beautiful, funny, sad & true

Last night, I was co-hosting my friend’s really cool radio show.  While driving home, I was stopped by the police on suspicion of a DUI.  After being questioned, taken to the station, passing all the various tests, and being kept awake all night, I was cleared and released at ten o’clock this morning.  I got home by eleven and took a nap for an hour and a half.

This afternoon, I sold a keyboard case on Craigslist to a really nice guy who plays bass for churches in West Linn and Vancouver.

This afternoon, a lady came by to try (and hopefully buy) one of the two accordions I’m selling.  She had a third one to look at elsewhere first, so she wanted to try that one before she settled on one of mine.  She told me she’d let me know after she saw that one.  Totally fine.  Let’s hope she buys mine.

This afternoon, I wrote out the complete version of the police story here in BFS&T, in order to capture all the details as best I could remember them.

This evening, I played accordion with PolishCellist and our violinist friend at a swanky downtown venue with a North African theme, as part of a gigantic bellydance event featuring the most famous bellydancer in the world.  She’s so famous that even I know who she is.  The venue was full of elaborately clad dancers, cabaret performers, musicians, photographers, and a host of other interesting people.  It was loud, frenetic, and beautiful, and I’ll remember it for a long time.

Just now, I got home from the bellydance event and wrote down this short synopsis of the day’s  events, in order to capture all the details as best I could remember them.  The ironic, caricatural nature of the day’s highs and lows, and the significance of the juxtaposition between them, was not lost on me.  The whole time I was enjoying the gig I kept laughing to myself and thinking, This morning, I was in jail.

My eyes won’t focus anymore.  I’m finally going to collapse in bed, so that I can be ready for rehearsal at ten o’clock in the morning.

Life is weird.

How was YOUR day?

Once every month or two, I like to co-host my friend John’s radio show. Usually, we like to build a group of songs around a theme, such as Beatlesque or Girls’ Names, or Valentines’ Day. Sometimes, however, we like to just get together and randomly select songs, trying to surprise each other and create a compelling, seamless ‘flow’ from one song into another. Last night’s show was a ‘flow’ kind of show. John texted me to let me know that he was at a nearby pizza place, having a last-minute snack and drink before the show. I told him I’d be right there, and I drove over to the station, parked, and walked over to meet him. He was finishing up his food and drink when I arrived, but we still had plenty of time before the show, so he got a second drink, and I ordered a glass of wine while we talked and joked about what the show would hold.

It turned out to be a particularly good flow show, too, if I do say so myself. I thought we were totally on our game, and we were playing songs that really complemented each other and went together well. At three o’clock in the morning, when the show was over, we gave each other a hug and went our separate ways. We’d been doing the show since midnight, and I’d been out at a dinner/drinks/movie night with a couple other friends earlier in the evening, so I was definitely looking forward to going home to bed.

As soon as I left the station and came to the traffic light at the end of the block, there was a guy in dark clothing who surprised me by walking across the intersection against my green light. I had to swerve a bit in order to avoid him, which sent my heart racing. I turned onto Couch, and then Grand, heading toward home. Around the point where the freeway crosses Grand, a guy was crossing against that light as well. He was slowly pushing a shopping cart across the street, and he was very difficult to see in the darkness. Right before my turn onto Lloyd Boulevard, there was a construction cone in the edge of my lane, so I had to maneuver to avoid hitting it. All of these obstacles turned a normally tranquil late-night drive into a very nerve-wracking event.

As soon as I turned onto Lloyd, I saw police lights come on behind me. I pulled over right away. “Do you know why we stopped you tonight?”

“I don’t, actually.”

Apparently, I had made what appeared to be a wide turn onto Lloyd, and they’d noticed my swerves for ShoppingCartGuy and the construction cone, and assumed that I had been drinking. I had been, yes, but not for many hours, and I hadn’t been home to brush my teeth so it was still on my breath, though the effects had all but worn off. Suffice it to say that my tiredness and nervousness caused me to fail the standing-on-one-foot test, though, so they placed me under arrest and sat me in the back of the police car. They confiscated my laptop and had my car towed.

