“Find a way to make beauty necessary, find a way to make necessity beautiful.”
- Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Have you ever opened an oven that was set to four hundred degrees and looked in? It snatches your breathe away in one burning gasp, dries your eyes instantly, makes you think, “Damn, that’s flipping hot.” This is what it was like for me to step off the plane and enter Kuwait as a Hospital Corpsman in the U.S. Navy. The heat wrapped its body around me while the sand brown landscape pierced my eyes. Where oh where was the color!? I grew up in Southern California, was stationed in Washington state, I needed mountains, I needed trees, I needed to see the ocean. I was not going to get any of that here, maybe a glimpse at the ocean if I was lucky but let’s face it I’m just not that lucky. Thankfully desert cammies come with paperback sized pockets on the pant legs; thankfully I thought ahead and placed a copy of Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels into one of those pockets. Just feeling it pressed against my leg was an enormous encouragement. “Don’t worry it,” it said, “Just wait till we get off this nauseating bus ride and then you can read me.” Oh and read I did.
There’s nothing more filling to me then to devour a book. I love eating page after page shoveling more into my brain like Thanksgiving pie. Books are what keep me sane, they let me fall into other worlds, walk the streets of Venice, sail the Arctic Ocean, smell the dirt in Africa, and so much more. From the time I started reading I never go anywhere without one. You never know when the friend you’re meeting for dinner is going to be late- that’s prime reading time, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you amazon.com and my most phenomenal best friend Meghan for the multitude of books they supplied with such swiftness. Just like Sherman Alexie in his essay “The Joy of Reading and Writing: Superman and Me,” I knew what it was like to try and save myself by reading. Anne Lamott summed it up just right for me when she said, “Because for some of us, books are as important as almost anything else on earth.” (15)
The problem with being a book eater out in the desert is that your food supply dwindles quickly and there isn’t a local book store to refill it. You’re left to wait for the mail which takes roughly two weeks. To be honest it really isn’t all that long of a wait, if you have enough to munch on that is. I felt like Alexie reading magazines, wall postings, “anything with words and paragraphs” (14) when I didn’t have a book. Sure I reread the ones that I already had, hell I even badgered people who had one in their hands. I was like a crack addict licking my lips with sweaty palms waiting for my crack to come. “Is that a good book? Do you have any others? Can I look at it while you’re eating?” How could they expect me to deal with this brown hot bullshit all day everyday without a reprieve? And then it would happen, the mail would come and as soon as I had a free minute, I’d rush to the administration tent to see if my name was on the mail list. Thank God Meghan loved me, if it wasn’t a book, she’d at least always send me a letter. Sometimes it would be filled with little snacks, newspaper clippings from the Cal Daily. Oh those eccentric little articles were amazing they made me feel connected to something sane.
