The Bookshelves   
   The summer of 1964, my father flew my mother, myself, and my sister up to the   
   Teterboro Airport from our home in Georgia.  From there, we rented a car and   
   drove in to Flushing to his parents' house on Smart Street.   
      
   After visiting for a while, my father headed out to the airport to fly the   
   small company plane back home.  He had to get back to work and wouldn't be   
   able to go with us even once to the World's Fair in Flushing Meadows.   
      
   But it was on that warm New York day that I walked into my grandparents' house   
   for the first time, the one they'd lived in since before my father was born.    
   Why we'd never visited them before, I don't know.  They always came down south   
   to visit us.  It was a typical two story city house with small dark rooms,   
   Persian runners and a clutter of antique furniture and knickknacks.   
      
   I'd always loved antiques. Ever since I was a small child I'd been drawn to   
   them.  But this trait did not run in the family at all, not from either of my   
   parents and only by parsimony from my grandparents. The reason their house was   
   filled with antiques was that they never bought furniture (or anything else)   
   unless they had to.  So their house was filled with what had come from their   
   families, from the early days of their marriage, from who knows where.  And I   
   spent that family visit - when we weren't at the World's Fair - meeting each   
   and every antique item like a new friend.   
      
   And then there were the bookshelves. They were along a wall in the small,   
   crowded living room of my grandparents' little house.  I fell in love with   
   them at first sight.  They were beautifully made, everything fit well, the   
   glass panels that lifted up and slid back into the top of the shelf, each   
   shelf a unit unto itself that stacked onto the next.  They were of a dark warm   
   wood, walnut perhaps.  What was in them, I do not remember.  I just loved   
   them.  And I kept on admiring them all through that long ago visit, lingering   
   in front of them to study their lines.   
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   --- BBBS/Li6 v4.10 Dada-2   
    * Origin: Prism bbs (1:261/38)