Notes on Childhood

Simply put, however badly I am doing my adulthood, my childhood was worse.

 

For months, several years ago, I considered doing a book about Nicholas Coleman Pickard, my grandmother’s grandmother. I had been wading through the family history, trying to find out who everybody else was. In the process, I found a clue to who I am.

 

Consider: my grandmother was born in 1883. Queen Victoria died in 1901: my grandmother would have been eighteen when Her Supreme Majesty (a little nod to my husband, who takes this all very seriously) died. But the Victorian Age—however you define it—lingered in the United States, and all of the colonies much longer. 

 

And so my mother was raised by a Victorian, and in a Victorian house. Or at least, something close. And then she was raising me, in the late 50’s and 60’s. Which meant:

 

Rules: lots of rules. I got up at exactly the same time and ate the same meal and said the same things and went to school on foot, which was perfectly safe, although I now know that it wasn’t. But because we didn’t know it wasn’t safe, it was—and if you can understand that, then you understand the 50’s. The classroom had the damn flag of the United States (we’re coming to that) and we said allegiance to it. The little desks were magical affairs: the seat was joined to the desk, which opened up so that you could store all your books, papers and school supplies in there. And whatever else you might want to stick in there, because I had found these neat leaves on the way to school and I thought I could use them if I had a science report. To stick on the cover. Which needs to look really good, since the report is going to be pretty “C” material. Why? Because I will have spent all my time making the cover (much more fun), and not doing the report, and if you can understand that…

 

…then you understand me.

 

So there are leaves in there, and also the orange that my mother put into the lunch sack a couple of weeks ago because I really need Vitamin C. Or because my mother needed someone to eat the damn orange, since she had bought it and now she has it and nobody else is eating the orange so here it is. In my sack. And not just an orange, but a MORAL OBLIGATION! Because oranges are not cheap—not in the midwestern United States in the year 1965. No, they actually are making a transition from being the rarity of my grandmother’s day (her one Christmas gift—HER ONLY CHRISTMAS GIFT-- was often just a simple orange, which she would peel reverentially and then section carefully, and then offer to her dear brothers and sisters the pieces. They would say no, of course, but how dear, how sweet of your blessed grandmother to think of them BEFORE HERSELF. She didn’t expect thirty brightly and expertly wrapped gifts under the Christmas tree! She didn’t wonder if this year you would actually get a BIKE, and not some stupid underwear. OHHH, YOUR GRANDMOTHER…..

 

The problem being that I hate oranges. Actually, I don’t—they taste good on my mouth. But I don’t like peeling oranges and I don’t know why. I just don’t. My hands get sticky and it’s too much work….

 

TOO MUCH WORK! WHEN YOUR GRANDMOTHER WAITED AN ENTIRE YEAR…..

 

So I can’t throw the orange away, because that would be like spitting in my grandmother’s face—and I really love my grandmother—and now the orange has assumed the moral weight of the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, and every other sacred text ever written or indeed ever to be written by man.

 

And giving it away?

 

HAH!

 

So of course I put the orange away in my desk, as something that I will definitely eat when I have achieved the moral purity and devoutness of soul which the orange demands. Which means I am waiting for nirvana and did I mention that the orange appeared two weeks ago? Or maybe more, because I really don’t remember when I put the orange in the desk. But it is sort of odd that every time I open my desk, people start saying, “Phew, what stinks around here?”

 

Well, well—guess some other people haven’t achieved nirvana either! Picky, picky! Always have to have their noses—quite literally—in other people’s business!

 

Though it is odd that I actually haven’t seen that orange. In fact, there doesn’t seem to be an orange at all.

 

Though I certainly can smell something.

 

Anyway, I probably can’t see the orange because in addition to the leaves, there are some other things as well. Newspapers, since some kids have started to wrap their books in newspapers, and is that cool or is that nerdy? Not sure, but one day when I was verging toward the “cool” end of the judgment, I grabbed some newspapers, just in case. When inspiration comes, you know….

