6-23-10

THE TRUTH ABOUT THUNDER

There are two kinds of kids in the world. The ones who are told that thunder is really the sound of angels bowling in Heaven. And the ones who are told that bowling is really a sport. 

It was a big letdown when I found out the truth about thunder. I'd planned on being an angel myself. Come up with names for all those Cirque de Soleil shows. Whisper spelling-bee answers in children's ears. The only reason I bothered to follow the Commandments in the first place, or go to confession every week, or transcribe the Act of Contrition on my forearm in permanent marker, was the hope of bowling a few frames in Paradise -- making my way up to the foul line, closing in on another perfect game, while behind me some rowdy cherub toots his horn and calls out, "Beer frame!"

I checked the Wikipedia a few days ago, and found that while lawnmower racing, toe wrestling and chessboxing all have their own entries, the Bergen County Triathlon somehow has been overlooked. As a boy growing up in New Jersey, I practiced year round to sharpen my skills in those three events: miniature golf, bumper pool, and bowling. I putted the little orange ball into the clown's mouth often enough to win some free games, but I could never get around those stones guarding the cup on the eleventh hole. As for bumper pool, I had it all -- a feel for the geometry of the felt, the steady hands of a butterfly surgeon. When our table started getting wobbly and my parents put it out on the curb, though, I was forced to train at the Boys Club. The sign-up list for bumper-pool was always so long that I soon turned to knock-hockey; and, ultimately, to hanging out in front of the Girls Club down the block.

But my interest in bowling never waned. The ruddy exhilaration of sport. My first time out, I bowled a 16. I cried, and kicked the hand drier, and ate two orders of fried mushrooms. But the demon would not leave my side. Forty-six years later, I still can't deal with the number 16 in any form. If interrogators whispered it in my ear, I'd admit to buying Sarah Palin's book, playing darts with Osama Bin Laden, writing "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" . . . anything. 

My first try at romance came after two girls approached me and a friend at a bowling alley and asked us how to keep score. Phone numbers were exchanged. A few days later, I decided to call the one with dark hair. But I was too embarrassed to do it from home, so I walked five blocks to a pay phone. Midland Avenue was a speedway compared to the deserted streets all around me. But it had that phone booth, and the booth had a door. I knew instinctively that relationships were filled with deception, and thought it was a good idea to learn the ropes early. When the girl asked why it was so noisy on my end, I told her it was the TV. Nothing much happened after that. I sat on her stoop once, and saw her at a dance a while later. But were out of our depth. We kissed only once, and made a mess of it. 

I've been on a bowling team with guys who'd done time for armed robbery, and on a team made up (except for me) of IRS employees. The crooks were better bowlers, the thieves were better drinkers. Otherwise it was hard tell the difference.

I got my copy of The Bowler's Manual in the 1990's, back when I was trying to build a library dedicated to wasting time -- books on balloon animals, hand shadows, minstrel shows, postmodern furniture, tongue twisters, a volume of Michelangelo reproductions so big, you couldn't fit it into the Sistine Chapel without a hacksaw. Ephemera for the easily amused. Diversions for shy party guests. Something to do when I was stoned and not quite ready to finish off a box of Fig Newtons.

The Manual, written by Lou Bellismo, was first published in 1965. In terms of design, it's a queasy package. On the cover there's a grid of bowling photos built around a color scheme reminiscent of store-brand mustard. Inside are diagrams showing successful hooks and incorrect foot placement, approaches to picking up spares, and dozens of black-and-white photos of bowlers exhibiting both good and bad form -- men and women who seem to have been recruited from the "Proud Virgins '64" section of their high-school yearbook. The overall effect is dry, unattractive, and without irony. In other words, it's way more interesting than some kitschy coffee-table book with a hologram cover, color reproductions of vintage bowling shirts, and oddball facts peppering the margins.

