It’s odd how de-hoarding activities can sometimes lead to acquisitional activities. I spend a lot of time flinging but sometimes I encounter something that makes me stop in mid-fling and start tooling around on eBay or wherever. Bakelite utensils with red handles anyone? How ’bout vintage Sunset magazine cookbooks? The Golden Book encyclopedia set that we bought at the Red Owl one-book-a-week when I was a kid? Hey, I *read* that encyclopedia! Daguerreotype? Something about printing? Yes, I used to read encyclopedias and I got well past the Ds… Yes, this reverse flinging thing is dangereuse. KW the spendthrift in full-tilt boogie action!

So, a while back, I was doing a little light flinging and thinking about a launching a little prodject and I don’t exactly know how it happened but The Mighty Soo popped into my head straight out of the blue. I read The Mighty Soo when I was about nine or 10. I had been an independent reader for a few years by then but I clearly remember mis-pronouncing (in my head) colonel (like it looks) and Chicago like “Chick-a-go” with an accent on the “Chick”. I’m not sure what the heck I did with Etienne Brulé. (BTW, maybe some day we can get My Dear Uncle Harry to tell his *hilarious* story about mispronouncing words while reading when he was a kid. I cannot repeat it. I would mangle it. Let’s just say it involves the word “bastard”.) Anyway, I thought something like, “Hmmm, I *think* that would be an appropriate book to have in the moomincabin library but I don’t *think* I ever *owned* the book. I *think* it was a library book. Of course, I went out and ordered it on eBay and this gorgeous book came in the mail today, very carefully wrapped up.

I never thought of the moomincabin as having an actual library. We are all readers but when I was a kid we had very little space, not to mention money. We did make regular trips to the library and I spent many a cold, windy afternoon hanging out on the top bunk reading. Or maybe the bottom bunk. The Engineer and I traded off fairly regularly. I don’t even remember arguing about that very much. The Comm and The Engineer might remember it differently — us kids certainly argued about a lot of stuff! What *I* remember is that the top and bottom bunks each had their own charms and advantages and just about the time one of us would be tired of the top bunk, the other would be tired of the bottom bunk and we’d switch.

Nowadays? Hmmm… We kind of have a library. There are a bunch of vintage novels that belonged to Grandberry (and maybe other relatives too). Horatio Hornblower and stuff. A sizeable collection of cookbooks, including a bunch from Grandma’s Other House, The Real House, Where She Lives Some of the Days. Nature books, some paperback novels (on a crappy, rickety set of shelves) and I fergit what else. Oh, Cully Gage’s yooper humor books. I was kind of over those after book 1 but The Engineer loved them and I bet we probably own all of them and I still remember my brother giggling as he read the first book. I’m guessing he probably got over them too but I choose to remember his laughter. Now we will have Color Me Beautiful and The Mighty Soo. And if we already do have The Mighty Soo (the GG seems to think so but I’m pretty sure we don’t), we will have two copies. As the GG (an identical twin) likes to say, “More is better”. I think that’s true, at least in this case.

Of course, being meeeee, every time I think about The Mighty Soo, that old Mighty Quinn song comes to mind. So sorry that the link has a [frickin’] ad. What has happened to YouTube? Oh, don’t tell me…

Hey, the band Manfred Mann is still alive and kicking! You know you want to click!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 24th, 2013 at 6:52 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.