Have you ever placed something in a book and forgotten about it?
In 2019 I attended a literary conference in Natchez. Beth Ann Fennelly, Mississippi’s poet laureate at the time and creative writing teacher at Ole Miss, was a keynote speaker.
Promoting her newest book “Heating and Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs,” she explained a chapter about a time when she and her writer-college professor husband Tom Franklin did just that.
Young and poor and in a “just-in-case” moment, they tucked away a $50 bill on page 50 of a book they’d remember. Later, still young, Beth Ann placed a risque photo of her husband in page 50 of another book she liked.
A few years passed and they forgot about both — until they didn’t. After an extensive search of every page 50 of every book of the hundreds in their house, she and her husband could only assume they had given the books away to two of the countless college students who frequented their Oxford home.
That is something I’ve done often: “Please. Take this book. You’ll love it.” I even gave away my signed copy of Beth Ann’s book to an interested student.
Nineteen years and three children later, Beth Ann and her husband still have not found the money and more importantly, the photo.
Beth Ann aptly titled this chapter “Why I’m So Well Read.”
Being well-read, I too have tucked away things in my books — and in the library’s books. I’ve placed $20 bills near the end of long library books that I liked to reward a persistent reader.
But far more interesting are the things I’ve found.
My grandmother Halcyone Barnes bequeathed me her extensive library. Through the years as I read and perused her books, I discovered little snippets of her pre- and post-married life.
I found a love letter, written in beautiful calligraphy and dripping with sentiment, signed by a man who was not my grandfather. Pressed rose petals fluttered off the page. His name reappeared later, penciled next to a romantic poem.
Far better were the handful of postcards sent to her from my grandfather while she was traveling. None were long and mushy.
In printed block letters resembling a second grader’s, he once wrote, “Speedy, I bought a cow at the sale barn today. Lew is being bad. We and the sunflowers miss you. Billy.” I’m glad she married this one.
My other grandmother Ustane Butler left me her well-worn study Bible. Last year, I discovered two newspaper cartoons by Joe McKeever, who occasionally stayed with my grandparents when he preached at their church.
My favorite one shows a shock-faced pastor standing at the front of the sanctuary with a woman who’d just walked the aisle. Her words to him: “Pray that God will know my will.”
This past summer, I purchased an easy-read from the McComb library’s take and donate section. As I turned a page, out dropped a scalloped half-dollar-sized sea shell.
My imagination interrupted the plot. I’d like to believe a teacher was enjoying this very book on her last vacation before school started and with no bookmark, she reached for a shell a hand’s length away. Did she finish the book? Either way, I inherited the book and its mysterious oceanic bookmark. The tides ever turn.
Last week, I was reading a thrilling page turner and came across a library receipt containing the name of its previous reader, the daughter of a friend of mine. Ironically, the title of the book was “You Are Not Alone.”
A first-rate find recently made its way to me. Early mornings, I journal in “The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal.” It’s part of a study I started last year, with one absolute: that you write three pages in long-hand every morning. I balked at first. I’m now on my sixth journal.
I ordered my last one from eBay, with the seller’s notation of “near perfect condition.”
When it came in, I flipped through the first pages only to discover the name Roy where mine should have gone, and a date: January 14, 1996. Eleven pages in Roy’s scripted hand-writing followed.
“Oh boy,” I thought, “a secret diary.”
I discovered Roy had lived near San Francisco in a rental house with a lazy roommate whose one job was to do laundry, a task at which he failed miserably.
Roy was really bitter about the laundry thing. He mentions it several times and blames his roommate’s laziness on smoking pot, its illegality problematic as well: “He was going to do laundry and iron today but he cashed his check and bought pot. He can’t see the forest for the weed.” With the marijuana laws changing, Roy’s roommate now can smoke his pot and eat it too.
Roy stopped writing on page 11, his final words: “Gotta go. Off to work.” What happened? It’s like the old elementary school book reports where every student told a fragment of the plot as a teaser, ending with, “You’ll have to read the rest of the book to find out what happens.”
I just hope my journals don’t end up on eBay or in some flea-market store. But if they do, I hope they find their way to someone who appreciates them.
n n n
JANELLYN B. CORNACCHIONE recently retired after teaching 40 years in three Pike County high schools.
