Leaving
Editor’s Note: This is the first AgeSpots contribution by writer J.A. Hess, who now lives in Thailand.
I have moved many times, leaving cities, countries, and continents. My last move, 11 years ago, was from Canada to Thailand. Logistics decreed that I leave most of my library behind. In the Age of Kindle, that might not seem a problem. Discard and download later. But books have never been simply reading matter for me. Their physical presence holds memories. I picked up each one and listened. Out of hundreds, 47 made the journey. They now lie before me, in random order, except for the first and last.
First in line, a faded red hardback, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas – a Christmas gift from a young Barnard student while I was in my freshman year in Philadelphia. On the front flyleaf, I wrote: “December 27, 1962 3 A.M.-- Someone must sing for the sun to rise.” Eight months later, we eloped to North Carolina and married.
In the middle of the assemblage is Stop-Time, Frank Conroy’s memoir of a turbulent coming-of-age, so achingly similar and dissimilar to my own molten adolescence that the book grabbed hold of me and would not let me go until I finished the last page.
My gaze is arrested by a broadly rectangular book with an incandescent apple on its jacket cover -- Brian Wildsmith’s beautifully illustrated ABC, which I once borrowed from the Utica Public Library to read to my children at bedtime, and which, after they were fully grown, I purchased online so I could read it again, to myself.
Further down, I see a water-stained paperback, God’s Snake by Irinis Spanidou. It accompanied me from place to place for three decades because a person I liked very much had read that very paperback and had asked me why I bought books and never read them, so, finally, a month ago, I read it and found a young girl in 1950s war-torn Greece whose childhood wonderings were so achingly similar and dissimilar to my own that the book grabbed hold of me and would not let me go until I finished the last page.
At the end of the queue, The Insect God, a comprehensively twisted fairy tale written and illustrated by Edward Gorey, a gift for my 42nd birthday from my older sister, who, long ago, as my first dragoman in the land of books, led me to Nancy Drew and not the Hardy Boys and who, to this day, is the one person I always ask, “What have you read lately?”
At age 76, I survey my selection of 11 years ago. Novels, tales, poetry, memoirs, cookbooks. They have become even closer companions, our intimacy enriched by the selection process itself, now a valued memory. I have no regrets about what I brought, but, occasionally, I do think of some I left behind.
