Pages and Pages

Today I found visiting a few bookstores very frustrating. All those words, all that art, an overwhelming volume of it, mostly out of reach.

The mission was to find a few quality children's books for a quality school's library. But children's books of high quality are hard to find these days, or so I gathered. Meanwhile I took my own paths through the stacks, and the girls theirs.

The first was where Tower Books used to be, next to where Tower Records used to be, across the street from the Tower Theatre the chain got its name from. I looked at history books and at "literature", and had my usual halting realization that I had no idea what to get, and could browse, buy, and read online anytime, and that if I bought a book, it would sit on some horizontal space long after the magic of buying it had faded.

The second was a used bookstore downtown with brick walls and that wonderful used bookstore smell and one elderly proprietor and a small dog lassoed to the counter. I remembered it as the place that inspired my personal vision several years ago for a bookmobile art car for Burning Man, probably because it is in a neighborhood of bars and I'd been drinking and it looked all cool and dark at night and full of indirect lighting on countless books. I happily snagged a $5 copy of Solomon Northup's book. I had no idea until writing this paragraph that his story is just next week being released as a motion picture.

The third was a major chain store out in the 'burbs where, having finally loosened up a bit, I bought a collection of Neil Gaiman short stories and the girls each a book too. Was the mission accomplished? Not really, but it was begun. The girls? Two of Sunya's children, all of whom are, of course, readers.

All of this happened between and around other missions and other accomplishments and other forms of the usual frustrations on a long Sunday out and about. But the bookstores were a particular reminder to me, basically of a certain life not yet lived and of particular art not yet made. I'm not whining here, just sayin': I started wanting to be a writer when I was sixteen, and through my excursions through jazz bands and hot rods and engineering classes, girlfriends and marriage and child-rearing, career-building and house construction and career languishing and house division, replacing marriage with more suitable relationships, photography and barbershop and sex and drugs and Burning Man, my love for the deep affects of well-written words never, ever went away. But I look at the volume of work produced by the smart happy faces on book covers and go, what have I been doing the last thirty nine years anyway? All those authors led full lives too. Real writers don't sit in the offices of journalism professors with little else to do but write. They lead lives like ours, and manage to produce their art not because of that but entirely in spite of it.

Huh. I guess I am whining.

But something's changed, actually. There are new influences. Here I am in Sunya's kitchen, which someone else would perhaps organize and clean more instead of hang a canvas on a wall streaked with paint over a floor dripped with more paint, and it occurs to me the lawn probably wasn't mowed much while Steven King was writing Carrie. I hope to find less and less business that really needs taking care of, and NaNo is almost here ... and those bookstores really weren't frustrating as if they showed me how I'd let the years pass by until nothing was left but the dust and the must of all those pages I'll never write, but rather as reminders that I hadn't gotten to it yet; and here I am now -- if I choose to be! -- on the verge, or getting close to it anyway, with pages and pages ready to be turned.