A life of books...

and a poem from the Curious Iguana

When I was a child, my mother took my brother and I to the Greenbelt Public Library once a week where I “shopped” the stacks. For a kid from a broke working-class family the library was a place I always felt rich. After dropping out of high school, when many of my peers were heading off to college, I spent hours reading the classics and giving myself an education through literature. In 1992 my boyfriend Juan, who I’d just met backpacking in Egypt, and I spent a month in Syria. In Homs we met a college student, Redwan, who offered to show us around. We started talking about literature and he mentioned that the university library had a lot of books in English. He took us to the university book “office,” off of a large dusty square. We looked at lists of books and bought several classics including The Heart of Darkness which I read aloud to Juan at night for over a month. My backpack was already heavy, but I was OK making space for books. After 4 more months of travel, at the age of 24, I followed Juan to Argentina to live on a cattle ranch far from civilization. It feels cruel to say it, family and friends being the standard answer, but the thing I missed the most were books and my native tongue. This spurred my Spanish learning. There was no internet at that time, I was desperate to read and there was a whole shelf of books in Spanish in the house where we lived.

I only visited the US once in 3 ½ years and my main concern, other than introducing my newly born daughter to her grandparents and my best friend, was to buy books and be reunited with the books I’d left at my mother’s before going overseas. I visited my friend in New York City and went on a book buying spree at Strand Books. I discovered a cheap way to post books, in a large canvas bag, back to Argentina where months after returning I was reunited with my treasures. At 28 we returned to the US where Juan had been accepted to do a Masters. I waited tables, took the GED and finally made it to college. While I rued the cost of books for my classes it felt like an unbelievable luxury to walk into a store full of words in my native language and to be required to buy them. Two moves later in my early 30s, and now with two daughters, I was accepted to do a Masters in Library Science. It felt like a no-brainer, my love of books and sharing resources wed to a career. I was sure this was a match. In the end I became a Library School drop-out, only finding my vocation as a Social Worker some years, and another move, later.

Books read and awaiting new homes.

I still own or can locate at least one book from every stage of life outlined here. The Winds that Came from Far Away, my first poetry book as a child, is the one that’s traveled the farthest over time. The Heart of Darkness, bought in Homs, is in safekeeping at my brother and sister in law’s house in Buenos Aires. I still use the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook I bought at the Strand in 1994 although the front cover has fallen off. Colin Wilson’s Poetry and Mysticism was bought at Yes! Books in DC, harking back to when I was 17 and lived in a group house where we smoked late into the night, and fancied ourselves bohemians, talking endlessly about books and music. I still have the books I bought on political movements and the Dirty War in Argentina which I bought to research and present a paper in 1996 at a women’s studies conference in Lincoln, Nebraska. And then there is my poetry collection. Almost every year on my birthday I buy myself a book of poetry and inscribe on the inside “Happy Birthday to me!” Vacation souvenirs are books sought out from independent bookstores. And now that I am living in Spain a visit to Madrid always includes a stop at Desperate Literature an amazing bookstore whose name feels very apt to me. On my last visit back to the States I visited the Curious Iguana, an independent bookstore not too far from my mother’s home. I’d seen Ross Gay several years before with my mother at the Geraldine Dodge Poetry Festival, love his work and was very happy to see his book Inciting Joy which I bought to bring home. That visit inspired this poem.

On buying Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy at the Curious Iguana

It is a room full of words.

Words that run and eat and preach and speak,

Words that sing and squabble,

Words I don’t yet know mixing with common words that connect.

Words between covers, hard and soft, iced with graphics.

In the background the trees,

not only the Gingko’s nodding outside,

but also the trees that have been transformed.

Each sheet of paper holding the memory of another place;

a community of trees waving to the sky, and each other, for years, until falling

the rains that fed the trees and the water that held the mash,

pulp billowing like clouds.

Now held between my palms a book about Inciting Joy.

Holding joy in my hands, words that fill me up, trees and water made manifest.