Don's Bookshelf

Today is Grandpa Ringler's birthday. He would have been 89 years old.

While I rest in San Marcos, I am staying in his bedroom. I stay up late at night taking in everything, trying to absorb the entire room at once. So many things strike me that I would have asked about. I wonder who William Cole was; Grandpa has his Iowa farm title on the wall, dated 1820.

As I glance from one book to the next on his bookshelf, I think about how rewarding it was to hear him to explain each of these works to me. He always knew their historical significance, the author's background, the motifs, everything. He knew the most obscure facts about the most obscure works. Being a writer himself, he understood writers and the way that each one tried to present his or her ideas.

I thought of him, the young Marine, while I was at Camp Pendleton. I talked with Grandma Ringler about how they became engaged shortly before he was sent off for what would have been his second tour in the Pacific had the Japanese not surrendered. I never knew that he had been a Marine even before the war had begun; there is a lot I didn't know.

In the bathroom his cane still hangs on the towel rack as if he will come back for it after washing his hands. I can sense his presence when I am around all of his artifacts, the pieces of history he held on to and kept alive. I will always have his picture on my desk and his voice in my heart, to immortalize him in the same way he immortalized his idols. Happy Birthday, Grandpa.




"Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past."
-"Ulysses" by James Joyce