March 16, 2012

This is how title pages to books looked a century+ ago, if they were lucky. I do love the design elements of literature from the start of the 20th century. And I would so entwine my words with vines and blooms and lovers’ knots even today if I could. Actually, I do have stacks of hand-written notebooks where I did. This from a display at an early private library we pause to visit on our walk through my son’s childhood haunts, to show his gf the city he grew up in, a glimpse back at who he was then. Back home the drawer of old photos holds special appeal, and we even get out the slide projector for scenes of mountain hikes and childhood exuberance that fix our attention on each long-ago moment by the sheer magnetism of its image projected on the wall. Lovely, difficult, to troll the past, seeing what was there, what’s been lost. Our internal monodramas writ large, lives shared with those now absent by choice, necessity, or happenstance, revisiting nearly forgotten turns we took together in our separate pathways to today. Alas, they provide no instructions on how to move ahead with grace. That, my friends, we are each trying to figure out for ourselves every day.

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