It was a sunny day mid fall as I took a break from my job. The very first one where I received a paycheck with my name printed on it. It was official, I was well on my way to taxpayer at 16 and no long shlepping mac and cheese on a dinner plate for yet another demanding 6 year old. I had been feeling charged that year. In love with love, independent and finding my own way in the world. It's funny how at sixteen you feel as if your world is the only one moving so slowly and from left to right, while also forward. And I was. I was looking in every direction but back with no set plan in mind. I had been taking my time that day, just walking slowly from the pharmacy I was working at to the nearby Dunkin Donuts to grab and quick lunch when something caught my eye.
Sitting in the cramped used book store window was the Memoirs that would change my life forever, a book that actually stopped my reading epidemic for a year after that.
I don't know if it was the way in which the sun was setting that hit the gray toned cover just right, but my head turned slightly in its direction and with only ten dollars in my pocket I pushed myself inside.
I loved that store. It smelled heavily of moldy carpet and old books- with a subtle scent of sun warmed wood and glass. Shelves overflowed from floor to ceiling, books were piled in paper bags and on bare floor in all directions and old wire spin racks stood on crooked spokes dripping with paperbacks that had seen better days. I was known back then as I am now for my oversized grandpa sweaters and a paper book sticking out of one pocket. So needless to say I was a regular in the Book Trader back then. I never traded a book in though, I would just add to the punches on my card and get that 10th for free, every now and then. Yet, boys and work had taken me away from the pages and whatever extra time I had left I had devoted to music and dance! For whatever reason that day had dawned differently, I was looking for a new path, a new route to walk upon. The glare from the glass frontage of the building distracted me from my set goal. A thick book with a woman with a kind, knowing blue eyed look set upon her face.
I had picked the book up into my hands, the cover was warm from sitting all day in the full sun, it had that feeling of a book that had been loved tends to feel, heavy and soft, fitting perfectly into my cupped hands. I flipped the pages open and let the soft paper smell drift up to me, as dust motes danced before my eyes. I only wanted to find the price I knew would be marked in the corner of the back cover. There was no price, how strange for a book to be placed in the front window without a price. They were like the beckoning fingers that called you to come hither. Convinced you to linger over shelves and tuck yourself in back corners on rainy days and get lost in the travels only words can take you.
Perplexed as I was, I only had a half hour for lunch. I knew they would be closed when I got off at 10, so I skipped to the back of the store where the salesperson usually sat clustered between magazine racks filled with aging Rolling Stones and piles of books that had yet to make it to the corners and floor. She looked even more like a frazzled old librarian who had merged with a hippie than my English teacher did. Her glasses never stayed on the bridge of her nose and she constantly would push them up while she spoke to you. The second she had to go through the fifteen or so marble notebooks that were the log of every single book in the store, she would let them slide down where you would wait for them to fall completely off her face. I didn't know her name. She never gave it, she never smiled either, no matter if your were the most personal you could muster for being a moody teenager. Her Sandy red hair was frizzy, like the rain fallen crimps we would get when we would braid our hair before bed. It may have once been filled with curls but like the shop around her there was a lot of lopsided angles and untidy shelves. Her eyes were somewhere between blue and gray and if I could ever get a good look at them I would have probably titled them something romantic like thundercloud or dove. The truth was, she never looked at a teenager, no matter if that same teenager spent nearly every Friday going over book spines like greeting old friends.
When I asked her the price of the book, she glanced up from whatever task she had been doing, looking at my hands and the book being held there. She held out her spider-like fingers, that seemed to carry the weight of her years and the four rings with a regale grace that the rest of her had not. I remember almost feeling unwilling to part with the book, a fear that she wouldn't be able to sell it, it being in the window had been a mistake. She had turned it over the same way I had, flipping through the silken pages as if waiting for the words to float up off the paper and into the air above our heads.
“Eight Dollars.” She said shortly, her voice like the dust of a million old book stores.
I felt myself gasp, eight dollars when I had the ten in my pocket for the rest of the week. Eight dollars for a book that was sitting in a window of a used bookstore. If I had the means to go elsewhere and get a brand new copy at that moment it probably would have been cheaper. I could feel the book calling out to my soul and the hunger pains would subside if I could feed on their words.
Digging into my pocket I pulled out the ten, my hand sweating with a nervousness that didn't make sense. I handed it over and grabbed the book up off the cluttered counter where she had placed it with more care than the crumbled bill she had taken from me. I watched as she stretched it out just barely before placing it in the register with a click of the bar. Handing me my change and yet another punch card to slip between the pages.
I had barely enough time to grab a hot tea and drink it before it was time to get back to work, but it was worth it, because all though I was ten dollars lighter in the pocket, a book can make you richer and this one certainly did.
Sitting in the cramped used book store window was the Memoirs that would change my life forever, a book that actually stopped my reading epidemic for a year after that.
I don't know if it was the way in which the sun was setting that hit the gray toned cover just right, but my head turned slightly in its direction and with only ten dollars in my pocket I pushed myself inside.
