By 
Just as I can't imagine a life without books, I can't imagine life without my bookcase. Between us, my daughter and I have five bookcases in a two-bedroom home, but there's only one that I have paid — and will pay — good money to take with me wherever I go. The bookcase Dad built.
In my 20s, I moved out-of-state to teach in a small town in Idaho, sharing an apartment with another new teacher. Designed for students attending the local college, the apartment was partially furnished with a couch, chairs and a dining room set, but no bookcase. I had my bedroom furniture shipped from my family home, but my bookshelves there were built into the wall.
Dad's solution was to design a new bookcase for me that he and Mom could carry to Idaho in their camper.
My dad liked to build big, and he liked to build sturdy. Using plain pine boards, he constructed a six-shelved bookcase (seven if you use the top) that stood nearly six feet high and three and a half feet wide. Add a wooden back to the whole thing, and my new bookcase weighed a ton.
When I returned to California a few years later, I shipped the bookcase home with the rest of my furniture. It moved with me from apartment to apartment, and job to job. Eventually, I purchased a condo, turning the smaller bedroom into an office. There, the bookcase took pride of place, tucked between a filing cabinet and my desk. All was well until the Northridge earthquake.
The quake struck with the speed and roar of a freight train at 4:30 am. Electricity was one of the first casualties; I lay bouncing on my bed in a pitch black room, listening to the collapse of the world around me as walls shifted and glass exploded.
Once it ended, I found shoes and my purse, and pulled the terrified cats from beneath the bed while the floor heaved against me in aftershocks. The front door had jammed shut so I exited by way of the shattered patio doors and handed the cat carriers over the fence to neighbors, before climbing over myself. I left everything else behind.
My parents drove down the next day to help me retrieve whatever valuables I could. Dad forced open the front door, and we walked into a devastation of broken glass and broken pipes, toppled furniture, and TVs and computer flung to the floor. My home was less than a mile from the epicenter.
But the bookcase still stood. Dad had built deeper, taller shelves for the base. None of the lower books fell out, and their weight helped serve as an anchor. However, the force brought to bear on the bookcase was evident from a movie ticket stub jammed tight into a join between the upper and lower shelves. The vertical thrust of the earthquake pulled shelves apart on each bounce. When the ticket slid into the join, the wood clamped tight around it when the jolting stopped.
I moved again, the bookcase carrying the stub as a tangible reminder of the earthquake's power. It has carried other milestones through the years: my changing tastes in books, my daughter's grade school ceramics, souvenirs from family vacations, shells from a quiet beach in Japan.
We stack library books on the wider ledge, drop the mailbox key in a small dish, and prop bills to pay and appointments to remember behind a wooden owl and an old pottery fisherman that once stood sentinel in my dad's library. Christmas cards line the shelves in December, and a few favorites get added to the "keeper" pile below in January.
Dad built the bookcase to last a lifetime, and I hope it will continue to journey with me throughout mine.
