I’ve spent the last several days dismantling twenty-five years of my intellectual history, and I’ve been remarkably unemotional about the entire affair. Books about Christianity, Buddhism, ceremonial magic, consciousness, psychology, philosophy, and any number of attempts to explain what the hell is going on around here have been pulled from shelves, examined, and assigned new homes. Some will be sold. Some donated. Others will be kept because they still mean something to me, or because I’m reasonably certain I’ll never find another copy of a book about an obscure nineteenth-century occultist without surrendering a kidney. Four boxes have already been removed from the shelves. The goal is simple enough: make room for the art I’ve been creating, the objects we’ve collected, and the sculptures my daughter has recently begun making. Less space dedicated to the people we were. More room for the people we’re becoming. A perfectly reasonable project that was progressing quite nicely until a small blue truck came along and emotionally flattened me.
Little Blue Truck, to be precise.
There it was, sitting among the baby and toddler books on the lower shelves of our living room. A book I hadn’t thought about in ages. A book I once read so many times that I could probably still recite substantial portions of it under hypnosis. I picked it up, and suddenly I wasn’t standing in front of a bookshelf deciding what to do with an old children’s book. I was sitting with a little girl in my lap, making animal noises and turning pages while she existed in that extraordinary period of life when Dada reading a book was apparently among the greatest entertainment opportunities available in the known universe. And I started crying. Not because anything terrible had happened. Not because I was missing someone who was gone. But because the little girl who once fit so perfectly in my lap had grown into a bigger little girl who now reads books on her own, makes sculptures, develops increasingly elaborate opinions, and generally insists upon becoming an entire human being despite my complete lack of authorization.
I hadn’t expected parenthood to involve so much crying over things going exactly as they should.
What struck me was how effortlessly I’d been disposing of the physical evidence of my own previous selves. I could pick up a book that had once fundamentally altered my worldview, appreciate what it had meant to me, and put it in a box without a second thought. That version of me had served his purpose. His questions and discoveries had contributed to the person standing there today, and I didn’t particularly need six hundred pages of evidence that he’d once been fascinated by a specific spiritual tradition. But Jettie’s books were different. Those weren’t simply records of what she had once been interested in. They were records of moments we had inhabited together. I could comfortably let go of who I used to be because I knew that person had become me. But I discovered that I was considerably less enthusiastic about removing evidence of any version of my daughter I’d been fortunate enough to know.
Of course, the absurdity is that I desperately want her to grow up. Not immediately, mind you. I’m not suggesting we skip ahead to college applications and requests for money. But watching her become herself has been the greatest experience of my life. Every new ability, every independent thought, every ridiculous joke, every elaborate artistic creation is another reason to celebrate. The trouble is that childhood doesn’t announce when it’s finished with something. There was a final time I read Little Blue Truck with her curled up in my lap, and neither of us knew it was the final time. We didn’t mark the occasion. Nobody took a photograph. There was no ceremonial retirement of the book or a representative from the Department of Childhood Transitions to explain what was happening. We simply finished reading, went about our day, and eventually began doing other things. Somewhere along the way, one of the happiest little routines of my life quietly became a memory.
After recovering from my unexpected encounter with children’s literature, I decided that Jettie and I should sort through the collection together. Initially, I’d imagined dedicating about fifteen percent of the shelf to our old favorites. A reasonable allocation, I thought, arrived at through the highly scientific process of making up a percentage. We sat down with the books and began deciding what deserved to stay. Some were easy. Others required negotiations. We moved her newer books into place and made room for the library books that temporarily come home with us, since those books deserve somewhere to live before being returned to their actual owners. By the time we’d finished, approximately thirty percent of the original collection had survived. Apparently, the sentimental preservation budget had been doubled by a committee consisting of one eight-year-old and an emotionally compromised father.
But the most wonderful part happened when I told her why I’d been crying over Little Blue Truck.