 

So there’s that and several other lunches as well, because the peanut butter sandwich that I negotiated for as an unrelenting part of my lunch in place of the damned fried eggs my mother wanted to give me for breakfast ….well, I’m tired of peanut butter sandwiches. And I’m still fighting the issue of those damned eggs. Why did I have to eat them every damn morning? Who set that rule? Why not sugared doughnuts, which is what Sven’s mother gives him, sometimes.

 

SVEN’S MOTHER IS SWEDISH.

 

Well! That answers that, since we are Norwegian, and the Norwegians hate the swedes (lower case mistaken but now intentional) because the swedes stole all of our iron and then forged steel and then became a bigshot in the neighborhood and conquered Norway and held us in hideous subjection for years until dear Queen Maud—who was, by the way, the daughter of her Supreme Majesty—married Olaf or Knut or somebody and let us be independent as well as loyal subjects to Her Majesty.

 

SO! WE’LL HEAR NO MORE ABOUT THE SWEDES!

 

Anyway, that explains the other lunches with the peanut butter sandwiches and the leaves and the newspaper and the orange, which is in there, obviously, but not. In fact, there’s a whole lot of stuff in my desk, not just the ghost or the divine essence of the orange past or…

 

…it really does kind of stink, doesn’t it?

 

Oh, and the teacher, Miss Steensland (who I like because she is—guess what!—Norwegian) has smelled it too. And now she is telling the class how proud, how very proud, she is of this class, because we are the neatest class she has ever taught (and she started back in the days of dear Queen Maud). Nor does she mean “neat” in the sense of “cool.” No, she means orderly, well-arranged, tidy, clean, spotless, immaculate, without stain or blemish and…do I need to get the thesaurus? So that’s why we are about to have…

 

DESK INSPECTION!

 

Oh fuck, I say, even though I can’t say it because I didn’t know the word because I am eight. But I’m saying it now, still cowering at the thought of Miss Steensland (who will undoubtedly tell Queen Maud, who very likely will include it in one of the many, many letters that she writes to her dear mother, HER SUPREME MAJESTY)

 

So the blood is pounding in my ear and my mouth is dry and my palms are sweaty but wait. I’ve played this rodeo before so I quickly arrange all the books—which have shredded leaves all over them and in them (don’t know how that happened)—in one organized pile. Then I find the one largest and emptiest dead lunch bag, and put all the other dead lunches into that bag. So now I just have one “lunch,” which I will toss after lunch break is over. I probably won’t eat anything at all today, which is a little upsetting, but I won’t upset Miss Steensland and the Queen and Her Supreme Majesty. Who is very, very happy because Mindy Peckham has presented her with just the cleanest desk, and all of her colored pencils are arranged in order by their place in the color spectrum. So that when Mindy is consulting her color chart, which she has carefully taped to the inside of the desk drawer (such a nice touch), all she has to do….

 

OH, Miss Steensland is so happy!

 

So she moves away from Mindy and now is only two desks away from me, and so I squeeze the damn lunches together as hard as I can and that’s when I hear something plop and…

 

…it’s the damn orange!

 

Yes, now seriously shrunken. It looks, I observe, strangely like a walnut, though blacker and a lot smellier. Really putrid, in fact.

 

Whew, does it stink!

 

Of course, it could also be a shrunken pygmy brain….

 

So I’m thinking about that, and then I realize that Miss Steensland is standing over me. 

 

“And what do you have, Marc?”

 

So I remember salvation, which appears here in the form of a hole, an inch in diameter, which is cut into the metal bottom of every desk in the entire world, including mine. So I grab the shrunken orange / walnut / pygmy brain and I stick it in the hole and put the bag of dead lunches (and some newspaper and leaves that really did get shredded, somehow) over the orange and I slam my fist down.

 

Hoping it will fall, I will catch it, and put it in my crotch.

 

It doesn’t fall.

 

It gets stuck in the hole.

 

Which Miss Steensland can see and so can all of the class, because she has summoned them all over to look with horror at what a messy desk I have.