Speaking of my car, an important tidbit in this story has to do with the fact that the interior smells like marijuana, and it has since long before I owned it. I’m well-known in my social circles for my stance on marijuana. I’ve voted for it to be legalized a number of times, particularly for medical uses, but I don’t smoke it myself, and to this day I still never have. I didn’t know the car smelled like that when I bought it, but whenever the weather is rainy (and this is Portland, after all, so it’s always rainy), the smell is particularly pungent and strong. I’ve tried to scrub the interior, I’ve pulled the panels off and cleaned inside the doors, I’ve pulled up the carpet in the back to clean underneath it, and still the smell persists. I’ve half-joked about taking it to a K-9 police unit and having a dog sniff the car to find the source of the smell, so I can get rid of it, because I don’t like the smell of pot, and I don’t like the impression of me that it gives people when they ride in my car.

One of the officers noticed the smell when he was searching the car, and he walked to the door of the police car, poked his head in and told me, “Hey, your car really smells like marijuana. Are we gonna find something in there? If you take a urine test, are you gonna turn up positive?” I smiled and told them that no, they weren’t and that I don’t smoke, and that’s just the way my car has always smelled. He didn’t believe me; no one ever does. They drove me downtown for processing and further questioning. By this time, it was approximately four in the morning, and I had no idea what was going to happen to me. I answered their questions, and took all of their tests, while they filled in the paperwork. They gave me a breath test, which registered “.00”, which made the two officers very suspicious, so they decided to get a third opinion from their drug specialist. I was ushered into a cement and steel holding cell with a long wooden bench. I sat down and was amazed to see that even in a police holding cell, people will still attempt to carve their initials in a wooden bench.

DrugSpecialist appeared in the doorway, and ushered me to a chair next to his desk. He took my vital signs and blood pressure, and had me perform more stringent variations of the tests I had performed on the street for the two other officers. I had to close my eyes, tip my head back, and touch a finger to my nose repeatedly. I had to walk a straight line. I had to stand on one leg and count the seconds until he told me to stop. Each series of rapid-fire instructions was punctuated with, “Do you understand the question?” I easily passed all of these tests. He gave me a barrage of eye exams and asked me lots of medical- and drug-related questions. I answered all of them truthfully (I’m not on any medications, I don’t use drugs, I don’t intend to harm myself, I’m not suicidal, etc.) and they put me back into the holding cell while they conferred with each other about my mystifying results. It seemed to them that my stories all checked out, and that I was telling the truth; I wasn’t drunk, I was just tired and nervous. At about five-thirty, I think they decided that they were satisfied, and I was not the threat that they had originally perceived. They each made it a point to tell me that nothing like this had ever happened before in their many years of experience. One of them went so far as to sit down and say, “I don’t get it. I don’t know how you ‘blew a zero’, when I could smell alcohol. Your car smells like marijuana, and you say you don’t smoke. I believe you, but we’ll have to wait for your urine test to come back before we know for sure. You’ve been nothing but cooperative, but you have to look at this from our point of view. You’re a one-in-a-million case.”

They somewhat apologetically handcuffed me again, not because they felt they needed to but because the law said they had to, and they led me to a room where a different man frisked me and told to exchange my steel-toed Doc Martens for small, uncomfortable slippers. The original two officers again took me through a maze of electronically locked doors. “Sometimes people run,” one of them said, “but you don’t seem like a runner.”

The other one continued. “Assuming that you’re telling the truth, and your urine test comes back clean (and I’m sure it will), this case against you will disappear. You won’t have anything on your record, and it’ll be like this never happened. Your car’s been towed, so you’ll have to deal with that, but the rest of this. . .” He trailed off. They opened the door to the waiting room, unclasped my handcuffs, and gave me one of the strangest looks I’ve ever encountered. They still couldn’t believe the way this was turning out. I should mention that they were totally cool and respectful with me, and they did a great job, especially considering the bizarre circumstances. I thanked them and walked into the fingerprint room. The fingerprint attendant was a very friendly, almost jovial guy. “Did you know that you have what looks like eczema on your thumb?” I didn’t know that. “It’s not red or anything, but see how you don’t have much of a fingerprint there? That’s a classic sign of eczema.” Interesting. At this point, I thought the whole ordeal would be over soon. The fingerprint guy said, “Okay, looks like we’re done. Only four to six more hours, and you’ll be out of here.” Four to six more hours?

