I carry great literary works in my gym bag. I don’t intend any disrespect to the writers, most of whom are dead. The words are just easier to find when I need to the motivation to keep at it with my own work. Between Pall Molls and whiskies, I doubt Vonnegut or Bukowski would have cared that I sometimes carry their works with me layered in dirty clothes. I also stuff them into my overhead compartment at work, on closet shelves, under chairs and the nominal bed stand. Lining them up on shelves doesn’t do them justice.

Some of my best writing flourishes have come on the backs of register receipts, sticky notes, notebook covers and I keep those bits as tokens that moments of inspiration can and do strike. So why not other writers’ words be treated so brazenly? On my reading list (in the gym bag) at the moment: Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine.

Last Wednesday at lunch, I found a place in the grass by a lake and found myself wading in creeks, my feet bitten by rocks, my arms snagged by tree limbs, then lying down behind a weed tuft on a hillside looking out for my friends attacking in a toy gun shootout. These moments were sparked from another man’s memory from a summer 80 years ago.

The boy in Bradbury’s story is Douglas Spaulding, but his memories belong to the author. Douglas’ quest, at the beginning, is to realize he’s alive. He asks his brother if he knows he’s alive, and he says he does. But then Douglas asks him again … does he really know? Can he really sense the world? Does he understand how fragile it is?

Most people don’t pay attention until the moment passes or until world lets us down (or we let ourselves down). Writers and artists are in those moments. I’ve been paying a great deal of attention in my life lately – the little circles of life that swirl overhead like tornadoes in lake tops and eventually descend and spin my world apart as well as that of my children.

I remember the first morning of my best summer, in 1984. I woke up early. I was out on the hillside behind my house. I laid in the dirt in a draw and let it turn the ground and my skin warm. While I read similar descriptions in Bradbury’s book, it took me back to a moment early last week when I woke up in the sun. The blinds were lifted eight inches or so from the window ledge so a perfect square shown on the lump in the bed. I’d left the window open overnight, the first time this spring. A summer feeling was blowing in through the screen and the carpet was warm for the toes. The room was still and I my skin felt warm, not the chill it holds in arms that protrude from under the sheets. In a few days, it will be the unofficial start to the summer – Memorial Day weekend. I enjoyed every second of it. And my books stayed in their places.

There is no other time of the year as good to read Bradbury. I had this weird idea in college that if I printed out my work and carried it inside a book that I liked, something magical might rub off on it. Whether it can spread from book to loose paper is not likely, but There Is something magical inside it: brilliant description that tastes like summer. Where the books are stored has little to do with the places the words can take you and the memories that can be stirred.

This is the travel book section at the central branch of the Olathe Public Library, 917.3, a few shelves from the biographies and the same distance from history where, gauging by the titles, the Civil War seems to be the most prevalent subject. I came seeking Least Heat Moon and found Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, Kerault, McMurtry (crotchedy and condescending), all great American commentators seeking to find themselves or America on the road. Kerouac is over in fiction. The roads are not to be heard, neither are the engine’s reving, the breaks sounding, wind blowing in through the windos, no voices that they encountered, and yet what can be heard are the casual conversations among the libray staff, the clearing throats, the rolling book sorters, the conversations at the check out counter and the greeter’s desk. The answers to the world are here in hushed books, the commentray of the living on life and on death and romance and sex, here, sex explored in the erotic sense and at the clinical level, with impassioned words and cold medical ones, in beautiful illustration and cold diagrams.

The images and voices are silenced until they come down from the shelves and the words pour out. Then highways and backroads become visible, the coffee shops and cafes. I am tempted to drive off into the curving road, let it carry me where it may, but my gas light has come on and I owe on the car. Payment is due today. I still feel that the trip I might take could free me to write and pay off the bills forever.

Men and women who are not saints – and who in fact are the furthest from it – become them in the high-ceiling library in February, hiding from the 20-degree cold with the other regular citizens, all the real places in these books imagined and running through the mind with motion and in still shots. Loud books on the shelves, shrewd chords filling up the work space, romance and western, let me get better, let me find myself in someone else’s travels so that I might find my own journey.

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.

Side by side, they’ve been placed at eye level on the highest shelf, the Price Chopper management conscious not to show any favoritism for either candidate that might cause lost business. Fittingly, on the left Obama sits with his fingers intertwined and, on the right, McCain is standing proudly before a background draped with an American flag.

It can be inferred from the titles that both books paint these men as down-to-earth Americans and yet extraordinary politicians with simple ideas for transforming the nation. Obama’s book smartly combines the words “audacity” and “hope” as a way to an emboldened American while McCain’s touts his experience as a prisoner of war that can offer the way to a “braver life.” The books are even alike in page count – topping out at about 200 words each.

One man will have to keep his vision on a smaller scale after the election 12 days from now. The vision that he’s casting at rallys in battleground states, such as Missouri and Colorado, will be turned away. The other’s vision will be the one shared by the nation. And, for now, you can read about them both by the pharmacist’s counter and the trick-or-treat candy aisle.

In all, there are actually three titles on these bookshelves with each candidate on the cover. The more popular sellers described above are at eye-level near the main entry and the shopping cart pen. Each row of political books is completely full and it doesn’t appear as though there have been many takers.

Maybe the three nationally broadcast debates and the vice presidential showdown in St. Louis were enough for average Americans to take stock in their candidates. Or maybe America is sick of the rhetoric and have already made up their minds which candidate they are going to vote for – or are so sickened by the onslaught of TV and radio commercials, the flyers and yard signs, recorded telephone calls and online banner ads that they have decided not to vote.

During the next election cycle, my contribution to America will be a proposal that all campaign efforts be suspended and that biographies about the candidates be required reading before the people can vote. I’m guessing the nation would rather be spared the overexposure to promotional materials than be inundated again.

Lines would form outside the Hen Houses and Piggly Wigglys throughout Kansas so people could buy copies. Perhaps then one of the candidates would truly be brave and authorize a romance novelist to tell about his quest for the White House. Now that would get my vote, but only if the cover art work is appropriate.

Maybe it resonates to me because I so often stand in the children’s section of the wholesale bookstore at the mall, rediscovering memories of possibility and the fascination of experiencing things anew.

For children, the selection of picture books at the discount store is always quality. The shelves are filled with overstocks and titles with all the popular characters that just didn’t sell enough. And, there are more worthy titles. Tonight, I found an EB White collection of three stories for $5.99.

For adults, the picking is more sporadic. You might make several trips and turn up nothing, then the next visit unexpectedly find the book that’s been on your list for months but the price or your mood for that piece had never been timed right.

I got lucky and for less that six bucks found a hardback copy of On the Road. So with a bag full of books and deep thoughts still fresh from standing among the bookstacks and reading famous works, we head out to the play area in the mall’s middle.

No one could blame us for feeling intellectually elite (for a time) simply because of the way we spent the last hour broadening our horizons. Everyone else around us was pursuing a better pair of pants or maybe a new Hollister shirt.

The mall is not located in a working class area not far from where we live. Late October into early November is the drop in temperature that leads to cold and flu season. We are driven inside every autumn to pursue warmer interests.

The trips are a good way to rediscover childhood, but a better one is reading to the children as they lie in bed after bath time. They fall asleep with fresh imaginations and images in their minds of flying fairies and pirates. They do grow up, though, and they go to work and maybe watch their own children so they can be young again.

All that happens so fast, as quickly as pages turning.