Bowling pins traditionally were hand-carved from blocks

of redwood. After pressure from environmental groups,

the American Bowling Congress ended this practice in

1988. The pins are now made of ivory. 

This is the third edition of The Bowler's Manual, which to me is Mystery Number One. How do you update a how-to book on bowling? It's a game defined by its limitations. The alleys are all the the same dimension. Balls can't be more than a certain weight. The number of frames never changes. The highest score you can get is 300. And every time out, you will have to go the front counter at least once and ask them to reset the pins. Even the actions of bowling itself don't change much from person to person. As the author, Lou Bellismo, puts it, "Left-handed, right-handed, women, or men: the fundamentals are the same."

Which brings me to Mystery Number Two. How did he manage to hold off on making that observation until page 37?

In sexually repressive cultures, the term "seven-ten split"

is considered too suggestive, and is referred to simply as "Diane."

The paper scoresheets are gone, the thick pencils. The cost of rental shoes is up 700-percent since love first found me at Lodi Lanes. Otherwise, bowling hasn't changed and isn't likely to. Still, for all its finite characteristics, there are an infinite number of ways to screw it up. Proper approach, hitting your marks, releasing the ball, following through . . . it's a minefield. The sport can be ruthless in how it deals with the slightest imperfection. Moving half a inch to the left or right can mean the difference between having a bowling shoe named after you, or working behind the counter spraying deodorizer into someone else's.

In 2002, the Professional Bowlers Association banned

the use of electric carts in tournament play.

The Bowler's Manual has a special section on teaching children. It's become obsolete, since those rubber bumpers now make it impossible for a kid to throw gutterballs anymore -- turning what was once a boot camp of life lessons into a carefree romp through the land of pizza and vending machines. My first-grader can work on her Shirley Temple moves between frames, eat Mike and Ikes by the handful, and still beat me by thirty pins.

Some churches in 10th Century Germany used bowling as a

test of religious faith. A single pin, representing the devil,

was set up. If you knocked it down in one try, you proved

yourself a worthy Christian. 

That one's true.

Writers do poetic somersaults over the sports they love. Baseball -- a celebration of patience, beauty, and the inevitable course of failure. Football -- the alchemy of strategy and brute force. Golf -- the embodiment of man's quest to triumph over both nature and his own shortcomings. Even boxing, that madhouse of blood and degradation, reminds us that courage and strength are useless without the will to endure. 

There's never been so much as a limerick composed in praise of bowling. And yet it's the genesis of all games -- the link between ourselves and our hominid ancestors. Roll a big, round rock at some tall, skinny rocks -- what could be more fundamental? Take a look at those charts illustrating the evolution of the human race. Four million years before homo erectus -- smack in the middle of our journey through time -- walks australopithecus: posture slightly forward, gaze intent, arm drawn back in the perfect position to tap the 1-pin on the Brooklyn side. 

It's not unreasonable to imagine that bowling has brought us where we are today, or that it will guide us to where we are likely to end up. From the bowling ball came the wheel. From bowling itself came the snack bar. With the snack bar, fire. With fire, burgers and fries. With fries, corn dogs.

And with corn dogs, the gastrointestinal fall of mankind.

6-6-2010

AMERICANS KNOW EVERYTHING
In fourth grade I was diagnosed with astigmatism. My right eye wasn’t quite as round as the left, and things were getting blurry. I liked having an eye shaped like a football -- which is how they explained to me. It made me feel special. My father took me out for a club sandwich on the way home from the eye doctor. My mother called me brave; although reading an eye chart calls for about as much bravery as changing your socks in the dark.

Turns out astigmatism is no big deal. A pair of prescription lenses and I was back in business, reading the listings in TV Guide and the box scores in The Sporting News -- all of which were set in type so small, I was convinced they were designed by optometrists in order to drum up business.

