I had lunch
yesterday with my buddy ever since our earliest days together at 32 Admiral Rd,
Martha Chase Jackson Pagel. We had a great time jawing about our kids, my
grandkids, and Martha’s expected grandchild (due in October to her older
daughter, the lovely Christina.) Speaking of books we are currently reading,
Martha waxed eloquent on the virtues of e-books. I doubt that I will ever be
able to make that leap. I did buy an e-book device a few years ago but returned
it within a few days. I realized that though the selection of books available
for purchase through this medium is vast, that it was not satisfying to me. I
don’t tend to read the latest titles that come out. Usually I will come across
an author or a book in a serendipitous manner, from an article in the paper, or
more usually, from browsing the offerings at a garage sale or in the bins out
in front of local book emporiums.
For years I
have purchased books inexpensively through the on-line used book site abe.com. Often
the price is just $1 US plus postage; many of the contributing stores are in
the USA so I have been able to further reduce my over-all cost by routing them
to the home of my long-suffering brother-in-law, Terry Hall, in Portage,
Michigan. He stacks them in a corner until our next visit, when I open my
packages with all the glee and happiness of a Christmas morning.
It’s not just
the text that attracts and satisfies me. I like the feel and the heft of the
book, its overall shape and even its smell – excluding, of course, those that
have spent too many years in someone’s garage or basement. Many, especially
books related to history or biography, have photographs and maps to which one
can easily refer throughout one’s reading to put the people or the places into
sharper focus.
Last Friday
on our lengthy and circuitous drive to Ottawa we passed through the lovely town
of Tweed, north and slightly east of Belleville. On its main street the yard
and sidewalks of an older house, now a designated heritage centre, was covered
with shelves and boxes of used books. How could we fail to stop and peruse such
bounty? We came away with roughly ten selections – several classic “therapy”
books that I pick up and keep to give to appropriate clients, and, a set of
five Time-Life books published in the 1970s in a series called The Old West.
Each is filled not just with information about the western territories before
and during the age of expansion by European settlers, but just as importantly, with
maps, photographs, paintings, and the stories of explorers, pioneers, and the
aboriginal peoples with whom they alternately collaborated, fought, and
subdued. These materials flesh out with great immediacy the books Mark and I
have read in the last year or so about the settling of the American west and
more recently about Louis Riel and his “general,” Gabriel Dumont.
I was
thinking this morning about a conversation I had with my granddaughter Emily as
we drove her down to her dad’s place in Toronto on Monday night. Emily will be
14 next month. She is having many of the kinds of exciting, perplexing, and
painfully difficult experiences of adolescence that we have all been through,
albeit within the strictures and possibilities of our own particular era. Apropos
of nothing particular I said to her that when you live as long as I have you
have actually experienced many different lives. She wanted to know what I meant
by that so I tried to explain that it seemed to me that I have many times lived
in different places or circumstances each of which seemed to me just to be my life,
without reflecting that the life that I was living could at some point be
materially changed or even finished. There was my life as a kid with my family;
my year and a half as a nursing student; my four years as a religious sister; my
undergraduate and teaching experiences; working for three years in the
recreation department at Sick Children’s Hospital; my 17 years as a part of the
Therafields community; my 14 years with her grandfather, Maurice, as his girl
friend and then wife, and the mother of our children; my years as a graduate
student, teaching at Ryerson and at York U, and consultant work; establishing
my psychotherapy practice and becoming registered as a psychologist; being with
Mark these past 22 years; having grandchildren and growing up along with them,
and etc.
I don’t think
I went into as much detail as I’ve just outlined above, but I was trying to say
something to her about the fact that life (and everything else) changes all of
the time and often in ways that you really can’t foresee or imagine. Looking
back we can trace the elements of our passage through time and its connecting
threads, but rarely can we see ahead with anything like that kind of clarity.
To me it seems of a piece with the collecting of books: you just don’t know
what interesting pieces or people you might run across or in what unexpected directions
they might take you.
No comments:
Post a Comment