Yesterday browsing the religion section at KW Book Exchange. Three handbooks -- I mean books that fit the hand, books the size of a deck of cards. Bound in burgundy leatherette, covers soften, wrinkle closed like a leaf curling up. Onion skin paper, a holy smell, dusty. (Memory: going through my great grandmother's Latin missalette, finding dozens of four-leaf clovers, brittle pressed to sepia -- magic pressed inside religion.) The three books are identical: new testaments and psalms.
Books like these were given to soldiers shipping out to Korea, and earlier to WWII (beginning in about 1942 locally -- as far as I've been able to tell). Often there are letters and documents folded into them. Always worth a look.
Name plates inside: presented by the Gideons. The name of the receiver, address and date. The three have the same address on Caledon street. It is 1959. At the back there is a sort of contract, certifying that _______ has accepted Jesus as his personal saviour, and outlining the benefits of belief. All three have signed. They are two men and a woman -- or perhaps some are boys and girls? "Mary Jane" reads one, no last name, the handwriting careful
and trembly. Old or young? I can't tell. Blue ink weeping into the onionskin.
What is it about fragments that suggests, so? Powerful, like potshards. Almost I can smell the thin stew.
I have some paperback required for school that I got passed down from a sister. In the front cover is a poem by some unknown author, handwritten. In the back cover is a poem (or lyrics transcribed, I'm not sure) by her. I could find out, but it's so much more fun to imagine some young fellow in high school writing verse, selling the book used, and then she replies to the found poem with her own verse, imagining a chance meeting of the original author in a field of flowers.
It's the fascination of found things. Of the uknown. Of not having all the pieces to the puzzle and wanting to fill in the rest with your imaginaiton.