Author Archives: wendywelch

Too Short a Story

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Mankato was one of the nine foster kitties sojourning at the bookstore–and the first one to get sick. On Monday he went to the vet. On Tuesday he looked better, after some hefty antibiotics. Wednesday, he wasn’t doing so well. On Thursday afternoon, I went into the mysteries and thrillers room, also known as the cattery, and could see in a heartbeat what was going to happen.

How can something so tiny leave such deep paw prints on our hearts?

Five days of rubbing high-calorie gel onto my finger for him to lick off, then across his mouth when he wouldn’t lick my finger any more, four nights of feeding checks and desperate attempts to teach him to drink from a bottle and using a curved syringe to push .1 ml slowly, carefully into the side of his mouth, scared each time he would choke, over and over…. it was over.

The writing in his fuzzy book of love was going to be brief. But that didn’t make it any less meaningful. Innocent, no-holds-barred love is hard to come by in this world.

So I picked him up and cuddled him and carried him into the bookstore’s front room and sat in the armchair and stroked his head. Grown cats like to be by themselves when they die, but maybe kittens are different, because he seemed happy that I was there; he dipped his head into my palm in that way we’d developed during all those feedings. I rubbed his ears and told him it was okay, that we’d both tried as hard as we could, now he should go and do what he needed to do. I told him that he didn’t need to be nervous, that it would be fun on the other side, with a big grassy yard to run in and a fancy cat-climbing gym with balls and ropes, and lots of other kittens to play with. I said maybe his real Mommy was there, waiting for him. (He and his two sisters were found abandoned in a box.)

Of course he didn’t understand a single word I babbled. But he was in a lap whose smell he recognized, hearing a voice he knew, getting his ears rubbed when he went.

I’ve never held anything – animal, vegetable or mineral – as it died before.  I am haunted by the fact that I don’t know if I did what was right for him. (Did I feed him too fast? Was the bookstore too hot and suppressed his appetite?) Can we ever know if what we did was right? We do what’s best for each other, insofar as we know it, and we Google like mad through the knowledge of the universe trying to figure out the rest fast enough. I live in a bloody bookstore, and I can’t find the right answers. There aren’t always right answers – for feeding kittens or having relationships or any of what we call normal life.

So we do the best we can, fondling ears and crooning pap and spun sugar, hoping it helps. That’s what we do for each other. Hopefully.

Bookstores are full of tragedies; one shelf of Shakespeare will supply tears enough to flood a fountain. But bookstores have the stories they tell as well as stories for sale, and one of ours ended, a little too soon, getting stroked on the head.

‘Bye, Mankato. You were my favorite, but don’t tell the others, okay?

What If…..

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What if a book leaves us unchanged?

People read books for all sorts of reasons: entertainment, information, because someone (or everyone) else is… but what if we read a book, and it makes an impact, reaches out and punches us right in the heart? And what if we cry, and swear that we will change the world that could hold such horrid truths as, oh, say, Grapes of Wrath. Or Tess of the D’urbervilles. Or even Hunger Games–which may not have the staying power of those first two, but still packs quite a wallop in the interesting metaphor and parable of social justice departments.

What if we say all that, and then we pick up the next book in the stack–or advertised on the side of the bus–and keep reading?

Does it still count, that we cried, that we felt what the characters felt, saw the injustice, the fear, the hurt? Or did it never happen? Because it really didn’t happen, did it, that thing that left us shaking until we looked up and realized we were just riding the subway, holding a paperback.

Unless it did happen. Inside us. I can count hundreds of books I’ve read in the last few years, but ask which ones changed me, and I can count them on my fingers. The Smallmart Revolution. The House of Sand and Fog. And the Band Played On. A book of short stories called Hunger by Lan Chang. Rory Stewart’s Prince of the Marshes.  Kite Runner. To Kill a Mockingbird. The Children’s Story by James Clavell. Rumer Godden’s translation of Prayers from the Ark.  I can also tell you exactly what they did, in order: changed where I shopped; sent me to volunteer at a refugee center; taught me to be embarrassed at some of the church rhetoric surrounding AIDS; made me a better Cultural Studies professor, x3; gave me my first naive understandings of white privilege; scared the shit out of me; and renewed my faith in innocence.

I can’t list such specifics for most of the books I’ve read. Every book we absorb lays a foundation, yes, puts another brick in the walls of our beliefs, anchors our approach to life. Every word is valuable–or at least being able to access it is valuable. But not every work changes us, does it? The ones that suddenly, before we can defend against it, turn us sideways, tilt our world’s axis–well, when I sit back and think about, I’m surprised at how small a list that is. I remember passages and themes from many books, but when I think about the ones that visibly affected the way I think, act, speak—–the list shrinks.

So, which book(s) shaped you, turned you into who you are now, or filed away the rough edges of what you used to think? Which books made you say “what if” and then stick with “if?”