To Speak One's Piece

I'm celebrating your birthday today even though you're unaware of the celebration or of my peregrinations

When most people speak of a journey they conjure up places with exotic names--or at least locations far away from home. Destinations.

My journey is between two towns — six miles apart— and two libraries.


I stop at my local library  to pick up a book-- ennui prophet by Christopher Kennedy. A collection of prose poems, or prose wearing the accouterments of poetry.

I recall how you sold my poetry chapbook at a small retail card store. Did you read the poems?

One line In Kennedy's prose poem titled "Amish Radio"—resonates for this day .

Wind travels around the world to speak it's piece.

I, too, travel with my words uncertain of who  hears and what they hear.

While in the library I found Ursula Hegi's new book and borrowed it for two weeks. Imagine writing about a single day and the transformation of people's lives on that day. But you know that—

I open the book to a random page and read of a teacher listening to the rain. Rain alters its voice—sometimes gentle or hoarse or tapping or pounding with urgency. The rain falling against hard city concrete and the rain falling in the woods differs in sound.

Upstairs-- where the library keeps fiction and non-fiction,students sit in front of computers, a few people sit on brown leather chairs or at a long wood table.

I recognize one man. He often comes into the local coffeehouse and reads his newspaper— inhaling every word, in every section, over one
cup of coffee.

I could write a memoir of my life inside coffee houses. Do you drink coffee?

The next library— in a town only six miles away, but a town wealthier than my local town, opens its doors early and closes late every night—save Saturday. Their collection spans several floors and spills over into small rooms.

Roaming around in the stacks of the second floor—selecting a book because of its cover, or size, or title adds to the enjoyment of an unexplained discovery between chance and choice.

The Gathering of Birds by Edward Shenton catches my eye because of a shabby cover. This is an anthology of ornithological prose. Without any notion of what I might enjoy I open the book.

The trees lean this way and that, and they are scarred and marked as it were with lichen and moss"

We, too, are marked by an exposure to life.

Then I found a small, less than imposing looking book between two large tomes: Dunwoody Pond by John Janovy. I'm
enamored with his explorations of a small nondescript pond in Nebraska.

No nothing permanent except the memories and the meanings. You better make them, and use them, while you can.

Across the aisle and I'm in fiction. I don't want to select an author I know. I pull out a slim volume: Timothy, or Note of an Abject Reptile by Verlyn Klinkenborg.

Verlyn assumes the voice of a tortoise—, but not any tortoise. Timothy is the very tortoise Gilbert White observed in his garden and wrote about in his book, The Natural History of Selborne—first published in 1789.

The world is filled with "only Connects". Many years ago I ordered my copy from Blackwell's in England.

An entry marked September 1771:

Dear Sir,
The summer through I have seen but two of that large species of bat which I call vespertilio altivolans from its manner of feeding high in the air...In the extent of their wings they measured fourteen inches and an half; and four inches and an half from the nose to the tip of their tail: their heads were large, their nostrils bilobated, their shoulders broad and muscular; and their whole bodies feshy and plump.

Downstairs in the new book rack I find: Open City by Teju Cole. I open the book, let my eyes drift down the page. I find a line and close the book knowing that I'll recall the line. Yet the line disappears leaving two words—"time restored".

Before heading home I stop for a Lindor white chocolate candy and eat it for both of us.