My flight back from my holiday in Cleveland to New York this afternoon involved checking luggage, something I almost never do. As a single, non-gay gentleman, I can get away with cramming everything I need for dressing during five days into a smallish duffel bag or backpack. Granted, you will see me wearing the same pants for all five days, and may notice the same shirt surface on two of those occasions, but I like to think people don’t pay close attention to what I wear. As long as I’m moderately presentable and emit a pleasant odor, all is well.
But I had to check a bag, all 40 pounds of it, because every time I visit my parents, I’ve been retrieving books from my collection stored there to bring back to New York. When I moved from Ohio, I crammed all my essentials, myself and my sister (who drove) into a car, and that was that. Books, alas, weren’t considered essential at that time, but I’ve found myself missing them, my information-rich, highly flammable, musty-smelling children.
So I throw a few in my luggage every trip back to New York from Cleveland that I make. I went overboard this time. I had made a list in advance, my logic being that any books I desired enough to actually remember I owned were ones I truly missed and therefore deserving of a plane ride back. This list included both stout volumes of the excellent Poems for the Millennium series, two books of Kurt Vonnegut’s non-fiction, On Photography by Susan Sontag, a book of quotations (a small one, not the cement block-like Bartlett’s I own), and Me Talk Pretty One Day, my current favorite David Sedaris book.
Of course, I received three books as gifts that required addition to my cache: a collection of Hans Christian Andersen’s Tales and David Foster Wallace’s Consider the Lobster from Mom & Dad, and the popular punctuation epistle Eats, Shoots & Leaves from Andrew & Jess.
I also had two read-on-the-plane books in my carry-on that needed return: Geoff Dyer’s photography meditation, The Ongoing Moment, which Jimi gave me as an early Christmas gift, and T. Coraghessan Boyle’s The Inner Circle, which I’ve been reading very slowly and carrying around like a penance ever since I got it in October.
And naturally, I tossed in some extras from my collection that weren’t on my bring-back list: my first edition hardcover of Annie Proulx’s Close Range (because I recently saw Brokeback Mountain and wanted to reread the story on which it’s based), Paterson by William Carlos Williams, My Years with Ross by James Thurber, Blow-Up by Julio Cortázar, and, for good measure, a Dave Barry collection from the early 80s called Bad Habits.
That bag was heavy, man, but it was worth it.