 

And now, I have not only failed in my obligation of the Holy Orange, more sacred than all the prayers and mediatations that have been offered up to Christ, Buddha, Om, Mohammed and the Great Spirit. Now, I have descended to the temporal level, the everyday level, and I have killed any joy that Miss Steensland might have had in her decades-long teaching career. Not to mention…

 

DEAR QUEEN MAUD AND HER SUPREME MAJESTY!

 

But no time to think of that, because guess what! Miss Steensland has had to do the one thing that in HER ENTIRE LIFE AS A TEACHER she has never had to do. And there is now the maintenance man, standing over me, and he is watching me empty my desk of the books and the pencils and all the stuff that should be there (including that color chart that we all made and that dear Mindy…). And now he is lifting the damn desk, with its newspapers and leaves and dead lunches and most especially the more-and-more odiferous orange. There is no hope for the desk--“you’ll  never get the stink out of the wood,”--the maintenance guy tells Miss Steensland. So he’s taking it straight out to the dumpster.

 

Oh, and they give me a new desk!

 

Can you imagine!

 

A perfectly good new desk to a terrible boy who destroyed his old desk and the lives of his teachers, ancestors, Queen Maud and Her Supreme Majesty.

 

That was my childhood.

 

       

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   

 

 

 

  

 

On Killers and Covers

I asked him what it was like to be nineteen, since I was curious and very far from nineteen. I was nineteen in 1975, and that was half a century ago. And he was an engaging 19-year-old who had come to ask me why I was binding a book at a poetry slam.

 

“It sucks, man,” said Pedro (I had learned his name by then).

 

OK—that part hadn’t changed much. It sucked for me, too, but for entirely different reasons. My life, I imagined at age 19, was in ruins. I didn’t know that that was the usual state of things: my life would be in ruins for as long as I let it be in ruins, or for as long as it kept bothering me. The first step in having a “perfect” life turned out to be in not caring whether you were doing it right, whether it was working, whether it made any sense. 

 

But I was interested in Pedro, since he doesn’t have now, apparently, what I had and took for granted.

 

The day after I posed the question to Pedro, a transgendered person poked his automatic weapon through an open window in a church in Minneapolis. The killer’s name was Robin Westman, and she had apparently attended the school attached to Annunciation Catholic Church. Here’s the yearbook photo from when Robin was Robert.

 

 

The Robert Westman became Robin Westman, but there must have been a lot of changes beyond the sex reassignment. Robin killed herself after shooting the kids (and injuring 17 others), so we can’t ask her—what happened? We can’t satisfy our need to explain what is, at first glance, the inexplicable.

 

There might be no explanation, or it might be that we can’t bear to look at what we’ve become. Because it wasn’t Robert Westman or Robin Westman or anybody else that killed the kids and maimed the aged. It was the United States pulling the trigger. It was what we had become that killed us, or will kill us in the uncertain days to come.

 

We might as well celebrate it, since we don’t want to do anything about it. The solution is simple, and we all know it. The solution is to get the guns off the streets, and out of the hands of Robin. But apparently the only thing in the constitution that has any worth is the skewed reading of the Second Amendment, with its supposed assurance that any American at any moment has the right to grab an unbelievably powerful gun and shoot children.

 

We could prevent this.

 

We choose not to.

 

We like to kill kids.

 

If we could accept it, we might be able to change it. Instead, we look at the killer and find the clues to our liking that will explain why the (inevitably) quiet, polite kid went bad.

 

I say—get the guns off the street.

 

The Trump people say—see? Transgendered! Antisemitic posts in a journal! Calls for the death of Trump!

 

Wonderful—but why was the journal written (apparently) in English but using Cyrillic letters? Is there any meaning to it? Did he want to hide his thoughts from anyone stumbling onto his journal?

 

Our need to find “meaning” in this massacre is the problem. Pedro, the nineteen-year-old I spoke to at the poetry slam, grew up in a world where a shotgun poking through a church window was, if not normal or expected, certainly imaginable. I would have been going up to the gun nozzle, puzzled at what it was, and if anyone sticking the thing through a window needed help. Pedro would have been barricading the door and diving under desks.

