It gets me, sometimes, I mean really GETS me – takes me over mind and body – the descent into triviality, into the stark meaningless of so many lives. I let my mind wander the other day sparked by a discarded business card for the Author Author Bookstore in Calgary, Canada. It was tucked inside the book I’m reading and I don’t know how it got there, it’s a used book, and it’s been sitting on a bookshelf waiting for me to read it. “Chinese Looking Glass” is a bit intellectual and fact-laden but interesting, a sort of review for me of Chinese history and customs. The card showcases Dave Philpot, Proprietor, who I imagine is quietly arranging his careful book selections on shelves throughout the “best little wordhouse in the West”. I just know Mr. Philpot thought long and hard about that motto, and chuckles to himself whenever he sees those bon mots in print. Turning out the lights, donning his cap (of course he wears a cap), he buttons the top of his coat and catches the bus home. There are several regular customers at Author Author and he knows them all by name. Keeps a fresh pot of coffee on hand for those long chats, mostly about genres and sentence structure and how he will never carry books about famous people written by ghost writers from reams of self-congratulatory prose uttered by the famous personage and barely edited. Nothing fancy, his regular coffee brand, but always served in ceramic mugs from all over Canada. So it goes in the attics of my mind, as Dave Philpot’s life creates itself from black ink on paper and it’s all Eleanor Rigby in my head.
A cacophony of unheard voices fills my head sometimes inside my ears there is a high pitched whine. I wonder did their lives have meaning? Does mine? There’s someone right now writing in a diary that no one will ever read. There’s someone right now lying on their backs, looking at the stars, content to do just that, only that. There is a student cramming for a test, digesting just enough to regurgitate the expected responses, and then it’s gone. New channels in the gray matter crowd in, losing those all-important chemistry tables in some dusty corner of random access memory where the data gets corrupted, and the professor goes on sabbatical somewhere without students and spends months forgetting how to be bored, returning with a spring in his step, shorter hair and warmer thoughts. There’s over six billion of us, how special is any one person? If we leave behind a better world how is that measured? If history is to be the judge, how does it record these quiet unassuming lives? Did my home provide refuge to others as well as myself? Did I create more beauty in the world? Lots of people are retired, lots of people are just lazy, and almost none of us are famous. The Beatles’ verses resonate because right now, some clergyman is, no doubt, writing words to a sermon that no one will hear, you know? And someone’s weeding a garden that took years to grow in a back yard that the next owner will pave over as soon as he moves in. Surrounded by beauty, some people create misery. Can’t escape it. “Eleanor Rigby puts on her face from a jar that she keeps by the door, who is it for?”…