We sit together correcting books. It's her favorite pass time. I remember her sitting for hours snipping the "wandering text" from one book, and pasting it back where it belonged in another. Passages blending together, sometimes seamlessly, other times, well, as Mom used to say, "It's the writer's fault for stumbly words."
Yet, always the wonder of seemingly familiar lines transmuted into something all together different -- The Great Gatsby's Naked Lunch:
"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Shooting PG is a terrible hassle,' he told me, 'You have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper -- have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls.'"
Growing up, it was years before I realized Dr. Seuss never wrote:
"I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
I know the voices dying with a dying fall.
Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy."
Only she could weave T.S. Eliot with Silverstein, and Seuss, somehow having it all make sense -- The Love Song of the Lorax Giving Tree. Our home library, vast though arguably inaccurate, amounted more to a décollage than a collection of literature. Yet, I can't help feeling it offered more than the simple originals. Books usually leave an impression on a person, changing them. It isn't often for a reader to change a book.
Watching her now it might as well be decades back.
She sits in a small chair humming softly. A pair of scissors in her lap, Mom scans through a book. Every so often she smiles, and delicately extracts the wandering text. Why it's left home is anyone's guess. She's surmised any number of reasons, though is always cautious not to say anything with certainty. After all, every passage has its own reasons. Feeling bored some go off in search of new frontiers -- "Oh, no, my dear, I'm really a very good man, but I'm a very bad Wizard, I must admit. People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them up was a bite from a sheep." Joyce apparently having seduced bits from Baum, not to mention several others with his brothel of belleteristic phrases, aesthetically pleasing yet, Mom snip, snip, snipped away, hours upon hours clipping the strays and pasting them back where they belonged.
Sometimes I helped her, and as such, perhaps merely for a bit of nostalgia, I sat helping her again. Whenever she found an out of place passage, her surgery complete, she passed the text-graft to me, and I dutifully pasted it where she instructed. I think, also, I missed these hybridized books. That's why for Mother's Day I brought over a few used editions, handed them to her, and asked, "Would you care to correct them?"
"Only if you'll help," she smiled. Dad grunted his approval then waved us out of the room. Another soccer game about to start, he wanted to be left alone, his glares focused on the game. So Mom and I went to our familiar nook.
I sat on the floor, nine years old again. I didn't always treasure these moments. Not in the way children are predisposed to such failings, having no idea just how precious certain instances are, rare and unrepeatable; I didn't treasure them because for a long time I resented them.
Not knowing the alterations were, to put it kindly, unnecessary, I used to use Mom's books for school. My reports invariably got bad grades, and no teacher could be convinced I'd actually read the books. That is until around the seventh grade I finally encountered an educator with an actual education. I'd gotten into the habit of quoting in an attempt to prove a book report's authenticity. My teacher discerned the blend -- "Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren't so different. We saw the same sunset. The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also." Seeing through The Crying of the Outsiders, my teacher gave me a copy of S. E. Hinton's book from the school library.
Reading the unadulterated text... I felt betrayed. At first by my teacher for shattering the illusion that my Mom fixed books, then by my Mom. What she did no longer seemed sensible, her fairytale notion of wandering texts turned into something toxic, a corruption of the original narrative; and years of bad grades, alongside the often unsubtle contempt teachers express towards such students -- not paid enough to worry about a born loser -- suggested I'd spent years being punished for her failing. I began a secret library, gathering the pure version of stories I thought I knew. And whenever Mom asked me to help her fix books, I refused, sometimes rudely just to jab at her. She chalked it up to normal adolescence, though I remember a few times tears fell while she tried smiling off my barbed words.
Years went by. I moved out. Then one day, a girlfriend plucked a volume off a shelf. She flipped through it.
"What is this?" she asked.
"Oh, my Mom gave me that as like a house warming gift."
"This is Catcher in the Rye?"
I glanced at the cover, "'Catcher in the Rye Conquest of Happiness.' I think it's supposed to be a play on words. Rye for wry."
"I get it. I'm just saying, well here." She read a revised selection, "'There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is in adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.'"
"Yeah so?" I grumbled, already embarrassed by the prospect of explaining the book's origins.
"It's feels a little like a different story. A different voice."
"It's not the right story."
"No, it seems more interesting." She turned pages, "To me anyway. It's like an alternative angle to something familiar. There's something about being able to see something two ways at once -- I dunno. Did you make this?"
Shaking my head, "It's something my Mom does."
And we sat there flipping through the book, rediscovering it in a way. Not just Salinger's work, but my Mom's. In many ways, she wasn't polluting plots, she was connecting themes, the elements different books shared. In essence, she made their connective tissue more plain, less abstract analysis. Afterwards, I appreciated what she did. A different perspective will often inspire new feelings, or at least rekindle old ones. More importantly, I recalled how happy this work made her, and I started to wonder whom she hurt, if anyone at all.
Since then I've made it a point to buy Mom fresh books whenever she runs out of pages. So this Mother's Day, we sat together returning the wandering text. We barely spoke, but we didn't need to say anything. I kept thinking of line by Steinbeck:
"'And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.'"
It says enough I suppose. However, I think Mom can improve it. That's what she does.
