Churchgoers

Several years ago I was at a point where I just wanted to STOP WORKING, so I decided to take a walk – ‘Walk it off’ as Mike’s coach used to tell him to do. I was feeling like I had been letting ‘free’ time slip away from me. Work and its responsibilities are always in a corner of my mind - like a vastly overweight house guest who is constantly underfoot when you want to get something out of the refrigerator or vacuum the living room. I had so many duties, there really was no choice. I had so many things that HAD to be done and done NOW and by ME and so I just had to get busy and DO THEM and I did and now I AM taking a break. So I walked downtown and visited my usual spots, then headed home thinking of some sort of extravagant way to play hooky. I opted for a Tomato/Provolone Foccata from John’s Grocery after poking around in the Northside Book Market looking for a copy of Gift from the Sea for a friend. There wasn’t one available - everyone must keep their copies. I did come across three copies of Dimitri Merzekovski’s Romance of Leonardo da Vinci - guess that one’s not a keeper. My Dad loved used book stores along with hardware stores and lumberyards. He was a poker-arounder and I am too. He’d mosey around the stacks of books, telling me which ones he’d read and loved, and then would think of something to look for and go off on tangents, wandering down another dusty aisle. I remember a time in Pasadena, when we looked for a copy of a Tarzan book (I thought used books - cheaper! but actually they were about the same price –often even more -being antiques and all). At that time I was heavily into the ape-man series and the libraries didn’t stock them for some erroneous puritanical reasons. Tarzan & Jane WERE married and NOT living in sin! (If anyone on those morality committees had actually read the books they felt were so detrimental to society, they would have known that.) Dad had read them all and tried to steer me towards Edgar Rice Burroughs’s other hit series, the John Carter of Mars books. I never did read them. I liked the jungle and the animals better than Space. Dad loved the future. So as if accompanied by Dad’s ghost, I found myself gravitating to the same haunts. There is a wonderful sense of reverie and peace after an afternoon of bumming around in a used bookstore. It triggers all sorts of other peripheral thoughts and your mind flits from memory to memory, recollecting past readings and the time and place where you read them. The smell of deteriorating pages, yellow and crumbly, is heady incense. It was a most perfect spiritual experience and carried me away from my burdensome present, it’s my church.

My younger daughter, the animal lover, also became a fan of Tarzan and was ecstatic to find that I still had the complete series; she read them all and insisted that they be willed to her. She is studying to be a librarian and so goes to church everyday.