I secretly hoped the condition would excuse some of my other shortcomings, such as lack of athletic ability. I was one of those kids who dropped easy touchdown passes, swung a bat like it was a flaming pool cue -- completely hopeless in any game that couldn't be played on a kitchen table. It wasn’t the oblong eye, of course. My entire body was in rebellion. My experience with sports was a two-stage process: the fear of injury, followed by the injury itself. I took speeding frisbees to the forehead, sprained my ankle putting on skates, managed to swat myself in the neck with my own golf club. Even now, if I play a game of solitaire I like to keep an ice pack handy.

I've been told that I'm a terrible listener. Can't blame that on the astigmatism either. But I have also been accused of being a lousy observer. Distracted. Indifferent. Blind to what really matters. For someone whose head is always rattling with details, I’ll admit that I do miss a lot of what's going on around me. I see things . . . and yet I don't. The curse of the oblong eye.

Consider the birth of my child. After twenty-six punishing hours of labor, the moment came for me to tell my wife the sex of our baby. I knew there was African music playing on the radio, and that it was pouring outside, and that the food we'd ordered from the hospital cafeteria wasn't half bad. But I hadn't quite noticed whether we'd had a boy or a girl. The delivery room quickly become a place of outrage. The electrifying first moments of fatherhood, and I was being scolded by midwives, doctors, dulas, nurses. Even the baby’s crying seemed to be a rebuke aimed directly at me.

“It’s not my fault,” I wanted to say. “One of my eyes is shaped like a football.” But the timing didn't seem right.

A few days ago, I came across another good example of my knack for missing the obvious: A Pocket Guide to Vietnam. It’s the size of a passport, and just ninety-four pages long. I remember buying it in a thrift store several years ago, thinking it might come in handy if I ever traveled to Vietnam. I'd leafed through it once or twice, glanced at the black-and-white photographs of Saigon street life, fishermen tying nets, children eating with chopsticks.

There were color illustrations on the back cover, but I’d never paid much attention to them. This time I looked more closely. "Air Force Uniforms of Vietnam," it read. Seemed like a strange thing for a tourist to want to know. I checked the inside covers. More uniforms: Army up front, Navy in the back. It was the title page that finally set me straight. Above the word "Vietnam," was this:

"Armed Forces Information and Education. Department of Defense."

You'd think I would've known a military manual when I saw one. Good thing I’d never been drafted. Send me into a village with a flame thrower, and I’d think I was there to organize a cookout.

The book was published April 5, 1966. On that same day at Town Hall in New York, Timothy Leary had terrified the nation by predicting LSD would do for psychology what the microscope had done for biology. American troops were flooding into Vietnam. Teenagers. Killing, dying, coming home in pieces that would never fit right again. And their parents were convinced that the real enemy was a drop of colorless liquid that could make things look all swirly and blue.

A Pocket Guide to Vietnam apparently was supposed to be comforting as well as informative. Servicemen about to be deployed -- or already trapped in a rice paddy with a jammed M-16 -- were reminded on the first page that they were "helping a brave nation repel Communist aggression.” After that came a brief overview of the country’s history and character, with some valuable insights into the Vietnamese themselves. They tend to be superstitious. Somewhat reserved. Very polite. Rarely punctual. The women are small-boned and elegant. Their place is in the home.

You can't help wondering what a Vietnamese version of the book might've said about us:

"Americans are for the most part a gregarious, family-oriented people. They are inclined to question their leaders, but remain loyal to their country and beliefs. Offer one a bottle of ranch dressing, and you will have made a friend for life."

The book includes a map of Vietnam -- an elongated strip of land that could be Florida's jittery cousin. There’s Da Nang, Dien Bien Phu, the Gulf of Tonkin, Laos, Cambodia -- places familiar to me from the news reports of my childhood, even though I’d never bothered to look up any of them in the family encyclopedia.

Vietnam was never much more than background noise in our house -- hardly mentioned, never discussed. My parents were used to America always being at war someplace or other, and I'd played “army” enough to accept it as inevitable myself. We knew a couple of families who'd lost sons in Vietnam, but the sadness and shock didn’t translate into any kind of activism. War was terrible. What else was new?

