabama where his parents, by all accounts, were solid, sensible people well-regarded by their neighbors.  He was related to the area’s original settlers and pioneers, Chambers having been his mother’s maiden name, and land comprising the original homestead is still in the family and has been for at least six generations, possibly more.

       Grandmother Holladay was an excellent cook, as grandmothers universally are obliged to be.  To the best of my memory, she did not object when we played raucous games in the house or dug in the dirt with the good silver or trampled her flower beds during hide-and-seek or asked her, for the hundredth time, to recite in order the names of her ten brothers and sisters. 

       But Granddaddy Holladay was the truly beloved.  In spring he led us by the hand to the orchard and lifted us up to see the robin’s nest with its three perfect eggs in the crook of the apple tree.  In summer he knew the location of the best swimming holes, the kind that sent the storytellers and versifiers of yesteryear into such ecstasies.  He led us down the dusty path to Bowdoin’s Store, a local landmark, where he bought us all the candy and chocolate milk we could hold.  When autumn came, he spread newspaper over the kitchen table and carved jack-o’-lanterns.  Then we would walk the half mile to the schoolhouse fair where we bobbed for apples and took a chance at the cakewalk.  And for our winter colds, he rubbed camphor on our chests.  I still regard him as the finest person I have ever know. 

        Bruce and I always referred to them simply as “Grandmother” and “Granddaddy” without bothering to add their surname.  Doing so would have seemed rather absurd since, practically speaking, they were the only ones we had, and trips to their place in the country was every grandchild’s dream and birthright.

       And then there were Daddy’s relatives. 

       We went to see them also, but these visits were of a markedly different timbre from the ones to Dunavant.  They were both briefer and less frequent, generally lasting no more than a few hours on randomly chosen Sunday afternoons.  And since Collinsville was actually less than half as far as Dunavant, it reinforced the conclusion that there was something second-class about its status.

       Without forewarning, Daddy would announce “We’re going to Collinsville” in a tone that forfended nay votes from any quarter, and Bruce and I, none too thrilled, would silently get in the car.  Upon our arrival, the adults sat engaging in uninspired, rather strained conversation just to be civil.  My step-grandmother was, I think, a decent person, but there was no love lost between my Grandfather Cunningham and much of anyone else, least of all his family.  Bruce and I would sometimes wander off in desperate search of something to do, but there was precious little to wander to, and pickings were deadly slim.  Only occasionally did we share meals, and even more tellingly, we never once, that I can remember, spent a holiday or an overnight there, a common occurrence at Dunavant where we often remained for days.

       The two sides of the family were simply not the same, and from earliest childhood my brother and I knew this.  Their genetic contributions may have stacked up fifty-fifty, but where personal identification and affections were concerned, it was a rout.  We meant no harm by our favoritism, but circumstances being as they were, no other attitude was possible. 

       Grandmother died when Bruce and I were thirteen and sixteen, and Granddaddy stayed on at Dunavant for another couple of years or so until too feeble to live alone any longer.  The house was rented out, and from then on Granddaddy alternately resided with my family and my aunt’s until his death in 1973 at age ninety-seven.  The Dunavant chapter in our lives, with its grape arbors and strawberry beds, its festive Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, its long summer vacations, was closed forever.

       Its legacy, however, was anything but.  Daddy may have experienced hardship as a child, emotional as well as material, but Mother and Aunt Camma most assuredly had not.  Pampered darlings from birth, they occupied the center of their parents’ world and had been given every possible advantage.   When our turn came around, the previous generation’s example had not been lost on us, and Bruce and I expected – and got – no less.  Our name notwithstanding, we entered adulthood with the silent understanding that we were Holladays, not Cunninghams, because we regarded most of what we had and were as coming from the efforts and influence of the former.

      Not until decades later did I finally grasp that I had wronged Daddy’s family by not giving credit where due and by failing to acknowledge that in at least one crucial respect I am as strongly bonded to them as to the Holladays.  For fifty-five years, reading has been the mainstay of my personal and professional life, and Daddy’s family, no less than Mother’s, were readers.

       Sadly, the realization has come too late.  By this, I mean that because most of the principals are long dead, the details of this aspect of their lives are forever lost to me, and I sincerely regret that.  My father’s sister is still living, but she is past ninety-two, and my questions tax her recall.  Broad outlines are all that remain.