It was six o’clock in the morning now, and I was told to wash my hands and go sit in the waiting room, which reminded me of the old Firesign Theatre joke about the butler ushering a man into his home. He told the man, “You can sit here in the waiting room, or you can wait here in the sitting room.” There was a mens’ side and a womens’ side of the room, which were divided by a short cement wall. The room was gray on gray, with government-green highlights. There were two televisions mounted on the walls, and the sound was only turned up on the mens’ television. Sitting there with me was an assortment of serious drug users and repeat criminals. I kept thinking, BUT I PASSED ALL THE TESTS. I SHOULDN’T EVEN BE HERE. I closed my eyes and tried to relax, while avoiding the burnouts and miscreants I was trapped in there with. On the television was one of Dick Clark’s blooper shows, followed by an ‘urban’ sitcom, followed by Married With Children (a meth-head behind me blurted out, “That’s what I’M talkin’ about,” when MWC came on), followed by an hour-long show about a guy who pretended to be developmentally disabled so that he could run in the Special Olympics and beat their champion, becoming a champion himself and winning a bet for his partner in crime. It was painful.

Around eight o’clock in the morning, they finally called my name. I staggered wearily to the desk and faced another barrage of questions. The woman used the same loud, deliberate tone that they all use, after years of dealing with deadbeats and cretins. “We just need to confirm your identity, okay? Do you understand the question?” You have GOT to be kidding me. Yes. “If you have any friends or family members, we need to call them and talk to them, okay? Do you understand the question?” JESUS CHRIST; I’M NOT ONE OF THESE CRETINS! Yes, I understand the question. The only phone number I know by heart anymore is my mom’s land line, since people rarely have to manually dial phones anymore, so I gave the attendant my mom’s number and name, adding, “This ought to be a nice surprise for her.” The woman told me that it wouldn’t be much longer now. Did I have any questions?

“Yes, actually.” I tried very hard to formulate this sentence in a way that wouldn’t seem flippant. “I passed all of my tests with the officers just now, so I guess I’m wondering why I’m still here.”

“Well, I don’t know about that, but you’ve been booked, so you have to follow the procedures just like everybody else.” The phrase ‘just like everybody else’ echoed through my head as I made a quick scan of everybody else in the room. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

I glumly walked back, slumped in my seat, and noticed that Not Just Another Teen Movie was playing on the television now. A staff member went around and provided us with a sack lunch that consisted of a dry bologna sandwich, a piece of dry coffee cake, a hard boiled egg, an orange, and a tiny carton of milk that proclaimed it was “best if used before 04-08.” In my delirium, I thought the date meant April of 2008, and that they were feeding us three-year-old milk. I sniffed the milk nervously before sipping it ever so slowly. With all the recent milk issues my stomach has had, I hoped to God that I wouldn’t explode vomit all over the room. Luckily, I managed to keep it all down. I left the egg and the orange sitting in the bag on the chair next to me, until an attendant wearing a prison-orange jumpsuit took and deposited the bag in the garbage can.

I sat for another two hours, head bowed and eyes closed, barely able to maintain my rapidly declining sense of equilibrium. Suddenly, a little after ten o’clock in the morning, someone came in and announced quietly to the staff, “We have a release.”

“A release?”

“Yeah, for [my last name]. It came in just after you guys showed up the last time.” Incidentally, I should note that ‘the last time’ (the last THREE times, in fact) was for a group of guys who were lining up to have their clothes checked in, so that they could be issued the clothing for their stint in jail. I had been expecting to hear my name each time, and each time it wasn’t called, my nervousness intensified. When they told me I was released, I was too tired to even feel relieved. The man told me to follow the black line, and I was ushered through another maze of electronic doors until I was finally let out to the room where I collected my phone, keys (minus my car key), car insurance card, and debit card.

“I had a laptop, too,” I told the man, “and a bunch of CD’s and a black scarf. Would that stuff be here?”

That stuff turned out to be in the Property Room, which wasn’t the property room I was standing in front of. “You can ask the gentleman over there about the Property Room.” I walked to the gentleman over there, who was seated on a high chair alongside a security checkpoint near the main door to the building. I was almost outside.

“I had a laptop and a few other things in a backpack, and I need to find the Property Room.”

“Oh, that’s not here,” he told me, rattling off a series of rapid-fire directions. “Gooutsideandturnleftandit’sinthissamebuilding, andthengointhedoorandtalktotheguyinthere.”