 

Pedro was interested in books, and we talked for a bit about book covers. His favorite—or at least one of his favorites—was well known to me. Here it is:

 

 

The cover has entered into the collective conscience, apparently. It’s arresting, certainly, and I have used it for the cover of the slipcase that I put books into. In fact, I hate book covers, because they’re a symbol, to me, of how warped our culture has become.

 

Books are commercial items that must be produced (happy to help there!), targeted for marketing, directed towards an audience, and finally festooned with anything that will get the book off the shelf (hopefully passing through a cash register in the process). The back cover is filled with blurbs from The New York Times or from notable persons. The image on the front cover is curated and captivating. The cover, in short, is all about selling.

 

I want my books to be beautiful, not effective. The cover needs to protect the book and be pleasing to the eye. The spine—which I enclose in sheepskin—should feel soft in your hand. The pages should be thick. There should be—and God knows in my books there will be—a host of imperfections that speak of human hands. True—at some point the book will leave your hands and be put on a shelf with its brothers. I’ll print a bit of brown cardboard stock and attach the author’s name and title to the spine, but that’s about it.

 

Pedro didn’t ask me about cover jackets, and didn’t have to hear my screed / screech against them. A couple of decades ago, cover jackets were all the rage, and collectors paid twice as much for a book in bad condition with a cover jacket than they paid for the same book in excellent condition but without a cover jacket. It made sense, since most collectors don’t read. They just collect.

 

It's a wonderful thing, of course, for the people who read. The people who are interested in the book. The people who (rightly, in my view) detach the cover jacket and pitch it.

 

There were at least three approaches to book covers. For most of the history of books, covers were meant to be functional and beautiful. A marbled page on back and front, a leather spine—that was it. Watch any BBC history documentary filmed in an ancient library—the books are sober and drab. They were beautiful when young and the colors were fresh. They become somber and dignified as time passes.

 

There was a brief moment when hard covers became beautiful, and when some sort of détente was arranged between commerce and art. It was the Victorian age, of course, and here’s a nice example.

 

 

It’s beautiful, it’s functional, and it took a bit more time and effort. Besides the design, it had to be printed on book cloth and put on the boards of the cover. It stayed there as long as it had a cover. It was not some piece of paper that was an advertisement posing as a cover. It might even have been art itself, or suggestive of it. Here’s the 1855 cover:

 

 

Dude—the guy’s NAME doesn’t even appear on the cover. Apparently everybody in 1855—or at least everybody in 1855 who wanted to buy Leaves of Grass—knew that Walt Whitman had written the damn thing. And nobody suggested that the ornamentation on the capital letters was—perhaps—just a bit distracting, if not actually indecipherable. Speaking of which, the “of” doesn’t amount to much either.

 

But I support it, though the Victorian book cover had the same fate occur to it as occurred to the rest of society at large. It became cheap and commercialized, and in the end, we were all buying books that looked like this:

 

 

My God, did Whitman really get to be that old? Did they exhume the body to take a picture of it? I know William Carlos Williams (who wrote the introduction, as if the book weren’t enough) and I have heard of Malcolm Cowley (whose blurb escaped the back cover and moved to the front). The little blurb for The Modern Library is distracting. I would decrease the picture size and put a proper border around it. I would increase the size of the bottom textbox with Whitman and Williams’ names. I would make all sorts of adjustments, but am I a graphic artist or a bookbinder? 

 

I might—and often have—come up with something far worse than the image above.

 

So screw it. I am not my clothes, and the book is not its cover. We just have to be presentable.

 

Pedro had that conversation with me, and then drifted off into the poetry. I met him later in the evening, and he was with his father.

 

A very nice guy.

 

Younger than I am.

 

We spoke, we said farewell, and I left with a nice memory. A father with his son at a poetry slam.

 

Robin Westman had parents too, and they opened the door to the police, who combed the house looking for clues to answer the question. The parents left the house that had sheltered the killer as the police looked for motives.

