Dewey Decimal Gallagher

This past summer Betty and I started a “Little Free Library” in our backyard. You’ve seen them around town. There must be a dozen of them in the greater Bethlehem area, and there are now more than 200,000 nationally. In fact, our identification number is 207242.

Most of these small libraries are fairly simple affairs, the miniature library “building” mounted on a pole, perhaps surrounded by flowers or some pleasant decoration. The libraries might contain two dozen books, meant to be freely taken by passersby on foot or in cars, the goal being to foster and further a beneficial and enjoyable love of reading.

Now our library is a bit different. At its feet are a dozen or so small cardboard boxes also containing books – Ha! nothing fancy, you’ll recognize take out boxes from Pottsie’s Hot Dogs! – books broken down into such categories as Art, Best Sellers, Humor, Black Literature, the Epstein Scandal, and Bethlehem and Vicinity.

Now that’s unusual among the Little Free Library clan, and my sudden recognition of the difference and the meaning of that difference occasioned my latest senior moment with a bang. Listen up.

I have always worn colorful, incisive nicknames. For instance, among many other examples I could give, I was tagged “Father Ed” by a Mother Superior who early discerned a spiritual quality in me. I was dubbed “the Spook” by my college roommate for mysteriously disappearing from raucous parties that made me uncomfortable, preferring instead to haunt the library stacks and party with classic authors.

In my teaching work, students labeled me “Conan the Grammarian” for my violent war against their minor editing errors, while, ironically, I was “Edward Scholarhands” to the Instructional Technology professionals for my ineptitude with even minor operations in the new world of computers. I knew nine uses of the comma but often couldn’t figure out how to do simple editing of a Word file. Similarly, my hands a hammer or a screwdriver never fit, my family knew.

To my family, though, I was also “Mr. Rand McNally” – Rand McNally being our country’s premier mapmaker. As a child, I would play with globes and ask for them as gifts. I’m an explorer, a wanderer at heart. I spent a teaching career going into new fields and mapping them for others to follow. And in the old days before GPS, I was always navigator as well as captain on family outings, and even in the early GPS era I would argue with and even disobey the fleshless orders. I was sure I knew better.

These nicknames all spoke to an essential truth about me. They were “right on.”

At age 85, I thought I was done with the nickname generating business. But then, seeing the layout of our little free library, a waggish friend instantly christened me “Dewey Decimal,” the name of the system for organizing the contents of a library. For instance, among the thousands of volumes in the Lehigh University Library, the unique Dewey Decimal locator number for famous Bethlehem writer Stephen Vincent Benet is 818.5 B465.

Dewey Decimal Gallagher, yeah. “D.D.” for short. Another accurate nickname. For one of the things I eagerly do or energetically struggle to do in this life is bring order.

I was stunned. Just imagine -- a revelatory, insightful nickname at my advanced age that didn’t relate to my bowel or urinary condition! I must admit, “Dewey Decimal” speaks truth about my life. Without exaggeration, it reveals the core of my identity.

I experienced the shock of recognition. The backyard library is a Rorschach. It represents an essential truth of my character. My entire approach to life in my 85 years has been the attempt to organize my life and the life around me. Now, having this library of scores of books, I instinctively classified them into small units for the benefit of our patrons.

My friend’s “Dewey Decimal” nickname brilliantly captures an essential truth about me, about my entire life, that is, the attempt to turn chaos into order, to find a way to manage the complexity of my world, to give indiscriminate mass human scale, to get the wilderness of reality under thumb. This backyard library is my life in miniature, in microcosm.

Where there’s mess, others in my personal and professional orbit have called on me to clean it up. It’s what I do. In fact, I volunteer to do it. Often without thinking. Where there is complexity, I naturally seek simplicity. Where obfuscation, clarity. That backyard library is the way it is, because of what I am.

D. D. Gallagher, that’s the me inside the me.