I’ve heard that timing is everything and sometimes I know exactly what that means.
In this morning’s mail a package that could only have been a book, or part of it would be a book because I could trace it. Mid-morning with the thermometer already slightly above 70° when even here in Arkansas there should be signs of winter, snow or cold or ice. But it was seventy and I had a mailer with at least one book.
I traded the delight of winter for the delight of words, a much longer lasting delight. From my friend in Wisconsin, my old neighbor Rick who loves words almost as much as he loves tennis and the Cubs. Or maybe it’s a triumvirate. A few pages copied from a book about the Chicago reporter Mike Royko and a copy of an essay he’d written in 1978, “How to Insult a Norwegian.”
The title alone is worth a Pulitzer in these days when our president has changed his ancestry from German to Norwegian. More than that, it’s a delightful essay I wish I had written so I could have contributed from my childhood that a Norwegian is a Swede with his brains knocked out… and it works the other way around to insult a Swede.
I grinned and opened the book. Aimless Love, a collection of poetry by Billy Collins, a poet I did not recognize.
On the frontispiece Rick had said to start with pages 47 and 60 so I turned to page 60 and read “The Lanyard” once, twice, started thrice when two friends joined me on the back porch in the now 72 degrees. We talked for only a few minutes before I opened to page 60 and said, “You’ve got to read this.” They both read aloud well (that’s a skill) but I gave the book to Gem, and he read it aloud.
We three with teary eyes. The poem of an adult remembering making a red and white lanyard at a summer camp, giving it to his mother, and balancing everything she had given him with the lanyard he gave her. And knowing she had seen it as an even exchange. I doubt there’s a person alive who would not relate, who would not feel this poem.
The three of us smiled, considered, started sentences with, “I remember mother…”and ended a sentence when the next person would start. I could not remember a handicraft I had given my mother, but I could remember that in her 42 years of life she had given me all I’ve needed for my almost 91 years of life. Words in a poem did that.
Words were not over. They had brought some copied pages from the Democrat-Gazette. An article by Brenda Looper, “War on Big Bird,” that we all need to get worked up about as Arkansas becomes the first state to exit from the world of PBS.
An article by Gwen Faulkenberry, “Embrace the Surprise of Transcendent Joy.” Another title worth a Pulitzer. She writes about joy, not happiness, that “permeates everything” and “finds us sometimes when we least expect it.” This, too, we need to get worked up about as joy sometimes is easy to forget, to put aside, to let anger take the place of the delight of watching a bird bathe in the pool, or a stranger opening the door at Harts, or the 73-degree winter sun on bare arms, or the hugs of friends who dropped by with their transcendent joy of friendship, or some books in the mailbox at #4.
This was magic. This convergence of people, words from 1978 until today, the color and pleasure of late December, a gift for which I am grateful.
And yet another book gift from the same package, Time magazine’s “How Dogs Think.” My dog and I will spend tomorrow on the porch with this book.