The week before last I posted Ready, something about a book that reappeared after twenty-two years of hiding. I said that I was anxious to read the book. I was also anxious to read it when I purchased it, but near the back of the book, facing a photograph of Einstein and Schoenberg in tuxedos, I found a receipt. I did not buy the book at Barnes & Noble, as I falsely remembered, but at Irvine Sci-Tech Books where my girlfriend worked until we moved north to San Luis Obispo. She began working almost immediately at Barnes & Noble, which accounts for the overlapping of memories, while she attended CalPoly. The book in question was purchased on 9/10/95 at 20% off, because that was her employee discount. All of this, of course, won’t matter even a little to anyone but myself. It just strikes me as unreasonable that the book seems so fresh and yet so old.

Anyway, I have now finished it. It was a very slow and somewhat difficult read. I was definitely not ready to read it twenty-some years ago. It’s as if my reading program for those years was designed to help me understand this book, the one completely forgotten and then suddenly found. I hesitate to say that life often works that way. I sometimes have an idea how I would like things to turn out, but the way things actually turn out is more often the way things should turn out. Better in the long run. Who, for example, would buy a beautiful and appealing book, place it carefully on the shelf, make a note on the calendar to read the book twenty years in the future, and then read a list of two hundred other books in order to be ready? Such plans are so unreasonable that they end up being made for us without our knowing it. We reach in a box looking for something and then find that twenty-some years have gone by and it’s time to find something else.

Last Friday at the Ophthalmologist’s office I took the book out to read while my eyes were dilating. I didn’t think about having trouble focusing. I held the book up to my face and did the best I could. Later a woman walked into the examination room to ask what book I was reading so intently. I have no idea what her job was. I couldn’t reach the book at that moment to show her, so I gave her a two or three sentence version of it, up to the halfway point, and then told her about finding it in a box after packing it to move north all those years ago. She smiled and said, “That sounds like a book I’d like to read.”

I could feel the wheel turning. I had her write her name on the flyleaf and said I would drop the book off for her as soon as I finished it. I can’t believe that she will read it through and have comments on it. Though of course that’s possible. Just too much to hope for. But what I can believe is that twenty-some years from now, after I have become nothing but a dim memory, and the book is more worn around the edges, the things she may have learned could be incredible.