Read Online Home by Another Way by Robert Benson - Free Book Online
Authors: Robert Benson
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like to be prepared for everythingfrom the ancient mystics to Robert Parker’s Spenser novels to Graham Greene.
Over the years we have stopped hauling most everything but the books when we go on vacation, although I still carry some home stuff. It is my mother’s fault.
My mother is a self-proclaimed nester.
Whenever the family would travel as I was growing up, she would always pack some bits and pieces of home into everyone’s luggage. We had enough siblings at our house that a trip involved three hotel rooms, if not more, and my mother’s first hour or so upon arriving would find her working her way from room to room, putting away clothes and sorting out stuff and setting up the bits and pieces so it would feel like home while we were away from home.
She would put a candle or two in each of the rooms, and then she would add a favorite photograph or two as well. If you were in one of the kids’ rooms, then youwould have a photograph of our folks. The favorite one was a photo from their wedding. If you went into Mom and Dad’s room, there was a photo of me playing basketball and one of my brother with his guitar and one of my sister with one of the series of star-crossed cats that wandered into our family and did not live for very long. And a photo of my two little brothers who were so much younger than I that I still think of them as having grown up in a different family.
A favorite blanket was thrown in for napping and then a book or two and a game. There was always a puzzle, purchased for the trip, a group puzzle that we would all work on a bit here and there. She would bring vases, and one of us would be sent off down the halls to look for flowers. We usually scarfed them from the lobby when the bellmen were not looking. Then she would put them around on the Formica-topped desks and bathroom countertops. We always had fresh flowers at home, from my mother’s gardens, and Mother thought if you had some fresh flowers in your room,then you would feel like you were still sleeping in the great house we all called the homeplace. More than once I have helped her to rearrange the furniture in some Holiday Inn so it was more homey in some way.
I grew up thinking this was the way you were supposed to travel. I still think she is right, especially if you are going away on business. The people who have hired you to be away with them, speaking or retreating or conferencing with them for a few days or weeks, cannot always be trusted to remember you really do not want to be away from home in the first place. One of my friends who travels and speaks a great deal more than I do says people think they pay her to speak. “I would listen to myself talk for free,” she says. “What they are really paying me for is to be away from home.”
Home is where you find it, people say. My mother taught me that, if you have to, sometimes you can find it in your suitcase.
We are book people, Sara and I. Between us, we have been writing them and selling them and editing them and reading them and representing them for most of our adult lives. We have been collecting them too.
It would be embarrassing for me to say how many books we own. I am not sure I can tell you how many books we own. I can tell you that based on my rough measurements—measuring the shelves in our house and in my studio and the boxes we have in storage—that if you were to line them up side by side the way that you do on a bookshelf, we have about two hundred yards of books. If Barry Bonds stood at one end and tried to hit a ball to the other end, he could hit two home runs into McCovey Cove before he would get to the end of our line of books.
We had some shelves built into the walls of our dining room not too long ago, and we filled the shelves from floor to ceiling with books. It is like eating dinner in a library. We brought two dozen boxes of books from storage to fill the shelves. We told ourselves for months we could get rid of a fair amount of them as we
Over the years we have stopped hauling most everything but the books when we go on vacation, although I still carry some home stuff. It is my mother’s fault.
My mother is a self-proclaimed nester.
Whenever the family would travel as I was growing up, she would always pack some bits and pieces of home into everyone’s luggage. We had enough siblings at our house that a trip involved three hotel rooms, if not more, and my mother’s first hour or so upon arriving would find her working her way from room to room, putting away clothes and sorting out stuff and setting up the bits and pieces so it would feel like home while we were away from home.
She would put a candle or two in each of the rooms, and then she would add a favorite photograph or two as well. If you were in one of the kids’ rooms, then youwould have a photograph of our folks. The favorite one was a photo from their wedding. If you went into Mom and Dad’s room, there was a photo of me playing basketball and one of my brother with his guitar and one of my sister with one of the series of star-crossed cats that wandered into our family and did not live for very long. And a photo of my two little brothers who were so much younger than I that I still think of them as having grown up in a different family.
A favorite blanket was thrown in for napping and then a book or two and a game. There was always a puzzle, purchased for the trip, a group puzzle that we would all work on a bit here and there. She would bring vases, and one of us would be sent off down the halls to look for flowers. We usually scarfed them from the lobby when the bellmen were not looking. Then she would put them around on the Formica-topped desks and bathroom countertops. We always had fresh flowers at home, from my mother’s gardens, and Mother thought if you had some fresh flowers in your room,then you would feel like you were still sleeping in the great house we all called the homeplace. More than once I have helped her to rearrange the furniture in some Holiday Inn so it was more homey in some way.
I grew up thinking this was the way you were supposed to travel. I still think she is right, especially if you are going away on business. The people who have hired you to be away with them, speaking or retreating or conferencing with them for a few days or weeks, cannot always be trusted to remember you really do not want to be away from home in the first place. One of my friends who travels and speaks a great deal more than I do says people think they pay her to speak. “I would listen to myself talk for free,” she says. “What they are really paying me for is to be away from home.”
Home is where you find it, people say. My mother taught me that, if you have to, sometimes you can find it in your suitcase.
We are book people, Sara and I. Between us, we have been writing them and selling them and editing them and reading them and representing them for most of our adult lives. We have been collecting them too.
It would be embarrassing for me to say how many books we own. I am not sure I can tell you how many books we own. I can tell you that based on my rough measurements—measuring the shelves in our house and in my studio and the boxes we have in storage—that if you were to line them up side by side the way that you do on a bookshelf, we have about two hundred yards of books. If Barry Bonds stood at one end and tried to hit a ball to the other end, he could hit two home runs into McCovey Cove before he would get to the end of our line of books.
We had some shelves built into the walls of our dining room not too long ago, and we filled the shelves from floor to ceiling with books. It is like eating dinner in a library. We brought two dozen boxes of books from storage to fill the shelves. We told ourselves for months we could get rid of a fair amount of them as we
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