Bookshelf Memories of Summers Past

Sometimes books find us when we need them; I recall summers past through the books that revealed themselves to me at the time...

Last summer ended up being very much about a book I did not come across until it was almost over Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. As it turned out, the novel traveled with my wife and I to Aspen, Colorado, and kept me company on the long drive from Aspen to Denver when our plane couldn't leave due to turbulence and we hurriedly took a cramped van five hours straight with six others to Denver only to miss our flight. The series of mishaps caused me to miss the first day of school (fortunately missing only teachers' meetings and not the first day of classes with students) for the first time in my 18 year career and my first with a new boss. In retrospect, what I learned from a Gus and Woodrow in the pages of that paperback has been infinitely more lasting (and valuable) than what I missed at that first day of meetings.

Two summers ago, when I was (once again) embarking on a journey to improve my limited (and truthfully, just plain boring) cooking skills by adding some vegetarian diets to the mix, I heard, of all celebrities, "Batgirl" (Alicia Silverstone) on NPR discussing her recently published cookbook, The Kind Life. Despite my initial inclination to adjust the radio dial and dismiss both Batgirl and the book, there was a sincerity in her voice as she spoke about her kitchen methodology and intent to promote "kind" eating that connected with me. Though my ability to cook has never really developed, I remember with fondness trying to cut vegetables this way or that, and scouring the supermarket and co-op shelves for (to me) exotic spices and ingredients, and even proudly being able to tic-off with post-it notes the recipes I did manage to edibly complete.

The summer of my divorce many moons ago from my first wife was about the original Dune series by Frank Herbert. Though I had grown up on Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica, other than reading 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clark as a teen, I'd never been a fan of the sci-fi genre in its written form, excluding, of course, those outer-space elements present in within my literary genre of choice, the comic book. Those summer months were something of a downer, and a colleague of mine at the time brought in a box containing the entire original six novel series that she had been unable to sell back to Barnes and Noble for what she felt was a reasonable price. The second-hand book seller's loss was my gain as I spent a large portion of my down time that summer escaping to Arrakis across thousands of years with Duncan Idaho in tow, as I was reminded that "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer... I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.".

These books and others have served as gateway selections, opening my on reading to genres and authors that I might not otherwise have taken the initiative to explore on my own. In most cases it is a matter of receiving an unexpected gift of a book that someone else had a sense would speak to you when you had no thought that it would. Or, walking into a local bookstore or library with the intent of picking up one book, and a short time later leaving with another title which seemingly fell off the shelf into your sight line, and ultimately, onto the checkout counter.

For some, like myself, bookshelves are tactile journals of our past, whose titles and words serve to remind of our past and speak to our continuing development into who it is we are...