Thread by @AoDespair

It just occurred to me to tell the consummate story of the family wrought by Bernard and Dorothy Simon, the great continuing saga involving the three-volume hardback set entitled "The Secret Diaries of Harold Ickes" Bear with me:

https://twitter.com/AoDespair/status/1363219349390131201

Once upon a time, in a hamlet called Silver Spring, my parents occupied a rancher adorned with three full walls of built-in book shelving as well as additional book shelves scattered throughout the kid's rooms. Nonetheless, my father's cup runneth over. Understand...

...that this was a man for whom a trade paperback was an affront to literacy, while a pocket paperback was suitable only for overseas guidebooks and the sort of genre fiction that is to be left to the tides at the beach. Everything else, hardback...

...and as my father knew that he should aspire to the classics, we had some good stuff in library editions, and also, the kind of shit that writers know they are supposed to read but never do. Ivanhoe was bad enough, but my father had ornate versions of every other Walter Scott..

...doorstop staring down at us, because, one day, you know, we were all going to read Waverly and Kenilworth, because, yeah, this was a family that thrived on romanticism. But the greater share of the shelves were devoted to non-fiction: history, government, journalism...

...and my father was a completist sucker for the letters-and-papers-of-who-fucking-ever. Not just FDR's complete letters or the correspondence of Adlai Stevenson, but yup, the three-volume secret diaries of Franklin Roosevelt's Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes...

Now then, no family battle was better joined than when my mother, awash in hardbacks she would never read and unable to find something on the shelf like a modern novel she might actually devour would press my father to cull his library...

...The rhetoric in such fights was, to be brief, hilarious. And one night it came down to my mother, insisting to my father that even if he had read three large volumes of Harold Ickes' deepest thoughts on the New Deal, he was never, ever going to re-read that shit....

...and dammit, she was not going to quit until those doorstops were residing elsewhere in the world. In that fight, my mother was joined by my older brother, who began mocking the utility of the Ickes diaries until my father seemingly conceded defeat...

...but instead, quietly, on the next visit to my brother's house, my father waited until everyone was occupied with other things, then went into the car trunk and snuck the Ickes diaries into his son's house, hiding them in plain sight on the book shelves there....

...Nothing was said, but months later, when my brother had discovered the implanted tomes, he wordlessly brought them back to my father's house and stuck them on a high shelf. Nothing said then either. Months later, the books migrated to my brother, and then, when...

...my guard was down, the Ickes diaries were suddenly on my shelves in Baltimore. Again, nothing was ever said by any of us. The diaries went back to my father's house, then to my brother, then to my father, then back to me. This went on for years. At the time of my father's...

...death, the books were in the possession of my brother, and for obvious reasons, the Great Game lost some of its charm for a while. After my mother's death in September, however, when certain furnishings and mementos were being distributed around the country...

...my brother and I conspired to transmit the three volumes by including them in a container of stuff that was shipped by my nephew, Jason, in Los Angeles. Also in that container: A couple of my mother's mid-century modern chairs that my son, who had just moved to Los Angeles...

...had long admired. My brother wondered whether we should instruct his son, Jason, to keep the game going by dumping the Ickes volume on my son. But there was no need for us to worry it; the family tradition will out. Jason stuffed the books under the chair cushions...

...before they were delivered a couple miles away in Silver Lake. And to this moment, the Ickes diaries -- perhaps the most fundamental talisman of life in the Simon family -- reside with my son, Ethan. I do not know if he is reading the wonderings of Harold Ickes; I only know...

...that he yearns to send them east, wordlessly, and in such a way that the target remains unawares for weeks or months. The long journey of the diaries is far from over and Bernard Simon is remembered every time one of us looks at a shelf and mutters, what-the-fuck-they're-back.

I have no doubt that my great grandchildren will be playing this game. I have every doubt that they may not know exactly why, but such is tradition.