1
My friend did not hear the sleek silent new electric bus coming. She had stepped off a curb—the bus threw her into the air. A woman with many children dashed to her rescue. Although my friend was shaken up and bruised, no bones were broken and she went to work the next day. Within the same week, in an entirely different part of town, my friend returned to find her parked car had been hit, the side mirror snapped off. A note of apology, with insurance information, was folded under the windshield wiper. The car had been hit by a bus.
2
I had lunch with the president of Finland while wearing a gray linen shift dress I had purchased for fifty cents in a thrift shop in Rock Springs, Wyoming.
3
Michael pushed a shopping cart filled with boring Home Depot items—wires, hoses, plumbing connectives, a can of primer—toward his car. He removed his hands from the cart for a moment to reach into his pocket for keys and a man dashed up from behind and began rolling the cart away. Hey, wait a minute! Michael called out. What are you doing?
The man said, Finders, Keepers.
4
Way up north in Aroostook County, Maine, the town library was getting rid of books—massive heaps of books lay scattered willy-nilly on long tables with a sign—TAKE ANYTHING YOU WANT—FREE. Why? I asked the librarian. What is wrong with these books? I stared at the library shelves. They weren’t stuffed. We don’t want them, the librarian said. They are of no use to us anymore. Does that mean no one checked them out for a while? She shrugged, exhibiting no remorse. But a great sadness swept over me and I began browsing. Hardbacks mostly—biographies, Adlai Stevenson and Gandhi, novels, short stories, expeditions—mostly early- and mid-twentieth century editions. Some had engraved-style covers and were even older. I thought of my brother-in-law in New Zealand who collects and sells books about adventure and I hiked straight down to the Dollar Store to buy the most heavy-duty black trash bags available. Good thing I’d been assigned to work in that town for a whole week.
Every day I visited the library and packed a bag with books, then hauled it up the hill to where I was staying. I asked my hosts if I might leave the books in the front hallway so I didn’t have to lug them all up the stairs—my room was in the attic. They stared at me dubiously. I urged them to get down to the library.
At the middle school where I was working, I pressed the writing students. Hey people, you must get over to the library. Do it today. Great books are sitting there free waiting for you to claim them. You won’t even have to return them.
They stared at me. I never saw a single student at the library.
On Friday after school, I arrived to find the long tables gone. The librarian pointed to the back door when she saw me. They’re outside now, she said.
A mountain of lovely books lay on the ground behind the library, recklessly pitched.
I felt dizzy, sick. Marched back inside.
What happens to them next?
They go to the town dump.
My brain was whirling. Was there a criminal code for this?
The next day my husband would return from his own work in Canada to collect me and drive home to Texas. He would be shocked to see how my baggage had grown.
One of the books I took home with me was about a 1920s man who walked alone across Africa, something my bookseller brother-in-law had also done. This would be a perfect present for him. Later I heard he sold that book, that slightly tattered book with the empty library card pocket still inside its cover (which they say reduces the value), for $500.
5
I mailed a letter to my friend Howard Peacock, who liked to strut by the river between our dwellings, staring into water, meditating on turtles and cranes. Howard had a long white beard and a deeply southern, elegant way of speaking. He rented a small apartment in the Granada, an old downtown building which used to be a hotel. Howard gave me his dead wife’s casserole cookbook, which I never used because it was mostly meat. But I wanted to thank him, so mailed him a letter. I could just have walked down to the river and handed it to him. I also thanked him for saving the Big Thicket in east Texas which everyone said he and his late wife had fairly singlehandedly preserved, throwing themselves down in front of bulldozers, and a good thing, because those forests are profound and precious like all great things people struggle to preserve. He never mentioned my letter till five years had passed and he called. Did you write me a letter five years ago?
Uh, I think so. Maybe. Why? I got it today. Nearly five years to the day since you wrote it. Seriously. I’m mailing the envelope back to you right now as proof. It had taken my letter five years to travel six blocks.
I carried the envelope with both our addresses on it to the post office and asked the clerk, Do you have any idea where this letter might have been for five whole years? The clerk gazed at me with his deep sad eyes and said, Nope. It could have been anywhere.
6
Your parents met each other. Anybody met anybody.
Out of all the possible people who might have been born, you were born.
Constant miracles. But who remembers them?
Before the great film critic Roger Ebert died, he said, I believe I was perfectly all right before I was born and I think I’ll be fine later too.
We walk around the block, stride up the hillside. Is it this year or last? Something strange is happening. We’re so anxious but deep down, in the heart place of time, our lives are resonant, rolling. They’re just waiting for us to remember them. They are very patient and quiet. We are here, so deeply here, and then we won’t be.
And it is the most unbelievable thing of all.
