An Ancient Relic
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
Faded ink on an old register receipt describes the time and place where I made a book purchase nearly a decade ago. The Barnes & Noble sales slip has been a makeshift bookmark for nine years and its been pressed between the pages so long that it has outlived the store from which it came.
The storefront that once displayed New York Times bestsellers is now filled with mannequins in bridal gowns. But at 10:34 p.m., March 1, 1999, I stood in line at 5121 NW Roanridge Road and bought a book that I wouldn’t read and that wouldn’t deepen my dedication to writing until 2007.
Long before I became a near-broke father of three, I used to go to book stores and actually buy books that struck my fancy rather than arranging to check them out at the local library. This was in the mid- to late-1990s, when bookstores were being used by my generation as places to socialize rather book shop. People put on thick sweaters and posed as writers and other creative types while sipping lattes, pecking on laptops and looking over the bookstacks for someone to meet. Those practices as I’ve described them go on today, too, I suppose. One night I walked in from the rain and purchased a copy of Jack Kerouac’s novel, The Town and the City.
Like most great books I bought then – Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Mark Twain’s Letters from the Earth, etc., I had really intended to read Kerouac’s first published work. The book was sufficiently thick (I’d gone through a phase where page count was a determinate of literary greatness.) I took it home, reread the winding first few pages – his riffing on scenery – and set it down with intentions to read the reamining 400 pages of beautiful prose.
The book found a place on my book shelf in my apartment then was later boxed away and stored in the guest room at my mother’s house. After college, I’d lived at home for about a month, just long enough to find places for all the things I once thought I could never lived without, and then completely abandoned them all when I met my wife.
I’d always seen those books being carted along with me wherever I lived – just my meager clothes and cases of books. In them was nearly everything that KV, Jr., has written, Steinbeck’s greatest works, political philosophy manuals with thoughts from Rousseau and Kant and St. Thomas Aquinas, The Cloister Walk, among others. I’d kept some college textbooks: an Ansel Adams’ guide to photography that I couldn’t part with because the photos were so so real it would been like throwing away some of the most beautiful parts of the world; books on government; grammar and style guides; and a worn paperback copy of The Right Stuff that my writing instructor gave me.
Those were my most prized possessions during my junior and senior year of college. I strayed a few times and checked out books from the library when I was penniless or didn’t care to own them forever – Nabakov’s Lolita, for one. But those were the books I’d packed into Dole banana crates and carted from trunk to closet.
In the 10 years since I graduated, I’d picked over the books in the collection. When my kids visited their grandmother, I’d pull random books and take them home, the ratio of read books to never opened ones was about equivalent. Anything I don’t read now gets piled on the vertical shelves in the master closet with sweaters and sweatshirts waiting for the weather to turn cold and then switch places with khaki shorts and polo shirts.
I don’t know what drove me to pull The Town and the City from its dusty crate and take it home. I suppose it was guilt for never tapping into the knowledge that sat as though it was heavier than the air beneath the shirt cuffs and jacket tails.
I still remember that night in 1999, typical for March and perfect for a bookstore or for lying in bed, reading. The book had been picked by one of the booksellers as their favorite read and, as so, was displayed near the entry to the fiction section. I plucked it from its stand along the bay of windows because I recognized the author’s name. A friend on the college newspaper was an avid beat literature fan with his own interesting sense of style – one that I could never pick up. He was often unshaven, wore plaid, loose-fitting jeans and was outspoken in a careless and yet not reckless way.
I picked up the book and leafed through it and found a description of the Merrimac River, a beautiful metaphor for the sweeping nature of time and the perfect connector of the town, Lowell, and the city, New York City, both of which are central to the book’s setting. Kerouac obviously had a tremendous appreciation for this place he grew up and a tremendous memory. I took the book back to my apartment and my memory goes blank from there. I don’t recall opening it again or mentioning it to anyone until last year.
I discovered it just as the leaves were falling, which made the opening chapters in which Kerouac describes his hometown in autumn all the more vivid. His description of the town qaure and of being the hero in the big Saturday afternoon high school game is some of the best writing I’ve read. Wrapped in warm clothes and blankets, I read the entire book and felt let down on the last page because there was no more to read except his other books.
Kerouac has written other titles, but The Town and The City is the only one in which his writing is more traditional. This was written before he incorporated the spontaneous nature of jazz into his work and created bob prosity, so in that sense, it’s a singular book. I was influenced by it and an eveing writing course I was taking at the time. The book led me to make a greater commitment to the writer’s life in hopes that I would one day write something equally as great or greater (wishful thinking.)
My life can now be dated by antiquated things. The places I’ve been are recorded on paper so old it can’t hold ink any longer. But the books are intact. The words are there forever and it’s the solace I take from that fact that has carried my hope to one day write something great.
