Goodbye Uncle Wilbur
Saturday, March 01, 2008
Wilbur Plain
Born December 4, 1915. Died February 27, 2008
I posted this on Lord and Hearth as well, which is where I’d like to invite comments from the family.
For a boy, there is nothing more memorable than the kindness of a far-off, mysterious benefactor. That’s essentially the feeling that lingers most when I think of Uncle Wilbur. I can’t remember when the first box was placed in my hands. But I distinctly remember the whole event itself. I opened the small cardboard box (all stamps on, not the modern printed label from the USPS). I wondered frantically what was in there, and why I was the honored recipient. The flaps crackled back to reveal… books. A man I did not know had sent me books.
Now, let me tell you about books. These blocks of paper, with their covers, dust-jackets, print-flaws, typeset and illustrations, are my delight. I love any kind of book. To see me walk into a Borders or Books-A-Million is to see a kid in a candy store. The weight, perfectly cut pages, glossy smooth paperback spine or stiff hardbound cover and that ripple of the leaves under my finger give me comfort. Here is knowledge, challenge or entertainment in a perfect package. Even more sacred is the smell. All books have a defining smell. Old books are the best, of course, but there is no comparison to the scent of any books. Sometimes it feels as though I can tell the worthiness of a book just by checking its aromatic quality.
Uncle Wilbur sent me these boxes of books sporadically for several years. Every few months, a new one would arrive, and there was a flashing memory of the first. I came to live in a kind of perpetual impatience for the next installment to arrive.
There were two authors in the boxes. The first books were the Tom Swift Jr. series. Later on Louis L’Amour joined the stack. I don’t remember much about the books I read when I was young until these came into my hands. I think I had already read some Robert Louis Stevenson and other authors in the “Children’s Classics” series, and the Wizard of Oz. But Uncle Wilbur’s gifts are the first memorable books in my life. And I ate them up.
I would read them over and over. As the collections grew, I would categorize the books into various orders (alphabetically or by release order or by category). And I’d read them systematically, sometimes avoiding all other books but those from Uncle Wilbur.
If I was to state the one thing that stands out most in my life about books, Uncle Wilbur introduced me to them. I love books, the idea of books, and for me they came to life because of this man. I might have become an avid reader anyway. I might have loved books anyway. But Uncle Wilbur’s boxes impacted my life more than most anything else could, and may have been the greatest event in this boy’s childhood.
Just for statistical purposes, 127 books are listed by L’Amour on Wikipedia, and Uncle Wilbur sent me nearly all of them over the years. I have about 50 Tom Swift books, all of which he sent to me.
There could not have been two better themes to hand to a boy.
Tom Swift was an adventure, a gadget-filled romp through foreign countries, dangerous frontiers and even space and bizarre dimensions. I was a creative kid from the start, but my horizons were broadened by Tom Swift as I learned about electronic wizardry, all sorts of natural sciences and sheer ingenuity. Sci-fi that these books were, they brought a huge expansion to my thinking and ingenuity (much to the annoyance of my Mom, I’m sure).
Louis L’Amour was adventure, but introduced things I’d never read before in the poetry, the harshness of the Old West in both its people and its frontier. I fell in love with the wilderness and exploration. L’Amour wrote about the whole world, from Russia to the Solomon Islands, from Spanish California to the shores of England. I read my way from Gaul to Persia by way of Moscow with detours in Hong Kong and Canada. There was no place on earth that L’Amour missed, and I loved every bit of it. I learned about people and things, government and society from this man who had poetry for a soul and an honest, real mind.
Before I forget, there were two other things in those boxes. From time to time, business cards would come in the mail as well. Not as advertisement, but just because they looked neat. Uncle Wilbur started sending very unusual cards made from metal or plastic, or with objects attached to them (I still have one from a geological company with a sliver of iron pyrite glued on). When I expressed my interest, floods of cards started coming in. Uncle Wilbur sent business cards from all over the world (which intensified my impression that he had a very busy life). Most of them are still in my possession, somewhere in my collection of odd things. I can’t remember the count of cards in the collection, but I’d say there are probably at least a thousand, all unique.
And he sent me odd things. I’ve always been obsessed with little pieces of junk, and the books I got in the mail encouraged my acquisitive nature. Inside the books, just a few, once in a while, I would find the most intriguing items, such as 2-dollar bills, funny little coins, memos and cards. Mostly these were probably convenient bookmarks from previous owners (the books came from garage sales, flea markets and shops, I believe, for the most part, not from the local bookstore). So I would read a book, and half-way through a treasure would pop out. Ever since then, if a book passed my way which wasn’t brand-new-off-the-shelf, I would shuffle through it, checking for treasure. I still do that.
Imagine every book that passes through your hand going through an investigation process. Feel the cover and spine, looking over the thickness and colors and then open it and smell it. Read the opening line; riffle through the pages to see if there is a name written by a previous owner or if there’s a little treasure waiting to drop out. Check the date on the copyright and the edition. All the while your fingers are roving over the paper and the cover, taking in the book. Finally, the image of the first person you ever associated with books forms in your mind and you nod silent greeting to him. That’s what happens to me around books.
So what did I think of this mysterious person whose sole communication with me was through boxes of paper? I believe the inevitable happened. I to this day envision Uncle Wilbur as a personification of the books I’ve read. Whether this is accurate or not, here is what he looks like to me.
Uncle Wilbur was an inventor, with a keen and articulate mind. He knew about electronics and fabrication, and had travelled across the seas. He was well read in poetry and history, and could quote from Plutarch and Khalil Gibran in the same breath. Uncle Wilbur could have been a statesman, a woodsman or a sailor without hesitation. I attributed to him the positive qualities of the people in books, especially those he sent. Even later, after I grew past Tom Swift in my reading (I’ve never left Louis L’Amour), other authors, such as Heinlein, Asimov, Tolkien and Lewis, got parts of their characters infused into my vision of Uncle Wilbur
And I’ll never really know if that is what Uncle Wilbur really was. He’s gone now.
Two things I regret most about this uncommon relationship come to mind.
I’ll never get to thank him for what he did in my life. I wrote him letters of thanks for the gifts, of course, but I didn’t even realize the true impact of those boxes and their contents until much later. Some time ago I decided to dedicate my collection of books as The Wilbur Plain Memorial Library. My books, however many I have and however long I have them, will always be kept with thoughts of him.
I have no idea whether I’ll see him again. You see, Uncle Wilbur’s spiritual state is in question. The family does not know if he knew Christ and was on his way to heaven. To truly lose such a man in my life is a kind of tight pressure in my chest, and I know it won’t be relieved until I’m on my way home, whether he made it or not. There’s no sadness in Heaven, but I wonder if there will be that moment, right ahead of departure, when we’ll know who made it, and I suspect it’ll be a moment of either ecstatic joy or crushing shadows for each of us.
Let me close this story with one moral. Don’t let your loved ones slip from your fingers. Don’t let them go without knowing you’ve shown Christ to them.
Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus!