Relish

What exactly is it about people who see treasure in humble beginnings that is so uplifting, so divine, so profound and magnificent? I came to the realization today that I have always viewed these types of people with awestruck gratitude, as though the beauty of their faith was a particular gift to me. I know that, indeed, the beauty of their faith is, intentionally or not, a true gift to the entire world, but it always somehow feels humblingly personal. I have been lucky enough to know many of these people in my life. My mom and my sister are, to me, the first models of this rare trait, and to be around them is to be unendingly inspired by their ability to find and recognize the worth in that which has been cast off, the greatness in the overlooked, the secret in the seemingly transparent, the glimmer in a sea of dullness, excitement in the mundane, magical in the ordinary, the potential in things – and people – as yet untapped. There are many others, more and less well-known than these two beautiful women, people like Shel Silverstein, Saint Jude, Henry David Thoreau, folks who find their pets at animal shelters, Galileo, Albert Einstein, Robert Frost, farmers, Emily Dickinson, L.M. Montgomery, John Steinbeck,…and, as I joyously learned today, Ray Bradbury. I am coming to believe, in my ponderings on this characteristic, that it is in fact this, in a nutshell, that propels me to read ceaselessly, to seek out loveable literature. And furthermore, perhaps to want to be a teacher.

            

Today I went to the coffee shop to finish the last several pages of my book Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury. Not three minutes after I sat down, I was in tears. This novel has spoken to my soul ever since the introduction, when I learned that Bradbury wrote it in an attempt to capture his childhood in North-western Illinois. In so doing, he managed, at least at the beginning, to capture pieces of my own. But the novel is not a story about me, that much was clear to me midway through. The novel is, however, a story about (among other things, of course) a piece of my soul. And, like those people who see treasure in humble beginnings, it feels to me, somehow, like a personal gift. Don’t get me wrong, I think Fahrenheit 451 is a phenomenal book. But if I had known that Ray Bradbury had this book in him, I would have worked, by hook or by crook, to see him at the L.A. Book Fair before he died. Before I go on, let me make it perfectly clear that this is not a recommendation – from me to you – that you read this book. The meandering, near-plotlessness of the story had a strange and lovely effect on my being, and I don’t claim to know anyone else’s being well enough to know if it will do the same to you. You may read it and wish to throw it aside as abstract hogwash, and if you do, and if you do, I hope that you will not tell me either one, although I am sure, somewhere deep inside me, I will feel a prick nevertheless. In describing his grandma’s cooking, at one point in the story, the main character, Doug, says, “The food was self-explanatory, wasn’t it? It was its own philosophy, it asked and answered its own questions. Wasn’t it enough that your blood and your body asked no more than this moment of ritual and rare incense?” This is precisely how I feel about the novel as a whole and, basking in its moment of ritual and rare incense is all I am doing here, and very little more.

            

My copy of the book is from some used store somewhere, the best place (some will tell you) for finding diamonds in dust. It is an old, but well-kept paperback edition with slightly yellowed edges and not a single tear. Also not a single indication that anyone else had ever read this copy had I, until I neared the end and turned to page 222, somewhere in the last twenty pages. There, in spidery, pretty handwriting, in blue ink, were two notes from a reader of bygone days. The first note, somewhat spookily - for someone who has not read the book - reads, “I must die.” The spookiness of this remark is slightly diminished for those who have read the book because it relates to an earlier chapter. The strange part about it, though, is that it comes at one of the most uplifting moments in the entire story, a moment held long in anticipation, a moment soon after, in fact, I dissolved into tears in the middle of the coffee shop. And by this point those words, “I must die,” are no longer relevant. They are no longer profound to the story. I wonder why they are here, instead of somewhere else, earlier, when they may have done some good. The next note is slightly longer, short commentary on two of the characters. And though I read this note both before and after I read the chapter it belongs to, and perhaps a dozen times over, I still cannot gather exactly what the reader’s thoughts were in writing it, why they are important, why they needed to be written there. And it concerns me, not in a disruptive way, but in a curious way, because that is it, the only other note she leaves and I wish, I wish I knew what she meant by it. Because you see, she might have been a seeker of treasures herself. Or even a master of finding them. And if so, there is a message in those words that could, too, be treasure to me.