“Uhhh. . .errr. . .I spent the night here, and I’m a bit sleep-deprived,” I stammered. “So. . .out the door, turn left, and in this building. What’s the department name?” He told me what it was. I thanked him and walked out into the blinding blue morning. After staring at grey and green for the last seven hours, the beauty and color of downtown Portland was overwhelming. I called my mom’s cell phone, but she was unable to answer. I talked to John on the phone for a while, recounting the highlights of the previous hours. I got on the train and headed toward home. Luckily I live close enough that commuting to downtown and back is easy. Mom called back just as I was stepping off the train, and I told her that despite what the call must have sounded like, the situation wasn’t nearly as bad as it could have been, and that everyone knew I would be cleared of this charge in no time.

I have a court date this week, and I have to get my car and computer and everything back, and those things will surely cost money to resolve. I didn’t need any of this to happen, since I have enough happening already, but I’ll just keep being honest, and I’ll keep doing what I have to do to keep my name clear.

I can’t wait for this ridiculous nightmare to be over.

My older niece is in fifth grade, and every time we talk about school, I feel the need to bite my tongue a bit, because fifth grade was such a rough year for me.  My teacher, Mr. P., was horrendous, and mean, which I suppose is common enough, but that was also the year in which my parents got a divorce, and we were dealing with all that crap at the same time.  School work, naturally, got pushed to the back burner occasionally, as we were shuttled back and forth between Mom’s house and Dad’s new apartment.  My teacher sent many an angry report card home with me for my mom to acknowledge and sign, but I don’t think she ever saw any of them, because I would forge her signature and dutifully bring the cards right back to school with me the next day.  While I was in Yakima a few months ago for Stepdad’s funeral, Mom gave Brother and me each a box of our childhood stuff.  My box, which I now have here in my basement, was and is crammed full of school papers, drawings, my license plate collection, and even the slightly tattered blue blanket I used to carry around when I was really young.  Sure enough, mixed in with the forgettable mountain of school papers, I found one of those forged report cards.  I find it a bit depressing that with of all the important things I wish I still had (like my cassette tapes, and my toy cars!), that piece of hilarious minutiae somehow managed to survive the intervening decades.

But Niece doesn’t have to know about any of that for quite a while, as far as I’m concerned.  I don’t want to burden her with that knowledge, or to use the influence I have over her (as the ‘cool’ uncle) to sway her in that negative direction.  I want her to have the best school experiences she can, for as long as she can.  School’s hard enough without your uncle telling you how crappy it is.  But I do think about it from time to time, and I feel like fifth grade was the first real low point in my life, and that’s when something changed in me forever.

In sixth grade, I had a teacher with the very unfortunate surname of Growcock.  On the first day of school, he would quickly tell the students, “Call me ‘Mister G’.”  Thankfully, he was one of the best, nicest and most memorable teachers I had during elementary school, which helped bring me back from the shell shock of the year before.  He was always quick with a joke, but we knew to take him seriously also.  Each year, he would take the entire sixth-grade class to see a Harlem Globetrotters game in the nearby college town of Ellensburg, which was a tradition that all the younger kids looked forward to.

On Valentines’ Day that year, all of us kids made cards for each other, boys and girls alike.  That was the last year we did that before we all hit puberty the following year, which meant that valentines were out of the question.  One of those valentine folders survived in my childhood box, too, but I’m not sure if it’s the one from fifth or sixth grade.  What I do remember about that day was the folders we all made.  We cut out construction paper and drew a bunch of designs all over it – usually hearts or poems or whatever – and then we taped them to the side of our desks so that people could come around and place cards into them.  One kid, M. Reynolds, wrote a poem on his folder that quoted a popular commercial of the day:  “Reynolds Wrap:  the best wrap around.”  M.’s writing skills were a bit lacking, however, so he misspelled the word ‘wrap’, which meant that his Valentines’ poem was proudly displayed on the side of his desk, in huge bold letters, for all to see.

“REYNOLDS RAPE, THE BEST RAPE AROUND.”

My desk was right next to M.’s, which meant that I got to see that gem in progress before anyone else did, and I knew that it might get him in trouble if anybody else saw it.  I wasn’t necessarily a friend of M.’s, but I felt that I should mention it to Mr. G., and somehow stick up for M. at the same time.  When the bell rang and everyone else, including M., ran outside for recess, I walked up to Mr. G.’s desk and told him I had something to show him.  “I’m sure this is a total accident, since M. isn’t very good at spelling, but I thought you should see this, cause it’s funny.  I don’t want him to get in trouble or anything, though.”  We had a good laugh, and he told me he’d take care of it.  When the class came back inside from recess, M. had crossed out every instance of ‘rape’ and replaced it with the correct word.

