Tucked between the pages was a birthday card from Mort, who apparently missed my party in 1998 but was thoughtful enough to give me a book of poetry celebrating grandparenthood. Taller than me, older than me, more experienced in the world than me, Mort was kind enough to let me be his teacher at a time when I was ensconced in the study of the old. I’m not sure I ever read his gift. I put it on the “keep” pile as I continued to weed out books I would never read again yet have been packed and unpacked, shelved and unshelved, across state, marital and life lines. Maybe I’ll read it later tonight.
Tucked in the pages of a slim and diminutive Ferlinghetti tome was a handwritten message from a poetry lover/poet/lover – my first lover, as all who preceded him were unrequited adolescent crushes or whole-scale boyfriends. I didn’t move boyfriends to poetic reverie, so I don’t have a lot of these little messages lying between the pages of books on my shelves. That book stays.
Tucked between the pages of another book I haven’t cracked since two previous lives ago, was a letter from Cindy, postmarked January 23, 1993. Hand-written, with the “PHOTOS – Do Not Bend” message that I used to love to see, as pictures used to arrive by mail, not mouse click. Her 4 month old – big and long for his age, just beginning to smile, giggle and be ticklish – was at the center of a struggle with impossible career and motherhood choices. Her son is now a graduating senior with a good job lined up, her daughter, who didn’t exist yet in this world at the time of the letter, a college freshman. Whatever agony those decisions caused her, she did right by these lovely young adults. I don’t know where the photos are – there were only two stationery sheets, front and back, complete with the diagonal P.S. message at the end. The book goes, but I’m keeping this letter forever. Some friends enter my bloodstream, become an integral component of my body, essential for life, remain tucked between organs and muscles and bones and memories and causeways. When people talk idly about returning to childhood or former lives, there is no past I would return to if it would mean pre-dating the handful of close friends who are of me, in me, behind me, and with me, no matter the amount of “real time” we share these days.
I attended a reading last night, where community members read their favorite poems – poems taught to them by their mothers, given to them by their fathers, poems that spoke of times of protest, poems that spoke of life on a farm, poems read and re-read at various life transitions, poems that still exist in books that make it past every single move – including one Penguin paperback of Robert Frost that has followed a man from Britain to New Zealand and now to the Pacific Northwest. “The Road Not Taken” is almost a hundred years old, living in the bloodstream and muscle memory of generations to whom the word reigns supreme.
Tucked between the pages of poetry and fiction, coffee table books and children’s story books, memoirs and museum catalogs, biographies and guides for spiritual awakening, are the tiny moments that make up my life.
Sigh. I loved this.