pamelagmusings

Musings

Pam's Musings

My writing nook at my house in Laramie, WY.

My writing nook at my house in Laramie, WY.

A long time ago or once upon a time, stifled by the desire to get everything right on paper, rendered immobile by my inner and nasty critic, I was encouraged to read Bird By Bird, by Anne Lamott.  I have read it numerous times and often wish I could commit it to memory.  Ah, the perfection that comes from the memorized verse.  Lamott strikes out at the need and desire for perfection.  Instead, she pushes me to embrace the messiness of writing, to muse.  She tells me to let go and not worry about destination or the big picture.  She set before me the creed by which my musings are written, by which my inner wild woman craves to live:  “Don’t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right.  Just dance.”  When I muse, and this is a necessary part of my writing process, I don’t look.  I just write.  I hope you enjoy these musings.  I hope you muse as well.  

Stories Between the Pages, January & February 2025

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It was a chilly night, and I eagerly curled into the thick comforter and reached for my library’s used book sale find—an Elizabeth Strout novel.  As I fanned through the pages, as I always do before starting a book anew, a white slip of paper fluttered out.  A store receipt, it bore no interest.  I thought to crumble it but was drawn to the details.  My imagination churned, and a story of its own began to emerge, one tucked by a former reader of the book into a comfortable and secure little place of its own.  A story within a story.

Briefly, and with some embellishment, I offer this story gleaned from a receipt’s skeleton.  The book was purchased at Denver International Airport’s Tattered Cover Bookstore on 5/18/2018, at 8:54 pm.  That would have been a Friday evening.  I will call our main character Sandra.  Sandra, an avid reader, had of course finished her previous book during the plane ride from, let’s say, a city on the northern east coast.  Facing a long night in one of the nearby hotels before her Saturday morning flight departure, Sandra knew she needed another book to read. Or perhaps she was grabbing a present to present for her dear friend who was just now driving into DIA’s terminal area for flight arrivals.  But at 8:45 pm?  Wouldn’t that purchase have occurred the day before, unless Sandra was one of those last-minute people?

The cashier at The Tattered Cover was named Katelynne.  Such a musical name could only suit an animated young clerk who wore a long dress of swirls of reds and purples and dangling earrings that caught the welcoming store’s bright lights.  “I haven’t a clue,” Sandra might have said, and Katelynne replied, “Something like a warm cup of tea with just the right amount of an old country spice?”

Katelynne swirled to a shelf and back to the register.  “This—” she held up the book, “is what you want.  This is Elizabeth Strout. Some people don’t believe it, but you can read her books out of order.”  Katelynne looked attentively at Sandra.  “Even you, sweet,” she added, peering at Sandra’s crisp, tailored outfit. 

The price of the book in 2018 was $17.00 plus tax = $18.30.  Katelynne slipped the receipt into the book and snapped it shut.  Still holding the book, she reached out and took Sandra’s hand. “Whatever you need this book for,” Katelynne said, “it will be perfect.  Do you need a bag?”  Sandra did not pull her hand away.  “No,” said Sandra, thank you so much.”  She accepted the book with its little white receipt and left for her gate.  The receipt indicated Transaction 79538.  “Thank you for shopping with us,” it read.

We can learn or imagine so much about previous owners or borrowers of books.  Abundant redactions appeared in a book that I slipped off a library shelf years ago.  At first the reader had used a black marker to redact what might have been considered bad words.  As I turned numerous pages at a time, the marker was used more freely, marking out whole paragraphs.  Toward the end, thick black X’s rendered hopeless any guess of content.  I thought it my civic duty to take the book to one of the librarians.  “Oh my,” she said, “now there’s anger of an entirely different nature.”  Well put, I thought. 

To the contrary, there is utter joy in positioning a pen of good quality over the poetic phrases or sentences crafted by an exquisite writer such as Mary Oliver and carefully, slowly underlining words that reach out and touch the heart.  A friend spoke for both of us when she said, “I cannot read without a pen in my hand.” And what might future readers think of our attempts at such a show of emphasis?  Recently, a friend gave me Mary Oliver’s book titled Upstream.  It was in excellent condition but for neat, controlled underlining that never detracted from my own reading.  But didn’t I dare to read with what Emily Dickinson might call “slant”?  I began to read aloud, emphasizing the matter marked by the reader of time long ago.  The reader’s pen illuminated the importance of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s discussion of “spiritual awakening” and the description of prayer as an “elite mystical practice.”  The underlining highlighted Oliver’s perspective on humans’ aging: “that one’s time is more gone than not, and what is left waits to be spent gracefully and attentively, if not quite so actively.”   The underlining grew heavy in Oliver’s discussion of “the beginning of descent.”  “It is the news of personal again….  It is the news that no one is singular, that no argument will change the course.”   An interest in prayer and mortality—what do we make of that?  Who might we make of that?  Might we make anything of ourselves from the underlining of unknown others?

And do we wonder if, in our wanderings over the planet, we might actually encounter someone who left behind, in the pages of a book, their personality?  Their story?  Many years ago, I was an undergraduate at Mary Washington College in Virginia.  As an English major, I was required to purchase a significant number of large and weighty books.  I often sought the “used books” section of the library for my reading requisites.  One of my purchases of which I was quite fond—Eighteenth Century Poetry & Prose—included inside the front cover the penned name of a previous student owner: Sandy Stout.  I did not know her.  Nearly thirty years later, at a high school teachers’ conference in northern Wyoming, I looked at the name of the keynote speaker and made it a point to connect with her after her presentation.  “Yes,” Sandy Stout said, “I did attend Mary Washington, and I did sell back that book.  It’s so nice to meet you.  Let’s sit together at lunch.”