 

Pedro’s father took him to a poetry slam. Westman’s parents, unbelievably, seemed to have left the house to the police and found themselves sitting on the curb. The neighbors saw them there, looking blankly at the street in front of them.

 

Looking for a parade that never came.

 

Dawdling by Walden Pond

Put something down on paper, I told myself, though I have no paper in front of me—only this old laptop. Just start to write, I tell myself: there’s a delete function. It’s like priming a well—throw some water down there and see if any will come back up.

 

Speaking of back, there’s Abrego García. He was one of over two hundred immigrants who got rounded up and sent to El Salvador. A judge had ordered that the plane taking him and the others be grounded. If they were in the air, they were supposed to turn around. There was no ambiguity in the order.

 

There was no ambiguity in the response, either. The Trump administration ignored the court order. It was one of the first signs that this administration was completely lawless and felt great about it.

 

It’s hard to know why Abrego García, and not any of the other “detainees” captured the public eye. Every story had its heartbreak, often appealing to one person but not to another. I worried about Abrego García, but I also worried about Andry Hernández, a gay makeup artist from Venezuela. He got sent to El Salvador as well, and only got out last month to return home to Venezuela.

 

These are the two guys I know about—what about the other two hundred people who got kidnapped? What about the thousands of people who are facing a decision today—do I risk going to Home Depot, to stand around and look for work as a day laborer? Do I go to mow the lawn or pick the fruit? Or do I stay home and cower? But for how long? And who feeds my family if I do?

 

My Monday morning, which I think is horrible, is a day at the beach compared to this. I leave my apartment and walk thirty feet down the sidewalk—a house is being renovated on my block. Which means that Richard, who is Cuban and lived in the states briefly, is at risk. So are the other guys who work there. Always, in the past, the gate to the building they’re working on would be open. Now, it’s shut—though you can hear them working there—and locked.

 

It's relentless, and it’s designed that way. It is, in fact, what I always feared: a vast, unyielding network that is designed to remove a certain number of people every day. Once in the system, you are completely unprotected—it won’t matter if you’re a US citizen or not, if you’re here legally, if your tattoos are just tattoos, not gang symbols.

 

So Abrego García got rounded up and sent to El Salvador. We all followed his case, and a United States senator, Chris Van Hollen went down to Central America to see him. They met at the hotel von Hollen was staying at, not at the prison camp Abrego García had been sent to. 

 

I watched Abrego García speak to the senator, and thought, “great—but what about the others?” Then the senator left, and Abrego rotted a couple more months in prison.

 

Sorry, he wasn’t rotting. He was being tortured (actively) and held in subhuman conditions (passively). And when he was released, in early June, the story should have been over. But he was arrested again, this time on charges that he was helping to smuggle people into Texas. Unbelievably, the judge ordered Abrego García to be detained in prison for his own protection. The idea was that he was safer from the government in prison than on the streets.

 

Even that didn’t work. Abrego García was taken into custody by ICE again this morning, and faces possible deportation to Uganda.

 

Uganda?

 

I don’t know much about Uganda, other than that it’s in Africa, it had a murderous dictator (Idi Amin) for a decade or so, and it’s nowhere I want to go. This is probably about all Abrego García knows as well, since he is from Venezuela, and probably doesn't speak great English.

 

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the United States government had to “facilitate” the release of Abrego García from El Salvador. The Trump administration disregarded the order for months; the court did nothing. 

 

The message couldn’t be clearer. I have blue eyes and fair skin, as well as an American passport. I am no more safe than Abrego García. I write critically of Trump and all his minions, and occasionally Blogger (the site hosting this blog) will “flag” my posts. Nobody is reading this blog, but it is being surveilled. My name could appear on a list of subversives, I could be detained at the airport, I could be sent to El Salvador and sleeping in the same bunk as Abrego García.

 

I’m not safe from my own government.

 

It’s a change, because I used to rely on the government. I wanted them to tell me about the hurricanes, at least, or the flash floods that might take out the summer camp that I sent my kid to. I want them to keep the mercury in the thermometers and out of the rivers. I’d like them to teach my kids, and yes, slavery is wrong. Teach them that, too.

