SEPT 28: In honor of Yom Kippur, our blogger and poets are on break! Please check us out tomorrow afternoon or catch up on 250 former submissions!
SEPT. 29
It’s funny how forgotten people can suddenly turn up. DAVID REGENSPAN
Some time after my widowed mother’s death I was looking through her basement in preparation for an estate sale, to see if there might be any items worth salvaging before everything went on the auction block. There was a table full of tools rusted with age. Distasteful vases, useless jars, broken pole lamps. There was a bookcase along one wall. The whole thing was painted a discolored off-white and, so far as I was concerned, was no more a candidate for my own acquisition as were the other items. The books themselves, however, might be another matter. They were old looking, true, with faded bindings, but there was also the possibility that one or two of them might have some value.
There were various items in Hebrew and Yiddish. These, then, must have been books belonging to my grandparents. Both my Hebrew and my Yiddish are spotty, but I was able to decipher enough to know that some of the volumes were prayer books. One was a chumash, a book designed for following and studying the weekly Torah readings in synagogue—in very poor condition, I might add. One was, of all things, a Yiddish translation of one of the works of the playwright and essayist Oscar Wilde. And one was… what?
It was a small volume covered with dust. I don’t know why I chose to pull it from its shelf. I felt oddly protective toward it. But the book demanded a wiping down. I went upstairs to retrieve a sponge. I returned, gently wiped the book’s spine, and read:
Essays of Elia. Charles Lamb.
I knew the book from my graduate school days. Victorian essays. They were nice enough, but nothing I would find myself reading again.
I wiped down the rest of the book’s cover. I opened it—carefully, because its binding was cracked. There was a signature and a date on the blank page just within the front cover: Herman H. Span 1926.
This, then, was a book owned by my long lost Uncle Herman, a man I never knew. He died young from, of all things, an unpasteurized milkshake that he bought at a farm stand. This was decades before I was born. He was known in my family as the writer who never was, the poetic soul who was cut down before his life truly began. This, then, was the only physical trace I had ever seen of his life. A book of Victorian prose.
Funny what a little cleaning can reveal. I took the volume home.
Untitled ROB SCOTT
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