Without missing a beat, Jettie started talking about other books we’d read together when she was younger. She remembered a particular voice I’d use for one character. She remembered a little routine involving a puppet and another book. She started recalling these tiny details of our time together that I hadn’t even realized were still living somewhere inside her. Things that had seemed so ordinary while we were doing them. Things I’d assumed were perhaps too small, too fleeting, or too far back in her childhood to have survived. And there she was, casually handing them back to me, one after another, like she’d been keeping them somewhere safe all along.
I cannot adequately describe what that felt like.
I’d been standing in front of those shelves grieving the disappearance of moments I thought existed only in my memory, only to discover that some of them had survived in hers. We hadn’t necessarily remembered the same details. We hadn’t experienced those moments from the same perspective. But we’d both carried pieces of them forward. I remembered holding her and reading the stories. She remembered the voices and the puppet and whatever strange nonsense Dada had decided was necessary to bring a particular character to life. Between the two of us, we were reconstructing little pieces of a world that no longer exists in quite the same form. A world I thought I had been preserving for both of us, only to discover that she’d been helping preserve it all along.
And just like that, several books that had been headed for a cardboard box were granted permanent residence in Dada’s possession. No appeals process. No further negotiations. The committee had spoken.
I’ve spent an enormous amount of my life thinking about impermanence. I’ve read the books. I’ve contemplated the philosophy. I’ve embraced the idea that everything changes, that nothing remains fixed, and that our attempts to cling to things are often the very source of our suffering. Wonderful stuff. Very enlightening. Highly recommend it. Unfortunately, none of that intellectual understanding prepared me for discovering that the consequences of impermanence occasionally arrive disguised as a children’s book about a pickup truck.
And perhaps that’s because there’s something fundamentally different about accepting change in the abstract and watching it happen to someone you love. I don’t want to stop Jettie from growing. I don’t want to preserve her childhood in amber or turn our home into a museum where every object must remain exactly where it was when she was three. Quite the opposite. The entire reason we’re reorganizing these shelves is to make room for who we’re becoming. I want her new books on the shelf. I want her sculptures displayed next to my paintings. I want the library books coming and going, new discoveries arriving, old interests fading, and our home continuing to reflect the people who actually live in it.
I just also want Little Blue Truck to stay.
Because while I can let go of the person I used to be with relatively little difficulty, there’s a part of me that wants to preserve every version of the little girl I’ve been fortunate enough to know. And perhaps an equally important part of that feeling is that I miss being the particular version of Dada who existed alongside her. The one who could make her laugh with a ridiculous voice, who could hold an entire afternoon inside a picture book, who had no idea that these small, repetitive moments were becoming some of the most precious memories of his life. The strange thing about watching your child grow up is that you get to celebrate everything they’re becoming while occasionally mourning something you wouldn’t dream of asking them to remain.
I know perfectly well that the memories don’t disappear when the books leave the house. I also know that keeping a book doesn’t bring back the afternoon when we read it. But there’s no philosophical requirement that every meaningful object must be surrendered simply because I’ve accepted the inevitability of change. Sometimes a book can stay on the shelf because it makes us happy. Sometimes it can stay because two people remember something wonderful about it. And sometimes it can stay because Dada is apparently willing to part with a collection of rare occult literature but cannot emotionally withstand the departure of a cartoon truck.
I consider this evidence of personal growth.
So the shelves are coming together. There are fewer books, more sculptures, and room for the new things that will inevitably become part of our family’s history. About thirty percent of Jettie’s old books remain, selected by the two people who shared so many afternoons reading them. And while I still get a little emotional thinking about the little girl who once sat in my lap, I’m overwhelmingly grateful for the bigger girl who sat beside me and reminded me of all the wonderful things we’d done together.
I began this project trying to make room for the people we’re becoming. I just hadn’t realized how much I’d enjoy discovering that some of the people we used to be were still here. And apparently, one of them drives a little blue truck.