My sister had a POW bracelet. I listened to the casualty counts on the radio like they were baseball scores. Fifty-five Americans dead, eighty South Vietnamese, two hundred Viet Cong. Who cared if it wasn't all completely true? It wasn't our problem. We were worried about jobs and homework, and trying to limit my father’s smoking to three packs a day. The Batmobile was awesome. The Monkees kept making jokes I didn’t understand. Large portions of my life were spent misplacing and searching for my new eyeglasses. I was still rotten at sports.

As time went on, and the number of protesters and dead soldiers grew, we did finally catch on that the war was a pointless and horrible mess. The toiletries company my father worked for had a factory in Canada, and he vowed to get me a job there if necessary. In the end, I was still a couple of years from draft age when the U.S. got out of the war. I was relieved. I just couldn't see spending the best years of my life on an assembly line in Manitoba, screwing little caps on bottles of shampoo.

The Pocket Guide contains a thirteen-page Vietnamese language section. Vowel sounds. Regional dialects. Between battling snipers and destroying the countryside by helicopter, who would’ve had time to study those pages? Of course, I suppose that when the day’s work was done, an industrious private could try his hand at a few of the wartime phrases his superiors thought might come in handy. Dinner's ready. I'm going to the movies. It's a mango.

For me, the most poignant thing abut the Pocket Guide is the brief "Do's and Don'ts" section on the very last page. Some examples:

“Do learn what the South Vietnamese have to teach.”
“Don't forget that you are the foreigner.”
“Don't give the impression that the U.S. is running the war.”

And then one final instruction:

"Don't think Americans know everything."

Given the amount of suffering the war caused -- and continues to cause -- on both sides, it's a toss-up whether these guidelines were ever read by whoever wrote them in the first place. There’s probably some corporal at the Pentagon right now whose job it is to update the list whenever necessary. Do’s and Don’ts in Afghanistan. Do’s and Don’ts in Iraq. In North Korea. In Thailand. In the Gulf of Mexico. Do’s and Don’ts in Your Own Back Yard.

So that's it. A Pocket Guide to Vietnam isn't a historical artifact. It's a book of satire.

But maybe I'm missing something. One of my eyes is shaped like a football. And things have always seemed a bit blurry.

4-29-2010

THROTTLE. NIGHTSTICK. LUMBER.

"This goes against everything I believe in," my mother said over the phone. And so begins the story of how I came to own a copy of The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, and how occulolinctus found its way into my vocabulary.

She was disowning me for the same reason mothers have been disowning their sons since the invention of moveable type: I'd taken a job at a men's magazine. The ad in The New York Times had spelled it out: "Must be comfortable with adult material." It was a bit of a stretch for me. I've never been much for dirty pictures. If I come across a photo of a woman hinting that she's naked under her beekeeper suit, sure I'll take a look. But the most erotic thing I own is a hardcover edition of Gray's Anatomy, and even then I've never gotten past the respiratory system. Porn reminds me of those Civil War reenactments -- a playground version of the real thing. And since you already know how it's going to end, what's the point? Garter belts, oiled bodies, Tupperware breasts, they just don't do it for me. When Eve offers me that apple, I want to take it gently from her hand -- not pull it off the end of a leather boot with a nine-inch heel.

I won't mention the name of the magazine, except to say it was famous for publishing letters sent in by its readers describing their wild sexual experiences. People always wanted to know whether those letters were real. They were. A wall of filing cabinets spilled over with them. Whether the things in them actually happened is another matter. I'm not sure how many dental assistants go to work every day wearing vibrating panties.

