One Lost Marble Friday Round-Up

I helped a friend who is a librarian sort through her books because she is moving and now I have seven grocery bags packed with books intended for Goodwill in my car but I want to unload all of them, spread them out in my driveway, and make sure there aren’t gems I ought to keep. I am fortunate that much of my own reading life is on my Kindle but there are still a lot of books around here, precious for one reason or another. They have pieces of paper in them or inscriptions from people I used to love or lines underlined that moved me somehow but that I probably could never find again. It’s the memory and promise of all those kept books that earns them space on the shelves. Meanwhile, it feels good to deal with someone else’s books as a warm-up to dealing with my own.

Just now, a boy from the yeshiva rode by on his bike with a surgical mask on, holding a large milkshake in each hand, peddling his bike like he was driving a convertible with one finger on the steering wheel, that’s how slick he looked. I thought, first, I love living in a neighborhood with observant Jews even though I’m not one. And then I thought, damn, I could never ride my bike no hands.

I had a 1950’s/60’s American public education that started with Dick and Jane and wound its way through historical misinformation and algebra and french and all the other mundane and average topics of education so I am no genius or privileged person but I emerged from all that not a stupid person. So I’m baffled by all the dumbness I see. If you went to school in my era and just sat there like a stone, you’d have enough sense to know that the vaccine won’t magnetize your head and you should still keep your car keys in your pocket.

Today, pulling weeds from where we are trying to grow grass under the bushes that were brutally cut back by the tree trimmer but which are growing back beautifully, I saw this white marble. And so, I wondered, how long has it been since someone played with marbles out here in our front yard and then remembered that there is a parakeet buried in a mason jar somewhere nearby but there is no marker.

Today, I raced off in the car to check something in a local park and then careened home, dashed into the house, only to have my husband yell up the stairs that I’d left the car running in the driveway. He looked at me as if he’d just discovered, you know, a symptom of youknowwhat, until I reminded him that I’d locked myself out of the car with the motor running and three kids inside while wearing my bathrobe at the downtown post office thirty years ago, so he let up.