Twice annually during my childhood, in spring and autumn, my mother would burn through gasoline and her afternoons on trips from Burlington to the Planned Parenthood Book Sale at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines. From elementary school onward, I would anticipate these adventures with a near-hysterical intensity, such that come the morning of, it took all my mother’s might to still her giddy pilgrim.
Promotional materials proudly, and to my knowledge correctly, proclaimed the sale the largest of its kind in the Midwest. It certainly looked the part: at each sale, the high ceilings and iron girdworks of the fairgrounds’ 4-H Building became resplendent with seemingly endless card-table arcades of donated books on every topic imaginable, the sale of which went to benefit Planned Parenthood of Iowa’s sex education programs.
It was apt, too, that the sale supported sex education efforts, in light of the sex ed regimen I received à la carte from book sale finds during high school, and not always from the expected quarters. Yes, there was Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, a novel of incarcerated gay love that wove together (ba-dum-tss) my burgeoning sense of self with my admiration for political dissidents and my loathing of prisons.
But there was also a Penguin copy of The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself, whose ecstatic episodes of divine encounter still speak to me about the embodied life as intensely as anything else I’ve read. Then came Elizabeth Bishop. And Herman Melville. (I have a whale tattoo to prove that one.) I was too promiscuous a bibliophile, and the books were too cheap, for me to render a thorough catalog.
The Planned Parenthood Book Sale was one steady source of books for childhood me, bestowed by my mother. The ritual of the trip brought her and me closer. This is important to point out, because its namesake organization is so often under attack for “corroding family values”: that is, for protecting women’s right to bodily autonomy. The book sale made our family life better.
It even made Christmas brighter. At the fall sale, my mother and I would sneakily purchase gift books to be given in two months’ time. Without the vast array of choices presented by the sale, book-giving would have proved much harder. If only the Republicans knew that when they attack Planned Parenthood, they are themselves waging the War on Christmas!
Looking back over the years, one Christmas gift acquired at the book sale sticks out to me. That year, I had the clever idea of commemorating my mother’s recent engagement with a bilingual copy of Pablo Neruda’s much beloved Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair. My mother, after all, is a person of powerful feelings, and these were lyrics of immortal passion. Plus the book is short, so giving it to someone doesn’t feel like assigning homework: such was my logic.
I had neglected to consider the extent to which the immortal passion I have just mentioned is made manifest through an eroticism fit to startle Madonna. Amid my mother’s post-unwrapping lather of demonstrative gratitude, she opened to the slender volume’s opening poem (entitled, I am afraid, “Body of a Woman”) and read aloud its translated opening stanza: “Body of a woman, white hills, white thighs, / you look like a world, lying in surrender. / My rough peasant’s body digs in you…”
Enough! The conscience balks at the act of transcription. Only staunch homosexuality, long ago disclosed (and lovingly accepted by the people who count), spared me, that dark Christmas day, from the lasting stain of insinuated Oedipality.
On the other hand, when I look at the stack of books my mother has gifted me, I think not of whatever thoughts they contain but of the thought, loving and earnest, that went into selecting them. This in turn makes me think of the uncounted hours my mother spent in the robin’s-egg rocking chair in the corner of my childhood bedroom, reading to me books whose pictures shrank with time and whose word counts slowly mounted. And it makes me think of the 4-H Building, awash in books.
After more than six decades, the Planned Parenthood Book Sale was abruptly shuttered in October 2023, due to rising event costs and an attempt by the city of Des Moines to acquire the event’s book storage warehouse. My mother told me this news when I was home for Christmas — as it happens, during the annual unwrapping. Thanks to the heroic efforts of the Young Women’s Resource Center in Des Moines, the sale is now in the process of being restored. But at the time, surrounded by Christmas debris, it seemed possible that the sale was lost for good — confined to the annals of childhood memory.
It was not a dramatic moment, and conversation swiftly moved on. I was nevertheless left lost in thought — and in gratitude — as I picked up my next compact, rectangular and slightly bendy package.