I'd joke with friends that it was my job to check the letters for physical plausibility. The reality, though, was a little closer to what a Composition 101 teacher has to deal with every day. Our readers might've been bedroom magicians, but they couldn't punctuate their way out of tenth grade. Each morning I'd open the folder on my desk, and start correcting grammar and spelling, adding context, sweetening sentences, and sometimes rewriting every word. The letters were usually hand-written, and often incoherent. It was my job to wrestle them into something that would give readers a cheap thrill. Thirty thousand dollars a year for keeping the men of America in a state of arousal. Another English major bites the dust.

The place itself could've passed for an insurance office. There was no cocktail hour, no clothing-optional swimming pool, no models roaming the halls in bathrobes. There were only the same phrases turning up, it seemed, in every letter:

I never thought I'd be writing to you . . .
I attend a large northeastern university . . .
I'm not gay, but . . . .

It was easy work, and of course there was the fun of coming up with all those synonyms for the penis. Although as it turned out, the best ones came from the readers themselves. Throttle. Nightstick. Lumber. Python. Jackson. Johnson. Hammer. Bishop. Lance. Limb. Oar. And my personal favorite, Mr. Dick.

The best part of the job was that I got to write stories, real ones, with characters and plots. After a lifetime of writing things no one would ever publish, I was now publishing things no one would ever read, with titles like Girth of a Salesman and She Knew Everything About Meat. My best was Dan, Jr., about a future where no penis was allowed to be more than four inches long. A father wants to genetically engineer his son to have at least six, hoping it would set him apart from the other boys and make him grow up tough and strong. Which is more or less the plot of Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue." I guess I could've just written "The Ballad of Dan, Jr.," but what rhymes with genitalia?

For a while I did a feature called "Lessons in Sex," made up of odd bits and pieces I thought might instruct or amuse people. I wrote about things like kokigami, the Japanese art of dressing the penis in a paper costume; or the "Origins of Kissing," which I decided was the work of two Pliestocene sixth graders.

The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices, by Brenda Love, was one of my many reference materials. It was sent to me by God, who steered me right to it in the Strand Bookstore in New York. The pages were full of things I'd never heard of. Some seemed neutral enough, such as satyriasis -- male nymphomania. Others, like acrotomophilia -- an attraction to amputees -- were just plain weird. A few seemed to have our readership in mind. Consider jactitation, which Love defines as arousal from telling others about their sexual exploits.

"On a recent canoeing trip down the Yangtze River . . ."

The Encyclopedia was a big hit with visitors to my apartment. If they didn't spot it on the shelf themselves, I'd bring it to them. My girlfriend at the time zeroed in on occulolinctus: the act of licking of someone's eyeball. It was definitely the most bizarre thing I've ever done, although the strange intimacy of it did carry a minor erotic charge. We broke up over a decade ago, but occasionally I can't help wondering who's licking her eyes these days.

The book sometimes gives the impression that the author just slapped the suffix "-philia" onto anything she thought might turn people on. But it doesn't really matter. The Scrabble possibilities of siderodromophilia alone are worth the time. On the other hand, if you think you are a spectrophiliac -- someone who likes to have sex with spirits, ghosts and ghouls -- your opportunities for online dating will be limited.

I have a confession. This book isn't actually on my shelf anymore. It's in my closet, in the box where I keep my old journals and tax returns. I have to hide it from my daughter. The problem is the drawing on page 206, under the title: "Splitting." How do you explain to a seven-year-old that a person might want to surgically divide their penis into two separate, working halves?

Besides, she's afraid of ghosts.

4-17-2010

DRIVING BUDDHA NUTS

Even if you can't find Dharamsala on a map, you've probably come across this bit of Eastern wisdom: "When you walk, just walk. When you eat, just eat." It's on page 65 of Buddha's Little Instruction Book, which sits humbly on my bookshelf between Gas Station Memories and The Plague. Since Buddah's name is on the cover, I guess it's his teaching. But Lao Tzu probably said it too. Not to mention Confucius, Li Po, Rumi, Yogi Berra, and Saint Paul. My Italian grandmothers, neither of who ever got farther east than Staten Island, had their own version: "When you eat, just eat. And eat."

