First time visiting? Start with the Prologue, then follow
the Chapters in the Archives list on the right sidebar, going from oldest to
newest.
For someone who anticipates epiphany with each author newly
encountered, nothing matches the sun-flare of excitement as when first
discovering language that transports, when just the right, the ideal,
combination of words and letters and pauses and starts combine to make me feel,
just for a few seconds, that nothing else I’ve ever read—or ever will read—can touch
me in quite this particular way. On the rare occasions when this happens it’s
not because the words are perfect or the phrases unique, but that they
unfailingly cooperate with me,
triggering memory and feeling in sudden, energetic bursts. Such bursts are
passing strange, as Othello might say, both rare and teasingly diaphanous, but
when it happens it feels like, for just that one moment, I am alone with
beauty in the universe.
It happened to me just this morning, emerging from the
opening of an otherwise non-descript story buried in a set of such stories by
Pulitzer winner Jean Stafford: “One of the great hardships of my childhood,”
she writes, “—and there were many, as many, I suppose, as have every plagued a
living creature—was that I could never find a decent place to read.”
With these few words Stafford—as I do—elevates the act of
reading to sepulchral heights, a need, a pain too often unassuaged, a
preference few around me understand.
These words do not describe me, yet they are me. My childhood shared no such hardships, and locating reading’s
Eden was never terribly difficult. I had my own room, and headphones. I
had a quiet backyard, and school stairwells. Anywhere and everywhere served as
a reading room when I wanted.
Yet these 34 words ignite.
Reading has always been for me just as it is for Stafford’s
young narrator: important, prioritized, invaluable. And so I’m now living in a
memory, intensely strong, that echoes Stafford’s fiction, a memory that
reminds, viscerally, that reading is everything….
*****
Every child has a sad-sacked side, a reason for feeling that
luck never leans leeward. Even, I’m sure, the tough guy, the wisecracker, the
quarterback, have moments when they feel nothing ever goes quite right. For me, that feeling came with paired wheels.
Every bike I’ve ever had, save one, was stolen. (The one that
didn’t suffered Goodyear's nasty kiss when I inadvertently left it in the
driveway and my mother, on a dusky late autumn evening, pulled into said
driveway rather quickly, resulting in metal remains so warped that I literally threw
the bike into a dumpster.)
First stolen was a plain-vanilla bike, the kind with foot
brakes and a barely adjustable seat. This was followed by my first sting-ray
(a 3-speed Huffy given for Christmas by a father who meant well but had no idea
that Huffy’s weren’t at all cool). My first ten-speed (the highest number of speeds
you could get back then), a brown Schwinn Varsity, disappeared from the bike
rack at school. Right up through college, where my high-end French racing bike
joined a dozen others as victims in a massive theft at a dorm party, they all took
flight.
The one that sticks
with me the most, though, is the yellow 5-speed stingray that Schwinn called a “Lemon
Peeler.”
Mine had a basket on the front.
As a boy, I wasn’t supposed to have a basket on the front of
my bike. It was less cool, even, than owning a Huffy. But this was a time
before backpacks, and if you had stuff to carry around, you either bungeed it
somehow to the back of your bike, or you had a basket. The bungee-cord method worked
fine for most people, but I needed the basket because, well, I went to the library. A lot. And took out books. A
lot.
On one particular summer Saturday I was heading to the
Gardner Park Library, my bike basket weighed down by five or six books all
approaching their due dates. I can’t recall what they were (I’m no savant,
after all), but I can guess that at least one of the books was by Madeleine L’Engle
(whose wrinkles in time I found
endlessly fascinating), and another probably had something to do with sports. Perhaps
it was a biography of Willie Mays.
Between home and the library sat Hancock Park Elementary School, the very place from which I'd graduated just a couple of years earlier, and on this
Saturday there were a handful of same-aged boys playing softball on the painted
concrete playground. (Back then safety and security were generally assumed, and lawsuits
were not. Besides, the fence was low and easily climbed.) Tim’s and David’s
waved hands brought me closer, and I decided to join them for a bit, continuing
on to the library later on. It was Saturday, after all, and I could ignore any
clocks. I de-biked, using my lock and chain to secure the Lemon Peeler to the
bike rack at the end of the playground, even taking care to wind the chain
through and around the basket of books.
You know what happens next, of course, and to this day I have
no idea how someone could have cut the lock and ridden away with none of us
seeing it happen. But it did.
I freaked—not at the loss of the bike (which had sadly become
routine by then)—but at the loss of the books. These were library books! I was responsible
for them!
Only much later did I realize what an odd, odd reaction I’d
had.
I walked home, despondent, knowing that I would have to face
my parents not only with the loss of another bike (“How could you NOT see
someone stealing it from the playground?” “Better start saving your allowance,
mister!”) but would also need to let the library know what had happened.
The first of these—parental reaction—came later that evening;
the second I delayed several days. I’d written down the names of the stolen
books, but hadn’t yet managed to get myself to the library; at that age my fear
of authority ran deep.
Finally I couldn’t delay any longer (my stepfather having
decided to hold the current week’s allowance as hostage), and I headed off—this
time on foot—to the library. There was no one at the schoolyard to distract me
this time, not that I was in the mood anyway. When I got to the library I
slinked up to the desk where one of several interchangeably frightening
librarians greeted me. I explained what had happened, handed her the list I’d
made, and waited while she shuffled off to check. She came back just a few
moments later, a puzzled look on her face.
“All the books are here,” she said. “They’ve been returned.”
I would have been flabbergasted if flabbergasted had then been a word in my vocabulary. Who steals a
bike but returns library books? How in the world did L’Engle and company not
end up in some alleyway trashcan?
I’ll tell you how: that thief was a reader. Someone with a passion for words, who feels, now and again,
that passing strange feeling, that sense of transport, that ephemeral tingle
that somewhere between any of those pages someone might be writing just for
him.
An odd kinship to admit, certainly, with someone who stole my
bike. As it turns out, though, that was all he stole. He left me this memory
and I find it much, much more valuable.
Read since last post:
- Independence Day, Richard Ford (1996)
- The Edge of Sadness, Edwin O'Connor (1962)
Currently reading:
- The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever (1979)
- Honey in the Horn, Harold L. Davis (1936)
- Collected Stories, Jean Stafford (1970)
Count: 61 read; 26 to go.
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