I loved that store. It smelled heavily of moldy carpet and old books- with a subtle scent of sun warmed wood and glass. Shelves overflowed from floor to ceiling, books were piled in paper bags and on bare floor in all directions and old wire spin racks stood on crooked spokes dripping with paperbacks that had seen better days. I was known back then as I am now for my oversized grandpa sweaters and a paper book sticking out of one pocket. So needless to say I was a regular in the Book Trader back then. I never traded a book in though, I would just add to the punches on my card and get that 10th for free, every now and then. Yet, boys and work had taken me away from the pages and whatever extra time I had left I had devoted to music and dance! For whatever reason that day had dawned differently, I was looking for a new path, a new route to walk upon. The glare from the glass frontage of the building distracted me from my set goal. A thick book with a woman with a kind, knowing blue eyed look set upon her face.
I had picked the book up into my hands, the cover was warm from sitting all day in the full sun, it had that feeling of a book that had been loved tends to feel, heavy and soft, fitting perfectly into my cupped hands. I flipped the pages open and let the soft paper smell drift up to me, as dust motes danced before my eyes. I only wanted to find the price I knew would be marked in the corner of the back cover. There was no price, how strange for a book to be placed in the front window without a price. They were like the beckoning fingers that called you to come hither. Convinced you to linger over shelves and tuck yourself in back corners on rainy days and get lost in the travels only words can take you.
Perplexed as I was, I only had a half hour for lunch. I knew they would be closed when I got off at 10, so I skipped to the back of the store where the salesperson usually sat clustered between magazine racks filled with aging Rolling Stones and piles of books that had yet to make it to the corners and floor. She looked even more like a frazzled old librarian who had merged with a hippie than my English teacher did. Her glasses never stayed on the bridge of her nose and she constantly would push them up while she spoke to you. The second she had to go through the fifteen or so marble notebooks that were the log of every single book in the store, she would let them slide down where you would wait for them to fall completely off her face. I didn't know her name. She never gave it, she never smiled either, no matter if your were the most personal you could muster for being a moody teenager. Her Sandy red hair was frizzy, like the rain fallen crimps we would get when we would braid our hair before bed. It may have once been filled with curls but like the shop around her there was a lot of lopsided angles and untidy shelves. Her eyes were somewhere between blue and gray and if I could ever get a good look at them I would have probably titled them something romantic like thundercloud or dove. The truth was, she never looked at a teenager, no matter if that same teenager spent nearly every Friday going over book spines like greeting old friends.
When I asked her the price of the book, she glanced up from whatever task she had been doing, looking at my hands and the book being held there. She held out her spider-like fingers, that seemed to carry the weight of her years and the four rings with a regale grace that the rest of her had not. I remember almost feeling unwilling to part with the book, a fear that she wouldn't be able to sell it, it being in the window had been a mistake. She had turned it over the same way I had, flipping through the silken pages as if waiting for the words to float up off the paper and into the air above our heads.
“Eight Dollars.” She said shortly, her voice like the dust of a million old book stores.
I felt myself gasp, eight dollars when I had the ten in my pocket for the rest of the week. Eight dollars for a book that was sitting in a window of a used bookstore. If I had the means to go elsewhere and get a brand new copy at that moment it probably would have been cheaper. I could feel the book calling out to my soul and the hunger pains would subside if I could feed on their words.
Digging into my pocket I pulled out the ten, my hand sweating with a nervousness that didn't make sense. I handed it over and grabbed the book up off the cluttered counter where she had placed it with more care than the crumbled bill she had taken from me. I watched as she stretched it out just barely before placing it in the register with a click of the bar. Handing me my change and yet another punch card to slip between the pages.
I had barely enough time to grab a hot tea and drink it before it was time to get back to work, but it was worth it, because all though I was ten dollars lighter in the pocket, a book can make you richer and this one certainly did.
"Memoirs of a Geisha” Arthur Golden
If there are books that make you into the person you are today, then that book shaped me. Between its satin pages lay words like none I had ever read before and I was a child of Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Blake. I did not scoff at a book, I was not set on reading teen novels while still in my teenage years for I had already surpassed those, thanks to my mother and Gran who had libraries that could take you from an English Countryside to a battle on a mountainside.
I had learned more from my beloved books than I could absorb in three years of high school and I had always felt this overwhelming hunger that no amount of sitting at a desk could feed. So what was it about the beguiling woman on the cover of this book that was making a connection before I ever opened up to the first page?
Was it the beating of my newly awoken heart? Was it the fact that I had already learned of love and lived through the utter loss of it? Somewhere between those pages I would find and lose myself. Somewhere between those pages I would not be able to pick up another book for a year.
A year in which my hand would trace along its spine in remembrance, but i would not pick it up again for almost 16 years.
When I look back, I can't recall exactly what changes it had made in me. I do know that no book since has ever moved me to the point of tears and flowed through me with imagery the way it did. I was just sixteen, but a child in the eyes of many. I had lived as far as I could tell, but I hadn't lived at all. So when a book can capture your heart when you still have yet to even know what tune it is playing, that is something magical altogether.