So there it is. Keep your mind free of distractions. Thoughts have no substance -- let them go. Sounds easy. But I'm sure I would've driven Buddha nuts. As I write this, I'm eating Chinese food, watching basketball highlights on my laptop, listening to a baseball game on the radio, and reading the fine print on one of those oil-change coupons I keep getting in the mail. I'm also wondering if I need to buy a new vacuum cleaner. And if there's a cinnamon-raisin bagel in the freezer for my daughter's breakfast. And whether General Tso was a military legend who really knew his way around a kitchen, or just a made-up character like Dinty Moore.

I'm not apologizing for my inability to focus on one thing at a time. The way I see it, "When you eat, just eat," opens things up for: "When you multi-task, just multi-task." I call it the One-fold Noble Path. The root of all suffering is desire. If your mind is cluttered enough, you hardly notice.

I used to think enlightenment was possible. But I approached it like a contact sport. I lived in fear that my friends would attain it before I did. There were sleepless nights. What if my cousin, the 9/11 conspiracy nut, was already breathing the blessed air of transcendence? I lit candles, burned incense, listened to CDs of chanting Tibetan monks, wrote in my journal about kindness and compassion. But I could not free myself from the bonds of earthly existence. There was no sense of deep understanding, no change in the character of my soul. Rays of light did not emanate from my fingertips. I knew that I was one with all sentient beings, but I still ate sausage with my morning eggs, and lamb chops whenever they were on sale.

Having been unable to find enlightenment, I'm now waiting for enlightenment to find me. I meditate once in a while, but soon the chatter in my head begins to sound like a jackhammer making love to a chain saw. When I've strayed too far from the path of mindfulness, I'll listen to a Pema Chodron audiobook or watch Tich Nat Hahn talk about peace on YouTube. I sometimes read ancient parables about angry hermits who were actually saints, killers and thieves who became holy in the final moments of their lives. But I don't claim to be a Buddhist. I don't have the discipline for it. And besides, where would I start? There's Zen Buddshim, Tibetan Buddhism, Theravada Buddhism, Mahayana, Vajrayana, Vipassana, and of course plain old Buddhism itself. I do like the message, though. Practice mindfulness and compassion, and live in the knowledge that everything and everyone is connected. Treat every lilly as you would your own heart.

I can't recall how I got my copy of Buddha's Little Instruction Book. So I'll make something up. My parents, having heard that I'd gone to see the Dali Lama in Central Park, bought it hoping it would help me find my way back to church. The book is only the size of a postcard and about as thick as a well-made pancake. It must've seemed harmless enough to a pair of old-school Catholics who prayed every chance they got that I someday would return to God -- as if God couldn't reel me in on his own. If they'd put a fraction of that energy into praying I would learn to speak French, my unquiet mind and I would be in Paris right now, sketching Caravaggios at the Louvre.

The title says they're Buddah's instructions, but the author credit goes to Jack Kornfield, a respected Buddhist teacher who has been instrumental in interpreting the lessons of the East for the minds of westerners. I have a few of Kornfield's books, and his clear language and love of the teachings always leads me to a state of ease and possibility. Still, the idea of interpreting Buddhism for Westerners has always left me cold. Once you translate it from Sanskrit, "When desire ends, there is peace," isn't too hard to understand. I'm sure Buddha planned it that way. We're an interesting species. Whether we're killing the messenger or glorifying him, the message itself often ends up getting second billing.

There's a reason I don't open this book much. Despite the value of the words, at times the language seems a little too chummy -- Gather round the bhodi tree and listen up, guys. Maybe that's the interpretation part. But when a holy man tells me the secret of existence, I want him to do it with elegance and charm. Consider Buddha's Flower Sutra, when he explained the meaning of life to his followers by holding up a flower and saying . . . nothing. Now compare that to page 60 of Kornfield's little instruction book: "Just as driving on the right side gives us the freedom to go anywhere, follow this way like the moon in the path of the stars." Not only does that sentence play out like a mobius strip, it seems a little lightweight for a lesson in total awakening. It's more like something a kind-hearted State Trooper might say after letting you off with a warning.

