Emily and Madeline

We have two wonderful photos in our stairwell, framed and enlarged from their original 4×6 size. I’ve been looking for those small originals for a long time, and my sister just sent me a copy of her girls, Emily and Madeline, so that is one out of two! The other one is my nephew Edward and his sister, Elaine. My guess is that these photos are buried in documents somewhere in my dad’s office, or mom gave them away as she was doing that a few years before she passed away, stacks of photos, gone. But, if this photo can resurface, the other one can, too.

An Old Book About Nimitz

I like all kinds of books, new ones, old ones, deluxe leather-bound, guilded-paged editions, beat-up paperbacks, clean-cut pages or deckle-edged pages. I have a soft spot for beat-up books even though they are inanimate objects.

In this case, there are grease or oil stains on the cover and pages and, putting on my detective hat, this probably means that some mechanic was reading this at some point. Because the book was published in the 1970s, I would guess that maybe someone who was actually in the war fixing things, who would be interested in Nimitz enough to read about him. Most people couldn’t care less about Nimitz regardless as to whether they should. Apparently he was important enough to name the current class of aircraft carriers after, so, maybe he was a big deal.

There were other books at the thrift where I bought this that were also beat-up quite a bit, complete with spider-webs and caked-on dust on top of the books (that happens a lot, where someone passes away and the family had to grab all of the ‘worthless’ books and haul them to the thrift.)

So, that’s my guess. I’ll never know. But I’m reading it now with the idea that a former vet read it before me and did so for a reason.