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Old Friends

Posted on Saturday, February 27, 2010

By Patricia Crisafulli
 
            It started as a "cleaning expedition," rearranging bookshelves that had become overrun and disheveled, with volumes stacked higgledy-piggledy in no sense of order. Such things bother me with over-weighted fretting. Stacks on my desk are de rigeur, the sign of a busy life and an active mind, or so I say. But the bookshelves speak to two deeper truths that had become apparent in my life: a creeping disorder born of too much to do and an even more troubling realization that I was not reading for fun. How could I with so many familiar titles barricaded as if behind a brick wall?
            And so I started digging, pulling off books and stacking them on the floor. Soon I had knee-high stalagmites organized roughly in fiction and nonfiction. When I reached bare wood on the shelves, I dusted and reorganized: spiritual, poetry, and writing in one section; literary novels, classics, and contemporary works in another. Business, leadership, and finance, the other world I inhabit as a writer, had their own section. Because there are only just so many shelves, I had to make tough choices: a book I would never read again was packed for the ""take a book, leave a book"" at the train station.
            Midway through the project, when there were more books in front of me than at my feet, I began to connect with old friends. Caressing the smooth, cool paper of a cover, I couldn't resist a peek inside. How long had it been since I read this one? And this one! Oh, I thought I had loaned that one out, but here it is! With a great deal of discipline, I shut the books and put them on the shelves to continue my task, knowing that if I strayed from my intended purpose I would be walking around books for days.
            When I finished, it looked so orderly and perfect; not a spine out of place. Looking for a book the a few days later, I knew right where to go. Where my eyes and hands returned was to the old friends who had waited so patiently for me. And so for the past several weeks, I have been reconnecting. On my daily trip to the gym, I take along a novel, and spend forty-five minutes to an hour reading and exercising. (The machines are too mind-numbing, and I don't care to watch the television on mute with words scrolling by at the bottom.)
            Sue Monk Kidd's The Mermaid Chair, which initially I had not liked as much as The Secret Life of Bees, captured me on the second reading, as did Elizabeth Berg's The Art of Mending, which tore at my heart the way I did the first time. I am reading Anne Lamott, Leif Enger… I have welcomed the return of my author-heroes.
            Yes, there is nothing like a new book, the spine stiff and the pages unblemished, with words that whisk you into the story faster than the downdraft of a ferris wheel. But a familiar tale, even one you've read a few times, can grasp just as strongly. Here are the storyline you remember and the characters whose voices you've heard before; but also the details and nuances you've forgotten and failed to see fully the first time. It's like falling in love all over again.
            I invite you to take your own walk down a literary memory lane, revisiting places and people in a way both familiar and exciting. It's all there, on that shelf you need to dust off anyway. Reading when you're done is the best reward.

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FaithHopeandFiction is my creative home and my labor of love. I have written stories all my life. As a child, I told myself stories for entertainment, to pass the time, and for comfort. Stories were my way of interpreting and understanding the world around me and to discover the deeper meaning and lessons hidden in even the most ordinary circumstances and relationships.


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