       But a few things I do know.  Because Collinsville was roughly equidistant between Birmingham and Chattanooga, my great-grandfather hedged his bets by taking the papers from both.  My saintly Uncle Johnny, my worthless grandfather’s sterling brother, had a mail route, and in all likelihood he delivered those very papers to members of his own household as well as his other RFD patrons.  These the extended family members eagerly awaited and passed from hand to hand, to consume in their entirety, and if one or even several days passed before the last in the loop got their chance, it mattered not.  Older issues were valued and savored as much as current ones.  While quite young, I once astounded a teacher by knowing, more or less, the meaning of “photogravure”.  When she asked how I knew, I replied “I’ve heard my Daddy say it.  When he was a boy, his family took a newspaper, and that was one of the parts.”

       Newspapers, however, were not all.  There was a time when I, like many others, would have expressed doubt about the ready availability of books among rural, poverty-stricken inhabitants of the Deep South in the 1920’s and 1930’s, but my ignorance has been put to flight.  I have since been made humbly aware that sources there and then were essentially the same as here and now.  People who owned books shared with those who did not.  Teachers lent to students, ministers to congregants, neighbors to neighbors and, of course, relatives to relatives.  And limited though it undoubtedly was, Collinsville had a library.  It was Alabama, not Afghanistan.

       In between the arduous physical labors of the farm, Daddy read any book he could get his hands on.  He told me which ones, but with the exception of Anthony Adverse, authors and titles have fled from memory.  With penury pushing from behind and books beckoning from beyond, his desire for a college education was unshakeable, a goal he pursued to its completion.  Numerous times he related to Bruce and me, as though trying to expunge regret, that while literature was his first and true love – no surprises there – he had decided he could not sensibly elect that as his major.  A sturdy, workaday profession was essential for securing himself and any family he might someday have safely outside the clutches of privation, and a degree in English, then as now, is not terribly marketable.  He had no interest in accounting, his eyesight was too poor for medicine, and he finally settled on law.

       Aunt Evelyn, my father’s only whole sibling, was also a voracious reader and another excellent candidate for higher education, but in her case illness intervened.  Diagnosed with tuberculosis when only in her teens, she was sent to live with relatives in Arizona, and the prolonged bed rest, standard therapy for the times, put her secondary schooling on hold.  By the time she received her high school diploma, she was twenty-two years of age, the Depression had begun, and her determination failed.

      But reading had already begun its unquenchable alchemy.  As a mature adult, her store of knowledge, sophisticated tastes, and polished, articulate expression surpass that of numerous individuals with far more formal education, and many have mistaken her for one born to money and privilege.  A peek at the reduced circumstances from which she actually started might well leave them slack-jawed.

       I make no claims for the profundity of what they read.  No doubt much of it was popular fiction cranked out by the Frank Leslies and Augusta Wilsons and Gene Stratton Porters of the day.  But even if they do not always occupy it themselves, newspapers and magazines and dime novels have blazed trails to higher intellectual ground for many who had no other guides, and so it was with Daddy and his family.

       In my more forgiving moments, I am even willing to make one or two conciliatory nods in the direction of my no-good grandfather, the family ogre.  This is not the place to catalog his faults, some of which were serious indeed, but rightly or wrongly I suspect that his problems were due in part to denial of intellect.  As would be easy to guess, he loved reading, particularly the study of words, but unlike Daddy’s and Aunt Evelyn’s, his love ended in anger and frustration.  As a young man, he was offered an opportunity, utterly priceless for one in his circumstances, to attend the University of North Carolina, but his fundamentalist, hardshell Baptist father, darkly suspicious of higher education and its atheistic, sacrilegious influence, said no. Unable to succeed in business or farming, neither of which he had the slightest aptitude for, he soon descended into failure, moral as well as monetary.  His chance for a career as a teacher, which I think would have suited him rather well, had come and gone, and from then on his life and the lives of those around him were the worse for it. 

       Few of these observations about the Cunninghams properly sank in until adulthood.  Because of the much closer, more intimate relationship Bruce and I had with the Holladays, their love of reading was a cinch to spot, even for a young child. 

       Granddaddy Holladay knew and loved poetry and would recite his favorite verses to me while I listened with interest.  He also was a great reader and memorizer of the Bible, and his kindly, generous, pervasive religious faith, far more temperate than the sullen, disapproving outlook of certain of the Cunninghams, went hand-in-hand with his reading. 