 

So Abrego García is having a lousy morning, and I am having a great morning (because I am not in prison, in Uganda or anywhere else) but am not feeling it. I could go to the beach, today, and probably should.

 

Or I could consult ChatGPT or Replika—two site using artificial intelligence to provide (among other things) counseling to teenagers. Kids aren’t talking to anybody, not even themselves, and they probably don’t have the money to hire a therapist. So they are taking their mental health to…

 

to… 

 

…a computer program that is highly “intelligent” but not human. The New York Times says that the services offered by artificial intelligence are occasionally better than real therapists.

 

I’m saying no to the artificial therapists, and my Puritan ancestors are telling me “no” to the beach, as well. Instead, I’m going to be binding a copy of Walden, which is crazy because I have no interest in Walden and less interest in Henry David Thoreau.

 

We read him “then,” I told myself. “Then’ is the 1960’s, when the biggest issue (and it was big) was a war in Southeast Asia that we shouldn’t have gotten into and couldn’t get out of. We read Thoreau because he had spent a night in jail, for not paying his taxes to support the Mexican-American War. 

 

Thoreau got a visit, too—not from a U.S. senator but from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who reportedly dragged himself into town and shouted, “Thoreau, what are you doing in jail?”

 

Thoreau shouted back, “Emerson, what are you doing OUT of jail?”

 

Thoreau went on to write On Civil Disobedience, and it got around. Gandhi read it. Martin Luther King read. And we all read it, back in the 1960’s—all of us who were marching and protesting.

 

How quaint it seems.

 

However vile Richard Nixon was, he was one of us. He was a human—a piano-playing alcoholic who beat his wife and sobbed drunkenly in front of the oil portraits of Washington and Lincoln. Right—the drunk I became and am now makes me empathize with Nixon. But why do I feel that living with Trump—who is a teetotaler—is worse than living with a drunk? Every situation is always worse than you imagined, everything happens too quickly, any control is illusory and usually a trick played by fate to tell you, once again, that you’re fucked.

 

That said, what do you do?

 

Well, Michelle Obama knew the answer, which is when they go low, we go high.

 

Lovely, we’ll stride proudly with our head held high!

 

…as we approach the guillotine.

 

Gavin Newsum—the governor of California and Trump’s current most-outspoken critic—has the opposite approach. Beat ‘em at their game, he says, and proposes gerrymandering California to counteract Texas. That might work, if the rest of the country buys the argument that, “well, they(meaning Texas) started it!” I used to try this on my mother, and it was a dud.

 

So it’s a Monday morning and people are doing their Monday morning things like making a living and binding notebooks. Not that those two activities have anything to do with each other.

 

And Judge Zinis is having her Monday morning as well. She’s the judge dealing with the Abrego García case, and she has ruled for months now that the federal government must “effectuate and facilitate” Abrego García’s release from his illegal detention. The Supreme Court threw out the word “effectuate,” which meant “do” but agreed 9-0 that “facilitate” had just the right passivity—sitting by and letting the El Salvadorians put him on a plane, if they were so disposed.

 

The United States did nothing; the El Salvadorians did nothing. The Supreme Court did nothing. 

 

Judge Zinis must have been pissed—and why shouldn’t she be? She has been ordering the government to come up with any real evidence they might have against Abrego García, and all they come up with are plane rides (no ticket needed) to foreign jails.

 

Worse, ICE set up a hearing with Abrego García and then arrested him when he showed up. It was a trap.

 

Well, she must have been disgusted, and I was disgusted too, which is why binding a copy of Waldenseemed like the least nonsensical thing to do. Short of buying Judge Zinis lunch (they probably have Uber Eats or Door Dash up there) there wasn’t much I could do. 

 

Want to know my worst secret?

 

I bind books so that I don’t buy bottles.

 

And since the only bottles I buy now (infrequently) have shampoo in them, I can now bind books. Even better, I can thread a needle.

