books

I went book shopping last weekend. This is not something I need to do, ever. I have a fair number of books as it is, and when one's mother has a veritable library in her house and a generosity that knows no bounds, there is even less of a justification for such extravagances.

But I've lost a fair number of books over the years, too. Books dear to me, books that come creeping back in to my mind in odd moments, standing on subway platforms waiting for trains, walking all alone-like down Fort Washington Avenue early in the morning.

Back in college, in between dorm rooms, I had a habit of storing boxes and suitcases and bags of stuff in various people's homes. Most of it I got back. One particular suitcase, though, got left behind in the basement of an old boyfriend's parents' apartment building. Mostly it was school books that were lost when the basement got remodeled and the parents didn't know the suitcase was mine and it went out with the trash, but not all.

My new boyfriend at the time, seeing my heartbreak at this loss, replaced some of the non-school related books for me. Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. Chaim Potok's The Chosen. Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed. Douglas Coupland's Life After God. Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried and July, July. (Of the last two only the first had been previously adored, but both are autographed especially for me, "To Emily, Peace, Tim O'Brien.")

When that boyfriend moved out a couple years ago our five years of cohabiting inevitably led to both of us losing things we probably considered too much our own. I somehow ended up with the 8" Global chef's knife, and he took with him various books I'd fallen a little bit in love with over the years.

This past April I had to fly out to Seattle for my grandmother's memorial service. I stayed, most of the time I was there, with my Uncle Jim and Aunt Sharon. Sharon took me to a yarn store and though I did the most damage, she fell in love with a hank of Mongolian cashmere that was just about the softest thing in the world. And the colors were straight off the cover of Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. (Yes, I see the world sometimes as it relates to the covers of books I especially love.)

I got back to New York a few days later hellbent on rereading this Murakami novel, only to discover it had gone the way of so many books when the boy left. Heartbroken all over again, I was ready to call the boy and demand my book back but my mother, visiting for a couple weeks and ever the practical woman, insisted on giving me a new copy rather than letting me embarrass myself yet again.

I decided last weekend, while killing an hour before meeting friends for dinner, that it wasn't an entirely bad idea, this notion of replacing some of those lost books I held so dear. I went to the 83rd Street Barnes & Noble, traipsed around the fiction section, and gathered up Potok's The Promise, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, and Keri Hulme's The Bone People.

I have not yet actually reread any of these more recent acquisitions but there is a surprisingly wonderful comfort in knowing that they really are mine; that I can carry them with me, and hold them close, and never have to lose them again.