DBD the latest collection code...
...And how I manage to compare myself to John Stuart Mill
A couple months ago I mentioned that I was writing from a hotel room somewhere in a field in Arlington, Texas. Since then, we have onboarded a new collection and therefore introduced a new collection code - DBD. The steps towards getting a large collection so far afield are many, and they included not just going to the house and doing a preliminary look-see, doing some quick on-sight research, and writing up a consignment agreement. It also includes steps like going to see “Sheep Detectives” and stopping in at Mama Cuca’s down the road and opting to sit out on the patio even though the sky looks chalky and bloated. At one point an abrupt gust of wind picked up our bowl of salsa and hurled it skittering across the pavement. The road to DBD is splattered in medium chunky chip dip.
I also might have mentioned that during that initial trip we picked up enough high spot titles to fit into a carry-on suitcase and the morning of our departure I spent cataloging a couple of these. One was a first book edition of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism, which forced me to confront my intellectual shortcomings and also introduced me to Mill’s biography (Greek vocables at age three, Xenophon’s Anabasis at age eight). Mill was also known for his intense collaboration with his friend and later wife Harriet Taylor. Mostly what I came away with was that John Stuart Mill reminds me of me: my dad was also kind of a hard ass, and I too work closely with and adore my spouse. End of comparison, but still.
A quick aside about how I feel about Aaron: Casual conversation that just glancingly hits upon spouse Aaron elicits from me the kind of slightly jokey but still deadly serious verbal hyperbole that a parent might indulge in when talking about her child. No, but seriously. My husband is extraordinary. I won’t get into the details how, but I will relay one anecdote I heard from one of Aaron’s college buddies when he was trying to explain to me why he thinks Aaron has ESP. On a regular Tuesday night of drunken carousing around Kalamazoo, Michigan, nineteen-year-old Aaron and his buddies stumbled upon a ratty old pillow lying in the middle of the sidewalk. While everyone else stepped around it, Aaron picked it up, looked at it thoughtfully, and said, “I’m gonna need this.” Fifteen minutes later, still carousing from point A to point whatever, the group discovered a pal taking a snooze on a random lawn. Aaron bent over and gently tucked the pillow under his head.
The number of metaphorical dirty street pillows I’ve seen Aaron pick up and put to good use must be in the hundreds.
In any event, after putting together a cursory catalog description of Utilitarianism it was time to check out of our hotel, seven hours before our scheduled flight home. We packed up our things and moved our HQ to a cheery cafe in an Arlington strip mall where we spent the next few hours sipping and grazing and trying not to take up too much space. While Aaron diligently was going through the book contents of our suitcase I went outside to the patio to read (the sky was clear and the wind down) but instead spent the next hour eavesdropping on a twenty-year-old woman dressed in scrubs bemoaning to her pal about her gawdawful boyfriend who was, from what I gathered, a screwup (failing most of his classes) and a perennial jerk (wouldn’t go with her to the kitchen after she got scared watching a scary movie). At one point she seemed to have something of a breakthrough with the posit, “I just want to be told nice things.” I wanted to tell her that it sounded like this guy was never going to be the John Stuart Mill to her Mrs. Taylor and that she was better off braving singlehood than spending another second agonizing over him. Then I probably would have said, “Look at me, applying something I learned today to a real-world situation.” Instead, I was getting kind of hot, so I went back into the cafe to order another round of coffee and scones for me and my man.
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This trip to Dallas had been organized at the last minute and on the flight home Aaron and I were obliged to sit apart on the plane. I volunteered to take the middle seat a couple rows behind his aisle seat. My row mate to my left sitting in the aisle seat was a college professor with a Facebook addiction who also smelled kind of like ramps–I’m not complaining, I enjoy the odd ramp, but it is a weird earthy odor to encounter at a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet above sea level. To my right was a youngish guy who immediately threw on The Devil Wears Prada, most of which I ended up watching soundless over his shoulder while we sat on the tarmac and waited for the rain to stop. Apparently, Dallas planes don’t take off when there’s even light precipitation.
Midway through our flight we all three of us in row 21 seats DEF got up simultaneously to use the restroom, and I could see my DWP seatmate briefly nod to his wife, also sitting in a window seat a few rows back. I did what John Stuart Mill would have done and after I was done using the restroom I scampered up the aisle, waved at Aaron like a muppet for a couple of seconds, and then scampered back to my seat.
A few weeks later Aaron returned to Arlington by himself, packed the books into 300 banker’s boxes, took in the Spain Portugal World Cup game, loaded up a rental truck, and then, with his 89-year-old dad, drove DBD back to our auxiliary office/storage in Virginia.
DBD is heavy on literature, especially genre fiction. It is a lot like SCAR but better because the books are new to us and because there are no facsimile dust jackets or flimsy author signed bookplates. The first book I catalogued was a pretty, un-flakey copy of Mark Twain’s last book published in his lifetime, A Horse’s Tale. I must have underpriced it because it sold in nine days.