Annotated List of Things Found While Packing, Part 2

Copyright registration card from the Library of Congress. 

• My grandfather, who left school at 13 to work at the tar plant to support his eight siblings and then worked shift work at the steel plant until he retired, who taught himself basic electronics and economics from books but refused to read fiction on the grounds that it was “all made up,” who did not watch feature films (“foolishness”) or go to restaurants (“waste of money”) or travel for pleasure (“for the birds”), whose idea of a day off was to plant carrots, fix the lawn-mower and then take down the storm windows, took the trouble in 1935 to write to the Library of Congress to copyright a song he had written with a friend. He played the French horn, but according to the card, he wrote the lyrics to “Dove of Love.” He would have been 18.