            

Of all the beloved, unparalleled characters in this modest novel – Colonel Freighleigh, Helen Loomis, Mr. Tridden, Mr. Auffmann, Tom, Doug’s Great Grandma, his dad, Lavinia – Mr. Jonas is inexorably my favorite. He is a seeker of treasures. And he is what brought me to tears. Mr. Jonas is a collector of junk and he carries it around in his Conestoga wagon, drawn by his horse named Ned and he sings as he travels along in his corduroy clothes and hat, covered with old presidential campaign buttons, so that children can hear him a mile away. And, like Hector the Collector, he sings songs like this:

“Junk! Junk!

No, sir, not Junk!

Junk! Junk!

No, ma’am, not Junk!

Bricabracs, brickbats!

Knitting needles, knick-knacks!

Kickshaws! Curios!

Camisoles! Cameos!

But…Junk!

Junk!

No, sir, not…Junk!”

And he is right, because one of his pieces of junk, a bottle full of fresh air, saves an entire life. Mr. Jonas doesn’t sell his junk. His is a cycle of collecting and giving away. Tiring of his life as a businessman in Chicago, Mr. Jonas “set out to spend the rest of his life seeing to it that one part of town had a chance to pick over what the other part of town had cast off. He looked upon himself as a kind of process, like osmosis, that made various cultures within the city limits available to one another.” And it seems to me that, somewhere in those words, perhaps, are written the secret to peace among men. I wish to be Mr. Jonas, both literally and figuratively. But I, like Doug, must settle on the next best thing, to pay it forward. Because, after all, it seems to me, that looking for goodness, and worthiness, and hope, and success in all the cubbyholes of the plodding, patient world, is both the intended journey and the end goal spun into one. And I love those people the most!

It all makes me wonder about happiness. It sounds stale to speak of happiness being the secret to prolonging life. Not happiness in a grandiose or demonstrative way. Not winning lots of awards, with the adoring eyes of people you love and respect waving you on, or going to a million concerts where you get the thrill of all the pounding, glorious music down into your soul over and over again, or zip-lining across a tropical rain forest with your mouth open wide in a cry of breathless excitement, though these things help. Doug’s great grandma, who always took it upon herself to re-shingle the roof each year, tells him, just before she dies, “Douglas, don’t ever let anyone do the shingles unless it’s fun for them.” For her, shingling is a joy because she can see the whole town, the whole countryside, spread out around her from up there on top of the house. She tells him to look for the person whose eyes light up when he mentions shingling the roof and then he’ll know who really wants to do it. See, she’s got the right idea: finding richness in the mundane, happiness in a chore. It’s a simpler way of looking at things. Roald Dahl, another master of treasure-hunting said, “Above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” And this is what I wonder – about happiness, I mean – perhaps we overlook the seeming fact that happiness can prologue life because it is too difficult to hear. Because happiness is too much in our control. Calvinists seek comfort in knowing that their outcome, their final peace (or piece) is pre-ordained. But who seeks comfort in knowing, instead, that is it entirely in our own power? Now I, personally, fall somewhere in between the Calvinists and the idea that it’s all in my hands. And so, I suspect, do most of us. Still, it’s easy to shy away from the responsibility of taking life as completely into your own control as you possibly can. Choosing neither others’ decisions, nor the path of least resistance as your own, but picking, instead, happiness, however it looks in that moment, for as long as it looks that way, to you. It’s impossible, even, for some of us, to separate one of these choices out from the others. And as chaotic and relentless as this world sometimes seems, such thoughts are not always comforting. Looking through his grandma’s spice jars and cooking ingredients, Doug finds one marked RELISH: “And he was glad he had decided to live. RELISH! What a special name for the minced pickle sweetly crushed in its white-capped jar. The man who had named it, what a man he must have been. Roaring, stamping around, he must have trompted the joys of the world and jammed them in this jar and writ in a big hand, shouting, RELISH!” Words to live by found pasted to the side of a condiment. An epiphany from the mundane.

            

There is so much left to say and so much Summer left before me that I feel somehow that the two are appropriately, inexplicably intertwined. I put Dandelion Wine on the shelf next to my Anne books, because I think Ms. Montgomery would have appreciated it. Relished it. The story – the characters, really – linger now, on my mind like the fading strains of a symphony more innate and universal even than sound, than the taste of sweet tea on a hot, humid Virginia night. And, putting the book down, I looked up, immediately, the recipe for dandelion wine, a reminder, in the story, of each momentous moment of a bittersweet summer. Refreshment, vibrancy, beauty, happiness created out of a tiny, yellow weed. Treasure.

-R.E.A.