I had believed I had already had a love of words and had a writer's soul even then, for all that I never did anything to prove myself as such. That book made it all very real to me. To take something that was adapted from fact and weaved through the imagination of a man who was part historian part poet, was astounding to me. I wanted to live inside the very essence of the words written down in that story. I wanted to float on a cloud of the emotions that had been beating through me from the pages.
I lost myself to it all, I fell in love with the characters and the time period, I drifted in and out of every corner and when I finally came back down to earth and closed the cover, I wept.
It was the wee hours of the morning and the sun was not even coloring the sky with purple highlights. My mother had been sitting in her chair in the living room while I was on the sofa and I had just stared off into nothing remembering the entranced feeling that had taken over me.
We had talked briefly of books and she had offered me others I had yet to bend the page of. Yet I could not. I wasn't ready. Not at that moment. In fact, I would not be ready for a while yet. Even other so called classics that were forced upon me as required reading held nothing for me in their word on word reference. There was nothing dreamy in their whispers, words didn't leap from their pages to my heart. They were just words mechanically written and handed awards for being before their time.
A memoir of a poet, a dreamer, a lover, I had been taken over and could not be released. I stopped reading altogether after that. Nothing would do. It would be another summer of broken hearts and a new path altogether that would bring me back to the land of words.
My summer lost I call it. When I read until I fell asleep and drank up words like a thirsty person drinks water.
I never did read Memoirs again. Although it has traveled with me everywhere, holding a special place on every bookshelf in every home I had ever lived. It took me till the age of 31 to glance upon its pages again, so many years after losing love completely, finding love again, falling in love in the only way a mother knows love, breaking my heart and failing at marriage for the first time and tripping completely by accident into love once more. It took a whole new sense of self and sixteen years to the day for me to open it up to the front page again, bringing back the memories of an overly warm autumn day and a used bookstore window, to delve straight back into the heart of the book that started it all!
If there are books that make you into the person you are today, then that book shaped me. Between its satin pages lay words like none I had ever read before and I was a child of Shakespeare, Tennyson, and Blake. I did not scoff at a book, I was not set on reading teen novels while still in my teenage years for I had already surpassed those, thanks to my mother and Gran who had libraries that could take you from an English Countryside to a battle on a mountainside.
I had learned more from my beloved books than I could absorb in three years of high school and I had always felt this overwhelming hunger that no amount of sitting at a desk could feed. So what was it about the beguiling woman on the cover of this book that was making a connection before I ever opened up to the first page?
Was it the beating of my newly awoken heart? Was it the fact that I had already learned of love and lived through the utter loss of it? Somewhere between those pages I would find and lose myself. Somewhere between those pages I would not be able to pick up another book for a year.
A year in which my hand would trace along its spine in remembrance, but i would not pick it up again for almost 16 years.
When I look back, I can't recall exactly what changes it had made in me. I do know that no book since has ever moved me to the point of tears and flowed through me with imagery the way it did. I was just sixteen, but a child in the eyes of many. I had lived as far as I could tell, but I hadn't lived at all. So when a book can capture your heart when you still have yet to even know what tune it is playing, that is something magical altogether.
I had believed I had already had a love of words and had a writer's soul even then, for all that I never did anything to prove myself as such. That book made it all very real to me. To take something that was adapted from fact and weaved through the imagination of a man who was part historian part poet, was astounding to me. I wanted to live inside the very essence of the words written down in that story. I wanted to float on a cloud of the emotions that had been beating through me from the pages.
I lost myself to it all, I fell in love with the characters and the time period, I drifted in and out of every corner and when I finally came back down to earth and closed the cover, I wept.
It was the wee hours of the morning and the sun was not even coloring the sky with purple highlights. My mother had been sitting in her chair in the living room while I was on the sofa and I had just stared off into nothing remembering the entranced feeling that had taken over me.
We had talked briefly of books and she had offered me others I had yet to bend the page of. Yet I could not. I wasn't ready. Not at that moment. In fact, I would not be ready for a while yet. Even other so called classics that were forced upon me as required reading held nothing for me in their word on word reference. There was nothing dreamy in their whispers, words didn't leap from their pages to my heart. They were just words mechanically written and handed awards for being before their time.
A memoir of a poet, a dreamer, a lover, I had been taken over and could not be released. I stopped reading altogether after that. Nothing would do. It would be another summer of broken hearts and a new path altogether that would bring me back to the land of words.
My summer lost I call it. When I read until I fell asleep and drank up words like a thirsty person drinks water.
I never did read Memoirs again. Although it has traveled with me everywhere, holding a special place on every bookshelf in every home I had ever lived. It took me till the age of 31 to glance upon its pages again, so many years after losing love completely, finding love again, falling in love in the only way a mother knows love, breaking my heart and failing at marriage for the first time and tripping completely by accident into love once more. It took a whole new sense of self and sixteen years to the day for me to open it up to the front page again, bringing back the memories of an overly warm autumn day and a used bookstore window, to delve straight back into the heart of the book that started it all!