When Something Finds You
The bookmark was a piece of recycled cardstock, some dead independent bookstore's name on it in a sans-serif that had briefly been fashionable, and I kept it not from sentimentality, but from the specific inertia of a person who has decided to let objects make their choices for him. The novel was by Paul Auster, one of those books that arrives at exactly the right low point in your early twenties to feel profound and departs just as quietly once the low point resolves, leaving behind wisdom and introducing a newfound friend. The bookmark was nothing, but I pressed it between the pages anyway and then the pages closed over it and ten years went by the way ten years do…without asking, without announcing themselves, just gone when you looked up.
I found it again on a Tuesday or maybe a Wednesday. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the feeling that came with it, that astounding feeling of being returned to yourself from a great distance. Who was the person who put that there? What were they waiting for? One gets older and the artifacts of your past life start to feel like they belong to someone you once heard about, someone you might have pitied or loved if you’d known them in the right light.
The things you learned when you were young, they don’t stay the way you think they will. Life comes in and works on them and bends them. Sometimes it seems like it breaks them completely, like whatever you understood back then was just a child’s version of a thing, too simple to survive what was coming. You let go of it, or you think you let go of it. And then something finds you — a bookmark, a smell, a song playing in a parking lot at dusk — and what you thought was gone turns out to have only been waiting. Not broken. Just deepened by everything that tried to undo it. The early truths come back as larger truths. They were always larger, you just didn’t have the life yet to hold them.
The bookmark had no words, and that seemed perfect. Some things don’t need to say anything. They just sit inside the dark of a closed book, patient as a held breath, waiting for the light to come back in.
WHAT!! Gary, this is beautiful.
The timing of this beautifully written post is extra meaningful to me. On Sunday I picked out a local history book that has been on my shelf a long time. I sat down to read, opened it and a treasure slipped out. It was a handwritten note from my mom. Dated March 2003. She mailed me the book after she read it and included the note. She wrote her favorable impressions of the book and added, “This is a must for your personal library.”
The book has been tucked on a shelf for 23 years. I hadn’t thought of it and didn’t remember the note. I’m so glad I’m reading it now. As I read along, I try to guess the passages that would have most impressed my mom, and the ones that made her laugh.
I am appreciating this book, “The Last Cracker Barrel,” by journalist Ernest Lyons, in ways I could not possibly have 23 years ago.