Once Upon a Book Hunt

It happened without preamble. The sound was unlike anything anyone could prepare for. Equally difficult to describe as it was memorable, I still struggle to put it into words. It registered as inherently sick, a sound that shouldn’t be heard, a signal of immediate crisis. It coincided with a head striking tiled flooring as a body crashed headlong like a felled tree in a serene meadow. The body seized on the ground. Of course, I didn’t know what seizures were then.

I was ten or eleven at the time, a creature of the library. My mother believed education to be the great enabler of dreams and was fiercely loyal to it. Social scientists might have called me a statistic as the child of a single working mother, but all I knew was my story, and that ignorance protected me. Well, ignorance and fantasy, components typifying the essence of childhood. Our favorite hushed refuge featured an opulent public hall with lofty arched ceilings calling back to a much grander time. Shamrock-colored lamps dotted each desk, bright and glittering when lit but descending into a richer, deeper forest-like hue when switched off.

I rotated my metaphors. Sometimes I was the pillager of lost treasure surrounded by heaping precious metals and stones including emerald, silver, and gold. Other times I fancied myself an explorer roving through the jungle on the lookout for poisonous rainbow frogs while I searched for ancient civilizations. My creativity was certainly genetic; to both buy herself study time and keep me out of trouble, my mother invented an elaborate search and discovery game.

“Go find me a red book with a bird on the cover and an author with the initials D. H.,” she’d say. After some negotiation on one rainy afternoon, we came to an agreement that the initials could be D.H. or H.D. or D.X.H. or H.X.D as long as the D and H were included. The bird could be in any form - live or figurine or drawn - the red could be any shade in the family of reds, and so on. Still, given the parameters of the game I could be gone for an hour or more. When I’d finally present a matching book, she’d dole out another mission. “Find me a blue book with the word ‘peace’ in the title by an author including the initial M.”

It was in a dusty aisle on that quest that I encountered the stranger in crisis; the one whose swift collision with the library floor bluntly interrupted my assignment. In the span of an instant, long-forgotten memories flooded me, swirling my mind with visions of an irate figure threatening my mother. I watched as objects rained down like hail on the wooden planks in the kitchen and broke - a dish, a picture frame, the TV. Under the barrage I saw my mother cowering, then lying on the floor shaking... The rattle of the remaining pictures on the wall as the door slammed, and finally the sinister form was gone.

Jangling keys in the pocket of the convulsing body in the library snapped me back to the moment, where I unexpectedly found myself in a position to play the strong protagonist’s role I always held in my fantasies. As if gifted with the winged sneakers of Mercury, I sped back to my mother and conveyed a breathless message of emergency. In reality it was probably nothing more than incoherent mumbling, but somehow she pieced it together and dialed 9-1-1. Clueless neighbors glared at her for using her phone inside a quiet area, something we still laugh about. To this day I’m not sure of the outcome in the case of the stranger, but he was alive when he was loaded into the ambulance. The medics said he’d have a fighting chance due to my mother’s quick action.

As time went on, her intellectualism and discipline paid off. Despite being a single working mother, she shook the shackles of statistical destiny off and managed to finish a graduate degree. Shortly thereafter she secured employment as part of the administration with a local university. Eventually she re-married, finding a level of happiness everyone agreed my mother always deserved. I think it was enough to quell the violent echoes of my father.

We never talked about him. Neither of us needed or wanted to... He represented things we wanted to leave behind. But in a few instances over the years, she’d asked how as such a young child I was able to respond urgently despite a traumatic scene, to help a stranger in need. To be honest, I don’t know. But I’ve always suspected seeing that image of her on the floor in my mind’s eye as my father left us represented the part of me that was sorry I hadn’t been able to help her then, and that’s what roused me to run. I never found a way to say that exactly because dredging him up would have been breaking an unspoken rule.

Over the years I’d maintained a habit of giving her “cards” in book form on special occasions such as Christmas and her birthday. Inside the front cover I’d write things like, “For you - a yellow book with a Victorian shoe on the cover by an author with the initials E. H.,” and then a personalized message.

Last Christmas the message was one sentence in length. It said, “That fateful day in the library when we got in trouble for trying to save a stranger, you gave me courage.”