Wayne Michael DeHart

Rescued from the furthest corner of the very top shelf, the nondescript brown book revealed itself to be dusty and dated, seemingly dispensable now after a long-ago demotion from displayed to displaced on the still-sturdy steel shelves of the library’s basement. I sat down in the nearest chair and chose to allow the dust to see another day, gently opening it mid-binding, to a random yellowed page of crowded text and curious font.

I started reading from the top of the left side of page 46, mid-sentence, absentmindedly turning page after page, digesting every word, absorbing each paragraph. Wasn’t sure what I had missed and didn’t care. It was not unlike walking into a roomful of strangers and discreetly deciphering the multi-toned, ongoing chatter flowing from the small groupings surrounding me. The players are out of focus – fleetingly faceless, neighborly but nameless –  enabling me to discreetly follow along, filling in the blanks with my own spontaneous words and thoughts, my own  images and interpretations. 

I began to read at a faster pace, forming opinions of the characters and the events unfolding before me, oblivious to the time ticking by as I made assumptions, while continuing  to fill in the blanks on the fly. I had rolled into the realm of the rabid reading zone, where time stands still and instincts are cast aside like empty Coke cans. 

That is, until a desk phone trumpeted loudly nearby, and my divergence into discovery ended abruptly. My eyes shifted to the bottom of the page – 97 ! Had I really journeyed through 51 pages in a mere few minutes?  A quick glance at the clock on the wall behind me jolted me back in to the reality of a Tuesday morning in November of my junior year of college.  Minutes? Yes, about 75 too many,  and I was due in a classroom across campus at noon.

I gently closed the book, determined to preserve its cloak of noble dust, and stretched to return it to its rightful place on the sleepy top shelf in the musty corner of the basement, there to rest in peace and gather more dust till the next  curious  explorer stumbled along in search of a neglected  literary treasure.

In the years and decades to come, I sought out dusty volumes on the highest  and lowest shelves in libraries and used bookstores from here to there and places in between. The more dust, the more yellow the pages, the greater the anticipation and excitement. And for those volumes, the game plan was always the same – open it up to a random page, start reading, and keep going until a phone rings, my Coke can is empty, or my bladder is full.  And then stop right there, on the proverbial dime.  Put it back in its rightful place, its dust undisturbed, its beginning and its ending left to exploration by another reader, on another day.

All these years later, I can’t tell you the title of that first rescued book. I didn’t forget. I simply never looked. I didn’t want to know because I didn’t want to feel compelled to find a copy of it and just maybe read it from front to back. The experience  was perfect just the way it was – 51 pages of faceless and nameless characters letting me listen in to their story, mid-stream,  thus affording me the gift of completing  the story, fore and aft,  in my words, filling in the blanks from the pages that came before I started reading, and the pages that followed where I left off. In any given instance, I could serve as both author and reader, creator and consumer, maker and user. Always and ever changing. A mystery to be solved.

You know, much like that first old, dust-covered book, waiting patiently to be rescued, its words to touch, and  be touched.

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