Pocket Books

Lately I find I can only read mysteries and even then only mysteries of a certain type.  Most often they are British and ten or more years old.  Sometimes Swedish ones as well.  My sister has a few volumes of the right type that she lends to me.  This weekend she brought me a Dalziel and Pascoe by Reginald Hill from 1999.  Just the thing.

Until I got to thinking.  I know that my sister has many books that belonged to our mother.  I know that she even has the book that my mother took to the hospital almost ten years ago to read during her convalescence from surgery.  I know that my mother never read in the hospital as complication upon complication ended with her death.  Could this be the book she'd put in a bag with her reading glasses?  I think I can see a book on the table beside the hospital bed.  Her suitcase stayed or was put back into the trunk of my father's car along with her wheelchair.  By the fifth day after her surgery the horror was such that she begged my father to fetch her wheelchair and take her home.

My mother kept lists of the mysteries she'd read and ones she'd read about in the drawer of the table beside her chair.  Her chair was in the living room of the condo where my parents had moved from the home where I grew up.  The chair she seldom left.  The condo she seldom left.  By the time she went into hospital my mother had been virtually house-bound for many many years.  She used her walker to get around, sometimes sitting on the seat and pushing herself crab-like backwards down the hall.  She received a specially fitted wheelchair about a week before the hospital.

I have a few of the lists my mother left behind.  My sister and I knew to look in that special drawer.  Along with coasters there were nail scissors.  A loonie or two to reimburse my sister when she dropped by with a chocolate bar or other sweet.  Tiny newspapers cuttings.  And spiral note pads for her lists.  In one were her calculations working out the then current ages of her five children.  Shopping lists though she never went to stores.  Medications.  "Dilaudid 12 mg."  Lists of mysteries to read.

I remember my mother reading from my earliest childhood.  At that time she'd have smokes and a "quick" coffee close by.  She twirled her hair as she read.  By the time she was in the condo she needed reading glasses and both my parents had stopped smoking.  But still she read a lot.  She read the daily papers and listened to the news on the radio beside her chair.  She preferred paperback to hardcover.  She always called them pocket books.