When I was in high school and college I had a thing for bookmarks. By “a thing” in this case, I mean that I refused to use them.
My much younger brain kept page numbers and paragraph images perfectly catalogued. I never used a bookmark. Even while working hectic jobs in Japan, it never even occurred to me to use a bookmark… of course, it was never more than a few hours between reading times.
The subways and trains of Japan, though crowded, were a great swirl of white noise rhythms that made reading easy. I even had a lot of time to work on the young adults novel I’ve been playing with.
The advent of kids and my beloved minivan in Japan took a huge chunk of my reading time away from me. I was out of practice, and slowly plugged through a few books. In fact, the only books I really devoured quickly during those years were Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and Beneath the Underdog: His World as Composed by Mingus
(While we are on the subject, and in parentheses, here are a couple of videos of Charles Mingus for people that are unfamiliar. The first is his music. The second is a fascinating interview with him. The autobiography has the same linguistic flow as his speaking here.)
Now, after such a long and fun digression, I’ll get back to the point. This morning my daughter came proudly to me, telling me she’d found the stickers I had “hidden”.
The stickers in question are a part of a bookmark distributed at the library advertising PBS’s new Cat in the Hat kids’ show coming this September. There are indeed stickers on it, however I had been using it as a bookmark in the book I’m currently reading, Joe Hill’s “Horns: A Novel”
Well, she found the stickers hidden in the book, marking the last page I had read. I didn’t mind because I used my still properly functioning brain to browse through the book and find my place again the way I used to in Japan. It helps this time that I was only on page 9, but I am hoping I can get back into the reading and remembering groove and free myself from the need for bookmarks yet again.