Chapter 24. Bookends

We’ve all read lots of books.  Some we’ve read just for the hell of it.  Others because we had to.  But there are the very few, I think, that resonate for a lifetime. They’re like bookends on knowledge.

When I was living in Kansas after grad school, I read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.  And, until yesterday, I believed it was the greatest book I had ever read.  

Pilgrim showed me the world of the small: the insects, larvae safely cocooned, raindrops on leaves. I learned to look at the world in a whole new way, in small bits at a time, wondering how they fit together In the larger scheme.  I read Pilgrim during my first grown up job which taught me about the disappointment of working for the government.   I was hired as the Assistant Director of the Flint Hills Agency on Aging, an organization created to manage the newly adopted Older Americans Act.  Washington had divided states into areas and the first thing the government as going to do was ram a food access program down the throats of the nation’s elderly.  Trouble for us was that we were in the middle of farmland Kansas and the people we met had no use for a government food program.  They needed access to medical care.    So, the director of the agency and I, naïve optimists we were, planned for a grant that would cover a mobile med-van and would travel to the rural reaches of central Kansas delivering preventive services.

We submitted our proposal and were promptly denied.  We’re creating places where elderly can go eat and then they can access services from there.  See?  All centralized.  Again, we stressed that our old people were farmers or lived in farming communities and didn’t need food.  They had food and, by the way, they didn’t want to eat the frozen Tyson meals the government was offering (oh, whose boondoggle was that?).  

So, while we were losing the battle of common sense, I began reading Pilgrim because that’s what I felt like:  a pilgrim in central Kansas.  Now, the good news for me was that as I was reading about the kingdom of the miniscule, I was living amongst them.  Kansas had more bugs, insects, amphibians, and birds than I had ever seen in Colorado.  Oh, Coloradans complain about mosquitos but trust me on this, Coloradoans have never ever never seen as many strange bugs and insects as exist in Kansas.  So, as I read about all this life happening right at my feet,, I began looking at it.  I’d go out to Tuttle Creek Reservoir with my dog, Cruiser R. Roozer and we’d hunt for praying mantis.  I’d look under broad-leafed plants and witness the cocoons of a million spiders soon to hatch. I’d examine the caterpillar wondering what new form would arise from its amazing metamorphosis.  And I’ve kept this wonderment with me throughout my life.  Each time I walk through our garden, I check to see what crawlies have dined off our plants or reproduced and left their treasure on a stem or under a leaf.  Pilgrim showed me a world I never knew existed.

So, Pilgrim became sort of a book-end for my literary life.   I had stopped looking for my other book-end until Netflix threw me a lifesaver.   100 Years of Solitude.  I watched the 8-part series of the first half of the book. I was hooked so I began reading the book and, yesterday, I finished it.  I absorbed this book on a very personal level.  Unlike my life when I read Pilgrim, I had the time to invest, analyze, re-read, contemplate the many study guides and essays written about it. What Annie Dillard taught me about the minutia, Gabriel García Márquez taught me about the perceived grandness of our lives.  Our collective lives.  No matter where we live, what we do, how much money we have, we have the shared and inevitable experience of decay.  Our own mortality, the decay of communities, the destruction of dreams.  We share it but live it in solitude.  Each must face it in a different, lonely way. Each of us has the opportunity to impact and shape our own universe.  Each of us are ultimately trapped by its solitude. The brilliance of 100 Years was its expanse.  In one novel, Marquez was able to articulate literally everything all at once.  Time was circular and entrapping, people were unable to avoid the mistakes of the past, the future was eternally hopeful and doomed. 

I’ve written about the beauty and soul-fulfilling senses of our garden.  It gives us that but not without us giving it something in return.  This past summer, the garden asked more of me than I could give.  I couldn’t tend to it and without constant care, the garden began to die.  I noticed small things with my Annie Dillard eyes: weeds pop up faster than I could eliminate them.  Furniture seemed ragged in spots. I left leaves that had fallen as protection to the insects that need it, but the dogs dragged in the leaves, and I found myself spending more time sweeping than enjoying.  I didn’t rake them myself.  I hired it out.  It gave me no gain to see the 41 bags of packed autumn leaves and it gave me less pleasure to haul them to the compost dump.  It was work without meaning.

This spring, the garden will try to emerge with itself intact, raising dandelion heads to the sun and calling for me to care for it.  I don’t know if I have the will anymore.  I don’t know if I have the energy to rescue it from decay and disarray.  Marquez tells me that one person can temporarily win against the inevitable.  I know it’s worth the fight.  Our own garden can once again be home to the yellow butterflies, the singing birds, the plants opening their flowers to welcome the pollinators.   

Spring will inevitably reveal my omissions. And it will reveal them with my newly acquired Gabriel Garcia Marquez eye: will I beat back the decay and rot one more time?  We’ll see.  We’ll see.