prized possession

Prized Possession

What’s your most prized possession?  Your home?  Car?  Wedding band? Family portrait?  What about your mind or feelings? We don’t think of those as possessions because they’re not things. Yet, we believe our thoughts and emotions belong to us. Precious keepsakes? Simple reminders…  Like mine, yours must have an interesting stories attached to them that accompany you, as important as the schedules you keep.

Maybe like “Peter gets his Wish,”  my first reading book with its binding worn and pages loosed from the many times I leafed the pages and read it to my mother…printed in 1948 with lovely watercolor prints…the story of a child who wishes to hold cut flowers in his hands and give them to his mother. He has to work for it, but the wish comes true. He cuts some of the tulips from his garden and gives them to this mother; however, he experiences disappointment as the remaining flowers wither. He did not understand the flowers were perennials. Peter will receive a second blessing by their return. I remember asking my mother why everything couldn’t be perennial.   

My first history book….goes up to WWI, which since there wasn’t a WWII when it was written referred to it as the Great War. The big break-throughs of the times—telephone, transatlantic air flights, and sewing machines. But its personal value to me….in the Chapter on Christopher Columbus, it’s the page where an illustration has him sitting on a dock as a boy, awaiting his future…now remember, when I was a child, Columbus was a hero for discovering the New World…my town, New London, held a parade in his honor, and an imposing statue of the man graced the main street to downtown…. when I looked at the date 1492 (I was reading this in 1955, when I was eleven); I did the math 1492 to the date of my birth, 1944. My child’s mind asked the question--where was I during those 450 years? All that time that preceded me….I had a vision of myself waiting…my head and  those of many others barely above a calm, level ocean, all of us aware of the time before we were born. Waiting for a New World.  But I was not a navigator, I was without charts. I still don’t have the answer to that question.

So, you see, Toastmasters, reading—how we are introduced to new worlds. We are so small, and simple stories, greetings by people we have never known, welcome us into their homes, their travels, their feelings. What was the first strange world that invited you to be a neighbor? Is the memory of that, one of your prized possessions?

“Let me take you boys into my library,” the man said to us.  My friend, Marc, and I were visiting his high school sweet-heart, Nancy. Marc always stopped by to pick me up when he had places to go; I was his designated passenger—he said I was better company than the radio and helped him by not letting his thoughts run away with him, which later on they did. The man inviting us into his library was Nancy’s father, the local District Attorney who was very interested in getting to know Marc.  But he had me at “my library.” I knew what a library was—a large stone building that housed encyclopedias, reference books, stacks of research, shelves of fiction and non-fiction arranged according to Dewey’s decimal system.  The man ushered us down the hall to two large doors that opened to three walls of the room filled from top of low cabinets to the crown molding with dark bookcases fitted with books without interruption. Behind the desk, upon which he sat to cross-examine Marc about his intentions, were Law Books with burgundy and navy bindings, uniformly sized in width and height, hardbacks, not just books but volumes—just like in the TV ads of attorneys drumming up liability business. The two side walls of books were populated by historians, philosophers, serious novelists and poets. In other words, the lives and thoughts of writers condensed and bound in collegial procession.

You must remember, that I grew up during those distance days when truth and honor filled our minds. Yes, when we were guileless. I carried this belief, now I see as myth, worse as illusion—that if you owned a book, you must have read it; if you read it, you not only retained its contents but understood its intent. To have a library like this was a sign of legendary, certainly unusual, status because it measured the commitment and breadth of the owner’s knowledge. Nancy’s father was King Solomon, and he had invited us into the temple’s Holy of Holies. All this I saw, as time devoted to reading and thought, in that man’s mind, in order to understand what people sharing all the worlds worth discovering. 

From that time until six years ago—55 years—I too acquired and consumed books. I embraced any idea promiscuously, devoured stories with an appetite beyond my capacity. I kept those ideas, housed in their books for reference on my way toward a Masters in English and down other rabbit holes that welcomed me in….Alas, while I did not retain the contents of those books as I assumed Solomon had, I kept the books on the belief that owning them gave me the rights to the possession of their contents, like owning an instrument but not playing it, like having some great library wines but never wishing to decant them. Yes, I was a collector!

What about your most valued possession? What is it that you can’t live without? Something you bring out only on a special occasion?  Or use it when you really need to be reminded of your humanity? Your special stash! The collection to which you rarely allow yourself an indulgence.?