"Every one of us can learn to be awake. It just takes practice. And don't forget to change that headlight."

4-11-2010

CHEAP GUITARS

I was born choking -- two collapsed lungs, heart pumping out of control, gasping for breath in a delivery room at St. Mary's Hospital in Passaic, New Jersey. Being a Catholic hospital, the call went out for a priest to get to me at once. A doctor would've been the more logical choice, it seems. But whatever the plan was, it worked. I managed to make it from near death to an oxygen tent to my mother's arms and, so far, into my '50s.

I hate to admit, it, but in my worst moments -- those times of despair that from time to time threaten to steal my breath away once again -- I've cursed the way things turned out in that delivery room. I shake my fist in rage at the heavens and think: "I almost got there." The white light, the golden slippers, the everlasting bliss of the life after this one. It could've been great. No dead pets, no D in penmanship, no being humiliated in Junior year by a girl who complained that I didn't kiss as well as a Senior. The bursting appendix. The cheap guitars. The crumbling marriages. I had my chance to avoid it all, and I blew it.

But those are selfish reasons to regret being born. Maybe I was just trying to stay clear of what was about to happen in the world at large. The Cold War. Young people being killed for protesting violence and racial prejudice. Long stretches of time in which my beloved New York Yankees played like a group of armless Martians coming across bats and balls for the first time.

For my fortieth birthday, my sister gave me a book entitled What a Year it Was: 1957. It was compiled by Beverly Cohn (who did the same for 1945, 1948, 1950, 1960 . . . you get the idea), and intended in all likelihood to be sold primarily as a gift. I've always been eager to hear about the events that shaped the year I was born, so I was the perfect recipient. I take pride in the fact that I share a birthday with Marie Curie, Joni Mitchell, Albert Camus and Jake Gibbs -- the Mississippi-born catcher for those hapless Yankee teams of the '60s. I still have his baseball card from 1966, worthless on the open market but as valuable to me as my kindergarten graduation certificate, which I keep in a desk drawer along with my earliest attempts to scribble the alphabet.

I pull What a Year it Was off the shelf about once or twice a year, sometimes even leave it on my nightstand for a weeks at a time. It's a pleasure to thumb though but a messy thing too, filled with blurry black-and-white photos of the newsmakers of the day that seem to have been taken from Sputnik -- the Russian satellite that went up a few weeks before I was born, and managed to cause so much chaos on Earth that American astronauts were sent to the moon to remind everyone that wars could be fought anywhere, even in a crater 240,000 miles away. Mostly, though, the book is made up of lists: Oscar winners, Broadway hits, bestsellers, medical breakthroughs. Advertisements for cameras, cars and perfume. Kermit the Frog and The Cat in the Hat appeared in 1957. Toyota sold its first car in America. Spike Lee and Vanna White were born. A color television cost $495. Bath towels were two for a dollar. Ex-Lax was seventy-nine cents.

It's tempting to draw conclusions about a year in which Elvis Presley, The Everly Brothers, Sam Cooke and Buddy Holly all had big hits. But this book points out that Pat Boone managed to score three of the most popular songs of the year as well, including "Friendly Persuasion," with it's medieval chorus, "Lips have I, to kiss thee too." But Boone has always been an easy target. Lets not forget that Andy Williams and Debbie Reynolds also ruled the airwaves during those twelve months. And Johnny Mathis. And Perry Como. And the soundtrack from West Side Story.

I don't really care whether 1957 was a landmark year in history, or just a span of 365 days that saw, among other things, the invention of Purina Dog Chow. Forget that Paul McCartney and John Lennon met just a few months before I was born. What a Year it Was marks the year most pivotal for me. 1957 was the year I faced down death in that hospital in New Jersey. Maybe it was the priest after all.

