Things began ominously on World Book Night. As I got out of my car with my box of
books, a fire truck went by towing a small motorboat towards our town lake,
then an ambulance went by. Had the
winter driven someone to jumping off the bridge? Why didn't anyone realize there was a depressed person in
their midst? Would it be in the
paper? Was it someone I knew? I thought a quick prayer and went on my
way.
New at giving away books to those who lacked, I'd chosen a
rather nice student café to reach recipients of a compact anthology of
poems. The café's events
coordinator was ecstatic to have an event for Shakespeare's Birthday, and
arranged for me to have a table away from the bar. I was wearing a World Book Night logo t-shirt, and I'd made
a very nice matted sign explaining that you were welcome to a book if you
rarely read. I had no idea what
would happen next.
The first recipient was Angie, who said she hardly ever
read, although she had loved poetry in high school. She was passing by the café between her work hours and
meeting a friend for a show. She told
me how one of her art professors in college had started every class with a
poem. I guess that art professor
knew that passing on a love of poetry would be really good for art students. I knew Angie, because in my town we all
know everyone, but I didn't see her except when she was cashiering at the food
co-op, so I gave her a book. I
found a couple of poems and read them for her. We laughed, even though the poems were sad.
Two acquaintances, Ramses and Hallie, came by the table as
they had promised days before. I
couldn't give the books to friends, but I'd brought some extra poetry books of
my own to give them just for showing up.
My friend Ramses was looking forward to turning the event into a sort of
poetry reading. It turned out that
he had written a really interesting poem about a gramophone, and he really
wanted to read it to someone. Then
Hallie came along, so I gave her my larger poetry anthology, and she found a
T.S. Eliot poem she liked. A tall
blond student wandered by. I asked
him if he did much reading, and he said no, so I gave him a book. He sat down at the table. Finally Ramses, judging the audience to
be sufficient, pulled out his smart phone and read us his poem. The tall blond student was
enthusiastic, and talked about all the poetry books he had found at rummage
sales. It made me think that
people never present themselves as they really are. Then the group melted away, contented to have acquired
either one of my books or the night's anthology.
Nothing happened for a while. So I started going after people at tables or standing at the
cash register. I asked them,
"Do you do a lot of reading?"
Just about everyone said, "Oh, yes, I read all the time." Wrong answer, sorry, I would have given
you a book, but you don't need it.
Finally I went up to the bar and asked some more strangers about their
reading habits. A whole row of
them said no, they really didn't read much, so I said, "Well then, this
book is for you!" I passed
out my handful of books and went back to my table. After a while, I looked up, and there was a whole row of
middle-aged guys in plaid flannel shirts bent over their poetry books at the
bar.
I went back to my table and waited for more potential
non-reading poetry lovers. I
started reading the poems in the book.
There was a poem by Leigh Hunt, "Jenny Kissed Me." Whoa, that was the poem one of the
characters read at the end of "Call the Midwife" just three days ago
on Wisconsin Public Television! I
found another good poem about telling a sow she is beautiful, and I felt bad
about my feelings about the pregnant sow at the farm exhibition last month.
Someone suggested that if I wanted to find light readers, I
should have gone to the seedy tavern down the street. Perhaps they were right. It would have been wonderful to find twenty strangers who
had no books all in one place. On
a cold rainy night in a small town, where do you do that? It wasn't the right night for the
weekly soup kitchen, and you really can't go into stores to give things away.
My last customer was obviously from another country, perhaps
Saudi Arabia. I went up to him and
started to talk about Shakespeare's Birthday. I think he thought I was talking about a birthday party for
some local person. So I asked him,
"Have you read anything by Shakespeare?" He said he had only read a couple of poems and that he
didn't really read very much. I
was thrilled and handed him a book and told him it was free. Amazingly, he took it and smiled.
As I walked back to my car, another ambulance went by. More sorrow for more people. The evening was perfectly framed in
sorrow. But in between four and
six, there had been a café with strangers walking in, encountering perhaps a
book of poems, interacting, telling details about their lives. I had found connections between poems
and emotions in my own life, and I had met new people and become better
acquainted with a few others. The
café provided a setting for a small community to talk face to face or for individuals
to stare for a while at the homework on their computers, with a brief moment of
acquiring a real book. It was a
much better experience than just standing outside giving books to a stream of
strangers not even connected to each other in space or time.