Incidentally, I’m sure Mr. G. knew how lucky he was that he taught younger kids, because with the last name Growcock, teaching any older age group would provide decades of ridicule for the poor guy.   Maybe he consciously chose to teach lower grade levels for that very reason.  One of my current friends, who was in Mr. G.’s class at the same time I was, recently joked, “Man, I’d be changing that shit to Smith.“  I couldn’t agree more.  I did a quick search for Mr. G. online, and it seems that he’s still alive and living in central Washington state, although he’s almost eighty years old now.  I hope he continued to enjoy teaching, and I hope he’s had a good life.  I probably owe my sanity that year to him, although I promptly lost it again the next year, as soon as I entered junior high.

Like most kids, I spent the first decade or so of my musical life listening to my parents’ record collection, which consisted almost entirely of classical music, with the barest minimum of rock (The Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Mamas and the Papas, etc.) thrown in for good measure.  My dad’s rare ventures into so-called rock included easy listening stuff like the Carpenters, which made my brother and me cringe.  By the time I was about twelve years old, I finally discovered that I could have a radio in my room, and that radios had stations that could be changed.  I quickly found out about NPR, because they played a radio version of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I still think is one of the funniest and most brilliant books ever written.  I also found out about heavy metal, which was popular at the time, and which changed my life forever.

There was a late-night (ten o’clock is late-night when you’re thirteen years old) show called Metal Shop, which introduced me to a whole new style of music that I would call my own for the next few years.  The show has a newish online presence, albeit without the original host, but it will give you an idea of the kind of bands they played.  The ones I that knocked me out early on were Dokken, Ratt and Twisted Sister, but I eagerly devoured most of what the show offered up each week.  My brother dutifully followed suit, and before long, we were listening to all the metal masters of the day.  I got my first electric guitar a month after my fifteenth birthday, and this is about all anyone saw of me for the next two years.

I’m happy to have a scanner, finally, so that pictures like the one of my brother in Kiss makeup can finally see the light of day.  I’m sure he’ll be thrilled about this.

I’m sharing it here because A) it’s priceless and I love it, and B) he’s standing in my doorway, so you can see that I had corkboard panels covering my wall, and the entire thing was covered with pictures cut out from magazines like Hit Parader and Circus.  From the top down, they are pictures of Aerosmith, Ratt, the Scorpions, Eddie Van Halen, and Kiss.  You’re welcome.

All of this presented a problem for our mom, who was becoming more and more conservative as the years progressed.  She was worried about the state of our souls, and she would give us books by Christian authors like Bob Larson, who was most famous for his theories about the supposed practice of the ‘backward masking’ of hidden Satanic messages that only appeared in songs when the songs were played in reverse.

Bob is still around and doing his thing, and his focus these days seems to have shifted from the evils of rock music to the exorcism of demons, but back in the day he would spend all his time decrying heavy metal and playing song after song while he did so.  He would compare the supposed innocence of the regular version of a song, but as soon as he played the record backwards, its subversive and insidious ‘real’ meaning was revealed.  One of the most famous examples was “Another One Bites the Dust” by Queen, which said, upon reversal, “Decide to smoke marijuana.”  Or DID it?

The best times on the show were when he would open up the phone lines and take callers.  He would argue passionately with the ones who found his claims ridiculous, and he would ‘save’ the ones who felt they needed to repent, right there on the air.  It made for hilarious and riveting radio.   When a caller would say, “But, Bob, [insert famous musician’s name here] wears a cross all the time,” Bob would reply, “I bet he doesn’t even know what that cross means.”  Our favorite quotation of his was about the leather-and-studs clothing that Judas Priest introduced, which was quickly adopted by a lot of the other bands.  Bob made it very clear that “leather and studs are symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community.”

Who’d have thought at the time that Rob Halford of Judas Priest (in the picture above) would, in fact, come out of the closet and announce his homosexuality a decade or so later?  Who’d have thought that he spent much of his free time in gay S&M clubs, and that he would fashion the entire look for his band after the style of clothing that he’d seen and worn in the clubs?  The mind boggles.  All I can say is, when my brother and I were young, ideas like ‘the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community’ would never have crossed our minds if it wasn’t for Bob Larson.  We liked the music enough that we didn’t really care what people looked like, with the possible exception of Vinnie Vincent, who looked even more feminine than most of the other glam rockers at the time, which put him up against some serious competition.