4-10-2010

STOLEN JEWELS

It was the beginning for me, the big bang. I was moving out of my apartment in Brooklyn, leaving New York for good. I knocked on the door of the woman across the hall. We'd only ever nodded in passing, but I knew she had a little boy. I offered her a box with a dozen or so Hardy Boys books. These were 1960s vintage, the ones with the bright blue back covers listing all twenty thousand titles in the series. She was surprised, wanted to be sure I wasn't giving anything valuable away without realizing it, but grateful as well. As for me, I was a little shaken up by the time I got back to my apartment. I'd never given away a book before. Now I'd handed over twelve in one shot.

They weren't the exact copies of the Hardy Boys books I'd read as a kid. Those had long ago ended up in a landfill somewhere. These were ones I'd picked up over the years at thrift stores and garage sales. I did keep The Mystery of Cabin Island and The Yellow Feather Mystery, though, since those were the first I'd read. I can't remember any of the Hardy Boys plots. They generally followed the same format, although the settings varied. Frank and Joe got to ski, powerboat, climb mountains, fly crop dusters, and wriggle free from the ropes tying them to chairs in the abandoned cave where they've been held since nightfall. These guys couldn't help being seduced by trouble. Their lives were an endless parade of bloodstains, hidden guns and bags of stolen jewels.

At their age, I still needed help to floss.

What makes us keep the books we do? Maybe we want to read them again. Maybe we haven't read them yet, haven't gotten around to finishing them, plan on reading them when we're on vacation or laid up with the flu. We think that someday we'll lend them to deserving friends. Or, it could be that we just like keeping them on the shelf, to the point where they're not even books anymore, just familiar objects -- touchstones of where we've been. Every morning on the way to the kitchen, you see the blue fabric spine with silver lettering: Young Children and Their Drawings. Once in a while you pull it off the shelf, look at the primitive sketch on the cover of a man in a top hat smoking a pipe and riding a horse that looks like a harmonica. You leaf through it. You put it back. You're just happy it's there.

I can't recall many of the books I've gotten rid of. There was a collection of profiles and interviews with people on death row, for one, that I'd like to get back. Then again, I haven't tried to replace it. You can replace records, CDs, worn out videos. But once a book is out of your hands, you have turned a corner and can't go back.

For me, the process usually goes like this: I scan the shelves, my eye lands on the title of a book I'd forgotten was there. I ask myself, "Do I really need to keep that?" And the answer is almost always, "Well, one more year, then we'll see how I feel."

So I've decided to go through the books on my shelves -- the ones that haven't been there even a month, the ones I've kept since college, the ones that seemed to have snuck in while I wasn't looking. Who knows what's between all those covers? That bookmark on page 42 of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Did I just happen to stick it there, or is that as far as I read?

I'm not going to be reading, or re-reading, everything on the shelf. Of course, I might -- depending on the book. But ten minutes could be plenty too. This isn't about reviewing the books I own. It's about trying to figure out why they're still in my life. We start a relationship with a book the moment it comes into our hands, a powerful bond that is hard to break. You open that collection of Bob Dylan interviews under the Christmas tree, and begin reading it while everyone else is still unwrapping their presents. On the other hand, your brother gives you that pop-up Kama Sutra, and your mind goes right to work. Do you burn it? Say you already have a copy? Drop it in a mailbox in a moment of whimsy? Or keep it on the shelf as perverse evidence of how someone can spend hours in a store filled with tens of thousands of books, and end up buying one for you that is so inappropriate, it is almost an act of genius.

So that's it. What I want to do is touch base with the books in my possession, those millions of pages that have survived moves and purges and coffee stains, changes of interest and taste. Maybe there's something to be discovered about why they're still here.

Or maybe I'll just figure out which ones are the next to go.