LISTEN: ifiwereacamera.mp3
OR READ ON…
If I were a camera, I’d snap images of the dozens of merrily poetic scenes that run by me each day. They happen so fast, they are so overlapping, that I can’t get them all written down in time to capture the flavor.
If I were a camera I’d be snapping all the time.
SNAP #1
An energetic, tiny puppy runs past the shop, pulling a woman in her wheelchair as she shops the streets. I rub my eyes and realize this pup could not possibly be pulling such a load—the wheelchair is battery-powered, and he’s just doing what opportunists have done since time began: find out which way the masses are heading and run ahead to make it look like they’re leading the pack. The puppy is leading his source of nurture retroactively and having a merry time of it. The puppy really is pulling the chair! As Charlie Chan once said, “Sometimes the impossible makes itself happen.”
SNAP #2
“Will you buy me a candy bar?” It’s the voice of the checkout clerk, and I’m the only customer at the counter. First, I think she’s talking to herself via one of those earpod phones—that is, until she repeats the question, looking straight at me. I realize she’s trying to get me to add a dollar to my purchase so that she can legally pluck said candy from the display and eat it, free of charge. I’m so taken aback—so in a hurry—that I comply. She thanks me. I leave the store knowing that I’ve been smoothly and legally panhandled. For some reason, I don’t mind. Her bosses will never know.
SNAP #3
This happened once when I was very young…and I learned a valuable lesson from it:
In the throes of a very busy day at the shop, a street person enters, toting a heavy box. He wants to sell me the contents—a bunch of books, the likes of which I normally try to find, familiar titles I can always use. Without taking time to examine them, I hastily offer him a few dollars and proceed to help three customers, field one phone call request, search for a book I just know was here a few minutes ago…you know, the multi-tasking kinds of things you do to run an efficient shop. Later, when things have settled down, I go through the ritual of pulling volumes from the box in order to examine, clean, price and shelve them. It’s right about then that I realize I’ve just purchased my own books. The street guy has gone into my basement storage area, stolen whatever he saw there, then entered the shop to sell them to me. I’m amused at my carelessness, I admire his aggression, I roll my eyes at the silliness of the incident, and I file away yet another anecdote to pass on to you on a day like today.
SNAP #4
Again, it’s a long time ago at the shop, and I am plying my trade like any other rare-book dreamer surrounded by centuries of words and bindings and paper. A smiling, middle-aged man and a small, pleasant, elderly woman enter together, bearing a brown bag—hopefully containing goodies for the shelves. He has brought her to me, and she has a story to tell. She reaches into the recesses and brings forth a small, thick book, places it in my hands, then waits for my reaction. This calfskin-bound volume is obviously old, very old, an artifact from another time, another life, another continent. The paper is stiff and white—whiter than last week’s newspapers. As I leaf through the hand-written pages, I recognize Latin and some other language, names from ancient Greek and Roman times. Markings and stains indicate that this book has been through times of war, peace, times of good, times of bad, somehow surviving long enough to come to rest in my Museum of Fond Memories in Birmingham, Alabama. Objects this old have their own distinctive vibration, a buzz not quite of recent yore. The small woman wants me to have it—the many volumes it once accompanied have been sold at auction in New Orleans, and this is the last she owns. The man has told her I will be the one booklover who will respect and savor the book, not abuse it, not send it to an undeserved fate. I pay her what I can, she is satisfied, and she and her companion disappear into the morning, never to return.
SNAP #5
It’s years later. “I heard you got a 500-year-old book around here,” a good ol’ boy says, as he wanders about the shop. “Sure do,” I say. His eyes widen and he is silent. “Want to see it?” I ask. “Can I?” he answers. I unlock the display case, pull the ancient relic from its hand-made box, and hold it before him. “Man oh man!” is all he can say. “Want to hold it?” I ask. He laughs nervously and declines, afraid he might cause damage. “No, please,” I insist. “Everybody should hold a 500-year-old book at least once in their lives…just to see what a real book feels like.” He caresses it, turns the pages and is satisfied and awed.
This is a routine I repeat many times over the decades, in a feeble attempt to share my awe of the past, the wonder that old things engender, the realization that artifacts help awaken our senses and our imaginations—our appreciation of all that has come before us. Visitors who experience the past in this hands-on act carry with them the visceral memory that you can never get in a museum. Museums, after all, never allow you to touch or get too close. But here, in this one museum in the world, I insist upon touch, and you can attain the shock and awe that comes from sharing in the palm of your hand that thing that hundreds of people before you have held and cherished over many, many years. For a split second you are linked through the centuries to ancestors you can only know through touch and sense.
Can’t get this from a Kindle or a history textbook.
Quick, where’s my camera? Wait—it’s right here, all the time, just inside my observing heart
(c) 2012 A.D. by Jim Reed