At some point, I’ll have to write a separate entry about Vinnie Vincent, because his is a very interesting story, and a bit of a rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags one, too.  That’s neither here nor there, at least for the purposes of this story.

It was never our intention to emulate the rock-and-roll lifestyle; we were mostly well-adjusted kids who just wanted to listen to the music.  One day, however, our mom decided that she’d had enough.  She marched into my brother’s room, where he had a large poster of Poison on his wall.  The bass player, Bobby Dall (I didn’t even have to look that up!), had a cigarette dangling from the side of his mouth.

“That’s disgusting,” my mom sneered.  “Take it down.”

“What?” my brother asked.  “No way!”

“Yes,” she said firmly.  “Look at that; he’s got a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.”

“So?  You think I’m gonna start smoking just because he does?”

“Well. . .maybe.”

“Oh yeah, right.  Why do I have to take this down?  Come here.”  He ran into my room and pointed at a huge poster of Yngwie Malmsteen dressed in black, wearing a huge cross around his neck.  “Look,” he continued, sarcasm dripping from his tongue, throwing Bob Larson’s quotations back into Mom’s face.  “He’s wearing a cross. . .I bet he doesn’t know what that means! And all these guys are wearing leather and studs, which are the symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community!”

At that, Mom came bursting into my room, saying, “WHERE?”

I collapsed into laughter, and my brother was still consumed with rage, but after a few seconds he started to laugh too.  He wasn’t about to take down that poster, though, especially since I had an entire wall devoted to all the same people, and I certainly wasn’t going to take anything down.   Mom stood and stared at my wall, seemingly for the first time, and she didn’t like it one bit.  The symbols of sado-masochism in the gay community were everywhere, and so were the symbols of hedonism and satanism.

“I want this garbage taken down,” she said.

“No.  Why is this such a big deal all of a sudden?  These pictures have been up here for two years.”

“Well, take them down now.”

“No.  I like them.”

My brother and I won that particular argument.  I suspect that Mom realized it was a phase we were going through, and that we’d grow out of it soon enough.  Or maybe she just gave in.  Either way, we won, and the posters stayed up until we moved into our new house a couple of years later, by which time they had been replaced by world maps and posters of the Beatles.

In my experience, if you tell somebody they can’t have something, it only makes them want it more.  When I was in college, there was a pathetic demonstration of some sort (I don’t even remember what the issue was) that involved people waving signs that warned other people not to burn the flag.   One of my friends said, dryly, “I never wanted to burn a flag until they told me I couldn’t.”  Also, I worked at a record store during the time that 2 Live Krew’s Nasty As They Wanna Be came out.  That turd of an album sat untouched on the shelf for months at a time, and we couldn’t pay people to take a copy of it.  As soon as it got banned, however, we couldn’t order copies of it fast enough.  People who didn’t even like rap were buying them just to see what the fuss was about.

The point of all this, to the extent that there is one, is that kids turn out fine most of the time, and the music they listen to is the least of their problems.   Pick your battles, parents, and stay involved with their lives, but be careful not to make mountains out of molehills.  If you do, you’ll only make the kids more likely to rebel, which will exacerbate the issues you were trying to eliminate in the first place.

By way of a denouement, here’s a classic Bloom County cartoon I had on my wall back then, from when Apple introduced the first Macintosh computers.  I figured it would tie in nicely with this particular discussion.

Story #6 from The Red Notebook, by Paul Auster.  I took the liberty of slightly abridging the beginning.

R. told me of a certain out-of-the-way book that he had been trying to locate without success, scouring bookstores and catalogues for what was supposed to be a remarkable work that he very much wanted to read, and how, one afternoon as he made his way through the city, he took a shortcut through Grand Central Station, walked up the staircase that leads to Vanderbilt Avenue, and caught sight of a young woman standing by the marble railing with a book in front of her; the same book he had been trying so desperately to track down.

Although he is not someone who normally speaks to strangers, R. was too stunned by the coincidence to remain silent.  “Believe it or not,” he said to the young woman, “I’ve been looking everywhere for that book.”

“It’s wonderful,” the young woman answered.  “I just finished reading it.”

“Do you know where I could find another copy?” R. asked.  “I can’t tell you how much it would mean to me.”

“This one is for you,” the woman answered.

“But it’s yours,” R. said.

“It was mine,” the woman said, “but now I’m finished with it.  I came here today to give it to you.”