I heart books
Scent triggers memory in a special, direct, and immediate way. This was explained to me once–some kind of hardwiring from nasal receptors to frontal lobe–but not well enough so that I can explain it now. But we all know it’s true: a whiff of something, cut grass, gasoline, chocolate chip cookies, and we’re transported to another time and place, an entire scene evoked, a little drama played out on the stage of the mind. I smell garlic sautéing in olive oil, and I see my mother in the kitchen wearing the ghastly apron I sewed for her, turquoise it was, with white rickrack. Chlorine? The President’s Day weekend we stayed at the old Traymore Hotel in Atlantic City decades after the city’s heyday but years before its rebirth as Las Vegas East. I was 12 and fell madly in love with the pool boy. Pine needles? The secret trail behind one of the cabins at Camp Tamarac, the trail that led to The Rock, where I learned how to smoke cigarettes.
I think books are hardwired like this for some of us. There’s a high-speed connection between book and experience, between what we’ve read and how we’ve lived.
We have only to glance at a book, the way others catch a scent in the air, and we experience that moment in time when the book intersected with our lives. I see Richard Brautigan’s The Pill v The Springhill Mine Disaster on my bookshelf. It’s not just a book. It’s me standing on the shoulder of I-80 in Nebraska hitching my way across the country, going west on my own for the first time. Annie Dillard’s The Living? An impossibly rainy summer vacation in Bandon, Oregon, during which my then four-year-old son gets clobbered in the head with a boat oar, and we have to rush him to the 15-bed local hospital to get stitched up. James Clavell’s Shogun? That solitary winter vacation I spent in my first house, the one with no central heating, curled up in an armchair existing on pots of Seattle spice tea and packages of Archway chocolate chip cookies. My books, spine out on the shelves in my library, are entries in a diary I didn’t know I was keeping.
But there is more. In between the pages of the books we keep is tangible evidence of life lived. I go to the shelf and pull out My Mother, Myself, which I read during a particularly nasty year in the already rocky relationship I had with my mother. Tucked in between pages 44 and 45 I find her photograph, one I must have stolen from an old album. My mother looks sweetly at the camera. She has a mop of dark, curly hair and is holding a doll. She is perhaps ten. In Wild Alaska, a Time-Life book with page after page of stunning Arctic pictures, I find a menu for a little restaurant I used to frequent a block from the Fullerton El, just around the corner from my fourth-floor walk-up. I read that book on the fire escape during my last and sweatiest summer in Chicago.
Now I see something peeking out of the pages of the mustard yellow beat-up paperback edition of Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, and, with great excitement, I pull the book from the shelf. What could it be? What could I have placed between the pages of this wonderful book, this book that made me think thoughts I had never thought before, this book that prompted me to sign up for my first yoga class, this book that I carried around like a talisman for years? I am ready to be wowed.
It‘s an appointment card. On Thursday, Sept. 24, 1997, I went to get my teeth cleaned.