I didn’t have a personal library to rival Solomon’s.  But I had turned our two-car garage into a citadel and buttressed the walls with bookcases of cheap pine or particle board, each case fortified with the paperback books like unmortared brick. Alas, the walls came tumbling down as we needed to down-size when I retired. There was no way we would be able to fit those precious authors, because that’s what a book is, yes, the life’s work of a writer, fit them all in a much smaller house. My wife and I together performed the merciless task of triaging the survivors. Would we ever open this book again in our life-time? Oh, the authors and philosophers we would lead to the guillotine, library for its book sale….28 wine boxes filled with books to either be saved by another collector or abandoned to the recycling plant. It wasn’t a judgment against the authors, that their ideas were too heavy or wide to bring to a much smaller dwelling. It was more about our recognition of our diminishing space and time.  Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities was saved, his Great Expectations, not; the works of Shakespeare and Whitman granted reprieve, Socrates and scholars who put the OED together, summarily cut loose to save themselves. 

As I have been talking, I know you, as trained multi-taskers, have been thinking about your most prized possessions. The story behind it, the way it impacts your life, what it means to you. Good, you now have material for your next speech.  To tell us about those dear objects that belong to your lives as much as your names belong to your identity would be prized by each of us, your collegues. 

I vowed to my children that I would not try to reconstruct the fortress walls for them to have to dispose of, at some point in the future, after I too would be carried out in a box. End of story? From out of nowhere, actually from my daughter, on a Father’s Day nearly 6 years ago…she presented me with Aladdin’s Lamp, a Kindle Fire. I had no idea this is what I was wishing for. Yes, it became my prize possession.  Well, not the Kindle….because like the Lamp, the Kindle is just the container. It it what is stored inside.  Wait, you all know the story, right. Disney’s version is OK. How Aladdin, through no great merit of his own, comes in possession of an antique lamp. How his friend begins to clean it and the rubbing summons of the genii. Then, the three wishes—the first, for wealth so he can marry the Sultan’s daughter; the second, to delay death so he can live to enjoy his destiny. And you know the third right? Well, I must tell you, my appetite is not limited to three wishes. So far 155 wishes have been granted. I am a “Luddite on Fire, ”completely taken in by its power. Is it the genii inside that is my prized possession?….well, not exactly the genii (the magician of technology) ….. the wishes that the genii has granted have become my prized possession….the books inside are just containers too, containing the ideas and experiences that help us learn more of the worlds around us that we do not own.  Then, we as readers become the container for all those worlds. Not just Peter’s world, not only Columbus’ New World

All those books, 40,000-plus pages,  in Aladdin’s Lamp that is 3/8” thick, about the same thickness as Peter’s Wish.  Each book delivered within seven seconds of my wish. I didn’t know I would begin to build my library again. When I moved to Sacramento, I began tutoring English to students from grammar school to graduate school. I began to read the books they were reading…some of those books were the ones that didn’t make the triage but have been resurrected in the Kindle. I many cases, it is as if I had never remembered reading them.  With lessening time that age brings there is an excitation of the depth of transfer of knowledge…yes, remember well, this is the last time you will be told!

One of those books gives me warning and counsel--”….{don’t} lay up for yourself treasures upon earth, where moth and rust corrupt and where thieves break through and steal….for where your treasure is….there will your heart be.” Another tells me that “….the soul cannot be cut, burned, drowned or withered.  It is eternal and everlasting…As certain as there is birth there is death. As certain as there is death there is re-birth. It is inevitable. Knowing this, fear nothing.”  ………You are ready to tell us where your heart is now, aren’t you? You are almost bursting to tell your story, you fearless Toastmaster. 

Is your prized possession something that you would never be caught without? If you lost it, what would you do, what would you give to regain it? This I know, that we share a prized possession. Even as I don’t need a room to hold a library, I can hold it in the palms of my hands. In the same way, we hold a prized possession within us….the possession of language. Being able to speak and hear, to read and write.  All those worlds, such little time. All those word, and we are your captive audience. Language doesn’t really belong to us…more like a companion who is way more entertaining than a radio talk-show host but one who needs to use the air-waves. It is mythic and magic in its capacity. In many ways greater than us, but as the genii does, it surrenders itself to be in service to us. How is your prized possession like mine?  We’d like to know how it differs. Oh, yes, the third wish.  So strange when you think about it.  Aladdin last wish is to give the Genii his freedom.  That is my wish for you.