       Grandmother Holladay was postmistress for the Dunavant community and as such could conveniently subscribe to just about everything. Essentially she was a city woman, an urban dweller throughout her entire youth and early adulthood, and did not wed until age 30.  The prolonged rural existence she settled into after her marriage was probably not altogether agreeable to her, and reading helped relieve the stress of boredom and isolation.  The post office she was managed was a tiny, wooden firetrap literally across the road from their residence, two hundred feet at most, and from its door to theirs flowed a steady stream of print, sublime to the ridiculous: Book-of-the-Month, Recipe-of the-Week, magazines by the carload, all came, found a receptive environment, and stayed indefinitely. 

       One of my favorite activities was to curl up against the wood box and read.  Located to the left of the fireplace, this was a built-in chest equipped with a hinged lid that held firewood and was accessible from outside.  That it had long ceased to serve its intended function was attested by the masses of Readers Digests, Ladies Home Journals, and Good Housekeepings weighing upon the lid.  Arnold Schwarzenegger would have though twice before attempting to lift it. 

       I would sort through its offerings for hours and remain persuaded that my lifelong preference for non-fiction had its beginnings there.  My major in literature notwithstanding, I have never been much of a novel reader, at least not by the standards of the insatiables who consume an endless stream of westerns, mysteries, romances, adventures, science fiction and all other hues of the spectrum.  Jane Austen, P.G. Wodehouse and Donald Westlake are the only writers of fiction able to hold my attention past the preliminaries.

       In her autobiography Ruined by Reading, Lynne Schwartz relates how she has, in emergencies, been reduced to such lean fare as household appliance manuals.  I have been there.  Long before college, I nurtured the habit of going nowhere without something stuffed into purse or pocket, even if I thought there would be no opportunity to indulge.  It was an entrenched precautionary measure.  Whether waiting in line at the DMV or eating alone in a restaurant, my eyes are following the printed lines on something, if only jar labels or one of those house-for-sale booklets.  Rumor has it that once or twice I may have even picked up trash off the street.

       Down the ages so great a cloud of witnesses has sung praises to the word that even a brief examination of the entries for “books” or “reading” in something like Bartlett’s has power to make the apostate tremble while lifting the already-converted to ever higher levels of commitment.  In the face of such competition, fresh images are hard to come by, but in my own thinking, anatomical metaphors abound, for some reason.  Reading renews the brain, stiffens the spine, thickens the blood, comforts the heart and, sometimes, saves the soul.   Do I claim too much?  Maybe. Maybe not.

       To my enduring grief, my own children read minimally.  The blame lies partly with me and partly with circumstances beyond my control, but the reasons are not as important as the fact itself.   Hour after hour, year after year, they spend their leisure time watching television and playing electronic games, and the deplorable effects are all too plain.   They have diminished attention spans, do poorly in school, and when deprived of the activities mentioned become contentious and hyperactive.    In the face of my displeasure, they protest that assignments done at school are “enough”, that any more would be both unnecessary and unjust.

       For allowing such depravity to take root in my own household, I will surely spend, if not eternity, then at least a bloody long time in a place of punishment, which in my case means one with nothing to read.  And like many another frantic to expiate sins before it’s too late, I am looking for a way out.   If I bequeath my estate to a library somewhere, would that do it?   Perhaps, I decide, but which should it be?  Which recipient would please the gods of literacy most and persuade them to temper their wrath, if only a bit?  The one where I work now?  The one where I worked before?   Or everyone’s usual favorite and front-runner, the one in my home town?

       Shelby County, Alabama, to which Dunavant belongs, is well-heeled these days.    Affluent types have been relocating there from nearby Birmingham in jaw-dropping numbers, and their upscale neighborhoods and members-only golf links are springing up like mushrooms after a rainstorm.  The latest official numbers rank it as the fastest growing county with the highest per capita income in the state, and its libraries, along with everything else, are reaping the benefits.

       As for Collinsville, however, not much has changed.  Still small, poor and rural, its ship has yet to come in and, miracles barred, probably never will.   Its tiny library, which for years has been shunted from one make-do location to another, has variously occupied a storefront, a converted filling station and a room at the Presbyterian Church.  Recently a fundraising campaign for a proper building was begun, and once I became aware of this, the obvious began to whisper in my ear that my guilt offering, while clearly a case of too little too late, might well belong there.   It might serve not only as penance for my own parental failures but also as redress of an older neglect.   Finally I am saying to Daddy’s family what should have been uttered long before now:  “I am so grateful, so very grateful, that you read”. 

        I certainly never thanked them for anything when they were alive.