Tag Archives: used bookstores

The Weight of Books

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Yesterday our “Let’s Talk” group met for its monthly session in the bookstore. This is an open-invitation group that chooses a one-word topic, rotates moderator duties, and has a grand time dissecting the ideas involved.  Past topics have included evil, debt, karma, suffering, forgiveness, and–last night–ghosts.

Many tales were told of spirits returning, and as we shared stories, a theme emerged: that the returns we were speaking of were almost all benevolent, and that often even those of us (like me) who have never seen a ghost have felt presences, sensed weights or feelings that gave the impression of someone–a loved one or a stranger–being there.

That led us to the idea of a word I’m not sure I can spell: nefesh (that’s the phonetic version) the spirit that animates, the complete life of a being, in Hebrew. That word appears fairly often in the Bible, and more often than we might think in our lives, even if that’s not the term we used to define it.

The weight of being, the sense of someone’s presence, stays in their physical stuff, was what the group basically agreed. Call it memory projected by the bereaved, call it animation from beyond by the departed; just don’t dismiss it, because even those who have no truck with ghosts and goblins still have encounters with this nefesh thing when they enter a departed loved one’s room, pick up her hairbrush, smell his aftershave.

Could books be a prime example? People read book for all sorts of reasons: entertainment, information, enlightenment, to score points, to follow the crowd, to escape. Whatever the reason, does the reader leave a tiny piece of self behind in it? Not the jammy fingerprint at the top of the page or the grease spot from the burger–although we see plenty of those in the trade. I mean do people leave the weight of their presence behind when they read a book? Rather than your picking up a blank slate full of ideas for you to accept or reject as you choose, are you picking up (in a pre-loved volume) a little bit of the ethos the previous reader left? Does the book have a wisps and whiffs of what those who went before thought of it?

It’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? I really had considered books as idea houses: take them or leave them, but what’s in here is written down, pinned like a butterfly for study rather than one to admire in flight. But what if, oh what if books that have been read twenty, thirty times by different people carried just the hint of what people thought about the ideas contained therein? Would the dissonance of conflicting ideas create white noise to rub out acceptance? Or previous approval aid the willing suspension of disbelief?

Sometimes, when I’m handling the few very old books we have in our shop, 1800s titles, the tome in my hands feels heavy with solemnity, a weight beyond paper and print. Perhaps it really is nefesh, a sense of all the people who have read it before, and left the breath of their thoughts on its pages.

Hmm……

“Why is there a bullet hole in my car?”

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Even in a small town, stuff happens.

Jack and I rejoice in many good friends in Big Stone Gap, people who would feed us if we were hungry, mow the grass if we were incapacitated, take a bullet for us….

When our reliable Honda Hybrid developed a summer cold, gal pal Elizabeth lent me her green Subaru. She was working 12-hour shifts as the ER doc and, in her own words, “If I did want to go anywhere I couldn’t anyway.”

The evening before I needed it for an early morning meeting, E’s husband Mark parked the loaner at the end of our bookstore’s wheelchair ramp with the keys inside. (Ours is a small, safe town.)

About 11 p.m., as Jack read by bedside lamplight and I lay comatose, the book I’d been reading covering my face, a loud crack resounded–followed by every dog in the neighborhood going berserk.

As I stirred to awareness, Jack checked the bedside clock. “Drama’s running late tonight,” he said, and we thought no more of it. Our shop is across the street from the outdoor theatre that annually produces the Trail of the Lonesome Pine, a folk musical based on the novel of John Fox, Jr. –Big Stone’s most famous son. Every night about 10:30 gunfire signals the next-to-last scene.

The next day I blithely trotted down the ramp and hopped into the Subaru, whizzing off to my important college meetings, then back to the Food City parking lot a few blocks from our shop, again leaving the keys inside the vehicle without a moment’s worry.

That afternoon, the phone rang, and Elizabeth’s voice said without preamble, “Why is there a bullet hole in my car?”

It turns out the shot we’d heard had been an actual altercation, taking place at the house next door. A woman, two men, some alcohol, a loaded firearm . . . stuff happens. Police had been called to the scene, but hadn’t found the suspect (who’d fled) and hadn’t cordoned the area because, well, hey, it’s  a small town. Who was gonna be out there before they returned and studied the scene in daylight?

Me, with the 7 a.m. breakfast meeting. I’d driven off in their evidence, while an officer was literally in his car on the other side of the gym, grabbing some crime scene tape to block off the Subaru. (Imagine how HE must have felt…)

The cops spent the morning trying to find Elizabeth–whose car they recognized, since this is a small town and she’s the ER doc and police see a lot of the ER–and figure out who had the car, when, and where. E, having worked the night before, was dead to the world with her cell phone off at home waaaaay out in the valley. And the police were, quite frankly, kinda scared to ask her because the usual driver of that car would be Elizabeth’s teen-aged son.

A comedy of errors, it was. E found the hole before the police found her, when Mark returned from his day’s ramblings and took her into town to fetch the Subaru. Meanwhile, the smart bookshop owner with a writer’s keen observational powers drove to Wise (about twenty minutes away) and back in a car with a bullet in the door. As for the police officer with the crime scene tape … well, no one’s seen him around lately.

All’s well as ends well. They caught the misbehaving lads, insurance fixed the bullet hole, and the only gunshots ringing through the nights now are once again in the penultimate scene of the outdoor drama.

But Elizabeth won’t let me ride in her new car, a sweet little powder blue Mini-Cooper. I have pointed out to her that lightning never strikes twice in the same place, but she just smiles and says, “Let’s not tempt fate.”