HomeOctober 9, 1997
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I went out to breakfast this morning at Val's Sandwich Shop. As I ate my farmer's omelet and sipped black coffee with my head buried in Kokoro by Lafcadio Hearn, the sound system blasted a song about dancing to the end of love with some repeated line about burning violins. The people at the next table were gossiping about somebody that none of them liked. They kept describing "odd behaviors" that sounded perfectly normal to me. They got louder and the burning violins song got louder. They called over a guy from another table who had built a house for one of them. He didn't sit down at the their table but stood there leaning against my booth towering over them explaining some lot drainage problem to the tune of burning violins. It was really loud and pervasive. I caught myself singing it after I left. Their conversation got me thinking about how odd I am, or at least how odd and exotic I am perceived to be by some segment of the population. I had flashbacks to my prolonged encounter with the book phobic homophobic painter who spent the better part of the summer of 1995 wrecking my house and messing with my boundaries. He thought my books were, among other things, obsolete. Hmm, if Basho is obsolete why are there new translations still cropping up 300 years later? Is Yeats obsolete? Jack Kerouac? May Sarton? Henry Miller? Actually his objection to Henry Miller wasn't obsolescence, it was the Matisse of a naked man on the cover. That and the fact that it and the complete works of Emily Dickinson were in the kitchen. Only cookbooks and possibly the phone book are allowed in the kitchen in the conventional universe. For a long time- long long after he left - I stopped leaving books on the kitchen counter. As soon as I came in the house, I would put any books I was carrying on the dining room table and then move them upstairs to the office as soon as I could. Then I resumed my old ways. Right now, John Hanson Mitchell's Living at the End of Time, which I just finished, and Hiking in Japan sit in the corner of the counter next to the cat food. At least neither of those has a Matisse on the cover. To understand how traumatized I was by this guy, you have to understand that not only did he comment on how I had too many books and a lot of them were obsolete, but he moved them all to the basement - the damp basement that has never been the same since the flood of '87. He sold me a used dehumidifier for $100 and hooked it up. When the autumn rains came, I covered the books with plastic shower curtain liners just in case. I suffered the whole time they were down there, as if I had been exiled to the basement or some valuable part of my body - I was going to say my right arm but that's the scrivener's palsy arm so it was already exiled - had been cut off. I remember trudging down to the basement and pawing through the boxes of books looking for a particular May Sarton poem to read at Steven's funeral. I didn't find it. Fortunately, my Mom had the poem I was supposed to read, so that worked out, but even afterward I had to search the boxes until I found it just on general principles. Such attachment to books isn't all that odd. Many of the friends I've made since I quit the corporate world to do this sabbatical, are book collectors. David Bookstore sells antiquarian books. QI collects books - he has a first edition of Halldor Laxness' Independent People in Icelandic. Ned collects (surprise surprise) 19th century women authors. Tom and Julie live among piles of books despite their poverty - Tom comes away from every used book sale in town with huge bags of great finds. But then again, none of these people think I'm odd. Come to think of it, maybe they're odd. With all this on my mind, Ceej's entry about books felt like a message of affirmation. It was good to come home and read that. |
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