 

You smile indulgently, perhaps, thinking that it’s just aged hands and faltering eyesight that keeps me from threading needles easily. But it has nothing to do with that. At the end of my drinking, my hands shook so badly that a friend felt my hand shaking as we stood joined together in a circle to say the serenity prayer, eight years ago. For years, I tried to thank God, mentally, every time I threaded a needle, which became second nature, of course. 

 

I made jokes about it: “It’s just as we feared,” I once told Raf when he came upon me sewing something. 

 

“I’ve gone from the bottle to the needle!”

 

He wasn’t amused.

 

So Judge Zinis made another ruling that said that the government cannot deport Abrego García—and this seems to have stuck.

 

At least for now.

 

9:23 on Tuesday morning.

 

So then I went off to bind Walden, which I thought was going to be a simple affair, since the book is only 50 pages or so.

 

Not that I remember all that well, since the last copy I saw of Walden was half a century or so ago. It was a dirty, slim, earmarked (if not indeed ragged) paperback with cheap paper and miniscule print. It had been thrown on a dirty sofa next to an overflowing ashtray.

 

Well, books change over the years.

 

They grow up, maybe, since my copy of Walden, which I downloaded from the Internet Archives is derived from a copy published in that leisurely age, 1899. It has all sorts of gewgaws the paperback never had, like faded but impressive woodblock engravings (or reproductions, at least), and type font that is usually associated with the dire side effects of a vitally needed drug. (You know, “may cause itching,  ___45-other-things, seizures, paralysis and death.”) Yesterday’s book was on cream-colored paper that was substantially thicker than the toilet-paper-like paper of the old paperback. And the paper will probably stay cream and not turn brown, since it’s acid and lignin free. 

 

The Victorians were generous—more port? Another cigar?—in their books, too. The book comes with a generous portrait of the author, a wieldy forward and introduction (probably a preface in there, as well), a list of the assorted works of Henry David Thoreau, and for all I know an extensive biographical sketch.

 

The book was over five hundred pages, and would have collapsed any old sofa that it had been hurled onto.

 

So it had grown up, Walden had, since the days of my youth. Actually, it had aged substantially better than I had, and I got real pleasure seeing the sections slowly build themselves up. 

 

A book is bound from the back to the front covers. It’s logical, of course—would you build a house by constructing the roof, putting the attic underneath it, then the second floor, and all the way to the basement?

 

Thus the binder, if he is of a mind, rereads the book from the back. It’s like telling a story with friends—you remember what happened, but not why, or all the details surrounding why it happened, and why it had to happen. As the evening goes on, you remember more and more of the back story (as we call it, now).

 

And as the afternoon wore on, I left paragraphs starting with, “And so my two-year journey into the busy solitude of the pond drew to a close,” and worked my way towards, “the noise and bustle of the city had become impossible for me.”

 

End-papers, cover, and bam--that’s it.

 

Another secret—binding a book is a LOT more fun than actually writing it. Writing goes on forever, and then you have to watch your friends shift nervously, every time someone mentions the fact that you’ve written a book. Because they haven’t read it, and why should they? But they’re feeling lousy about it, as they should.

 

(This makes perfect sense, to me at least. But don’t worry—I’ll probably edit it out.)

 

Binding a book is nice because the rules are clear from the beginning, and you follow them or you don’t. If you do, and if you’ve made 500 awful books or so—then you’ll be fine. You can throw the rules out, and more likely than not, you’ll end up with a mess, and not the glorious creation your fevered brain attempted to create.

 

Even though I tell myself, before I begin writing, “you know all the words, you just have to put them into the right order,” it doesn’t really help. Writing a book is like a blank canvas, but binding that book is more akin to a coloring book. The mind can rest as the hands toil.

 

And so Abrego García had his day in court, and not a government-funded vacation in a Ugandan jail.

 

The world has another copy of Walden.

 

I’m still sober.

 

Judge Zinis is plowing through her day, and I am plowing through mine.

 

Is it enough?

 

No—but it has to be.