Yet, always the wonder of seemingly familiar lines transmuted into something all together different -- The Great Gatsby's Naked Lunch:
"In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since. 'Shooting PG is a terrible hassle,' he told me, 'You have to burn out the alcohol first, then freeze out the camphor and draw this brown liquid off with a dropper -- have to shoot it in the vein or you get an abscess, and usually end up with an abscess no matter where you shoot it. Best deal is to drink it with goof balls.'"
Growing up, it was years before I realized Dr. Seuss never wrote:
"I am the Lorax. I speak for the trees.
I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues.
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
I know the voices dying with a dying fall.
Once there was a tree, and she loved a little boy."
Only she could weave T.S. Eliot with Silverstein, and Seuss, somehow having it all make sense -- The Love Song of the Lorax Giving Tree. Our home library, vast though arguably inaccurate, amounted more to a décollage than a collection of literature. Yet, I can't help feeling it offered more than the simple originals. Books usually leave an impression on a person, changing them. It isn't often for a reader to change a book.
Watching her now it might as well be decades back.
She sits in a small chair humming softly. A pair of scissors in her lap, Mom scans through a book. Every so often she smiles, and delicately extracts the wandering text. Why it's left home is anyone's guess. She's surmised any number of reasons, though is always cautious not to say anything with certainty. After all, every passage has its own reasons. Feeling bored some go off in search of new frontiers -- "Oh, no, my dear, I'm really a very good man, but I'm a very bad Wizard, I must admit. People could put up with being bitten by a wolf but what properly riled them up was a bite from a sheep." Joyce apparently having seduced bits from Baum, not to mention several others with his brothel of belleteristic phrases, aesthetically pleasing yet, Mom snip, snip, snipped away, hours upon hours clipping the strays and pasting them back where they belonged.
Sometimes I helped her, and as such, perhaps merely for a bit of nostalgia, I sat helping her again. Whenever she found an out of place passage, her surgery complete, she passed the text-graft to me, and I dutifully pasted it where she instructed. I think, also, I missed these hybridized books. That's why for Mother's Day I brought over a few used editions, handed them to her, and asked, "Would you care to correct them?"
"Only if you'll help," she smiled. Dad grunted his approval then waved us out of the room. Another soccer game about to start, he wanted to be left alone, his glares focused on the game. So Mom and I went to our familiar nook.
I sat on the floor, nine years old again. I didn't always treasure these moments. Not in the way children are predisposed to such failings, having no idea just how precious certain instances are, rare and unrepeatable; I didn't treasure them because for a long time I resented them.
Not knowing the alterations were, to put it kindly, unnecessary, I used to use Mom's books for school. My reports invariably got bad grades, and no teacher could be convinced I'd actually read the books. That is until around the seventh grade I finally encountered an educator with an actual education. I'd gotten into the habit of quoting in an attempt to prove a book report's authenticity. My teacher discerned the blend -- "Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren't so different. We saw the same sunset. The reality is in this head. Mine. I'm the projector at the planetarium, all the closed little universe visible in the circle of that stage is coming out of my mouth, eyes, and sometimes other orifices also." Seeing through The Crying of the Outsiders, my teacher gave me a copy of S. E. Hinton's book from the school library.
Reading the unadulterated text... I felt betrayed. At first by my teacher for shattering the illusion that my Mom fixed books, then by my Mom. What she did no longer seemed sensible, her fairytale notion of wandering texts turned into something toxic, a corruption of the original narrative; and years of bad grades, alongside the often unsubtle contempt teachers express towards such students -- not paid enough to worry about a born loser -- suggested I'd spent years being punished for her failing. I began a secret library, gathering the pure version of stories I thought I knew. And whenever Mom asked me to help her fix books, I refused, sometimes rudely just to jab at her. She chalked it up to normal adolescence, though I remember a few times tears fell while she tried smiling off my barbed words.
Years went by. I moved out. Then one day, a girlfriend plucked a volume off a shelf. She flipped through it.
"What is this?" she asked.
"Oh, my Mom gave me that as like a house warming gift."
"This is Catcher in the Rye?"
I glanced at the cover, "'Catcher in the Rye Conquest of Happiness.' I think it's supposed to be a play on words. Rye for wry."
"I get it. I'm just saying, well here." She read a revised selection, "'There are two motives for reading a book: one, that you enjoy it; the other, that you can boast about it. If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is in adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.'"
"Yeah so?" I grumbled, already embarrassed by the prospect of explaining the book's origins.
"It's feels a little like a different story. A different voice."
"It's not the right story."
"No, it seems more interesting." She turned pages, "To me anyway. It's like an alternative angle to something familiar. There's something about being able to see something two ways at once -- I dunno. Did you make this?"
Shaking my head, "It's something my Mom does."
And we sat there flipping through the book, rediscovering it in a way. Not just Salinger's work, but my Mom's. In many ways, she wasn't polluting plots, she was connecting themes, the elements different books shared. In essence, she made their connective tissue more plain, less abstract analysis. Afterwards, I appreciated what she did. A different perspective will often inspire new feelings, or at least rekindle old ones. More importantly, I recalled how happy this work made her, and I started to wonder whom she hurt, if anyone at all.
Since then I've made it a point to buy Mom fresh books whenever she runs out of pages. So this Mother's Day, we sat together returning the wandering text. We barely spoke, but we didn't need to say anything. I kept thinking of line by Steinbeck:
"'And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.'"
It says enough I suppose. However, I think Mom can improve it. That's what she does.
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