Wrangling three kids in an echo-ey place with lots of valuable and breakable items might be a challenge for some families, but our kids really dig art so it wasn't that bad.
We were in one of the largest galleries when Mia pointed to a painting on the far side of the room and proclaimed it a Pollock. I wasn't sure... the style wasn't consistent with what I'd studied in college. The geometric shapes were well-defined, and it didn't have nearly enough splatters.
She was adamant.
We crossed the cavernous room to read the teensy weensy label.
To my great surprise, it was indeed a work of Pollock.
Do you remember when you first learned about Jackson Pollock? I do, and it was not in preschool.
I am semi-embarrassed to admit that it wasn't until an Art Appreciation course in college that I learned of the splatter king.
You, of course, are not surprised to hear this. You have not forgotten that I mixed up Rottweilers and Studebakers until a few short years ago.
I'm not exactly a fan of Pollock's work, but it is distinctive, which is why the cover of the book in the bargain bin at Hastings caught my attention on a lonely, rainy night long ago and far away.
It was 1999 or maybe 2000 and I was feeling very homesick and quite sorry for myself, so I went to the bookstore. Always familiar faces there, even if they're only on the book covers.
Crammed into the bargain bin with the other
I did not recognize the author or the title, but I opened it anyway, and here is where my eyes landed:
Well, that was a weird coincidence.
I checked the publishing info.
Hmm. Texas does have a lot of towns with unusual names. Maybe there's more than one Pomfret in America. The paper was pleasantly thick and nubby, so I resumed flipping.
And that's when I saw this:
Antiques and knickknacks in Putnam... Okay, what was going on here? I flipped to the back, fingers crossed for information about the author. Look at what I found:
She was a professor at my old school? She really did live in Pomfret, Connecticut?!
I bought the book and left. It was probably too late at night to call my mother, but I did it anyway.
"MOM! I was at the bookstore, and there was a book, and the cover looked like a Jackson Pollock, but the inside said Pomfret, but the publisher was Texas, and then it said--are you ready for this?--Putnam. It said Putnam, Mom. And the author, she teaches at Eastern. Have you ever heard of a," I paused to read from the cover,"Gray, um, Jacobik?"
"Oh, yes. Gray Jacobik. Lovely woman. I think we've had tea together, actually, though I'm not sure of the circumstances, but yes. Gray Jacobik. She has a book?"
My mother had tea with the very lady I whose book I found in the bargain bin on the night that I was in a state of homesickness, two thousand miles from the town that sounded like worried apples.
It was too spectacular. Naturally I had to share all this with Gray Jacobik. I emailed her the following morning. I have no idea how I obtained her email address, but I did. I told her everything-- the rain, the homesickness, the Pollocky cover. I left out the part about the bargain bin and also the tea because I didn't want to make her feel bad if she didn't remember my mother the way my mother remembered her.
She replied right away.
She said I was her ideal reader.
She said a lot of other things, too, several paragraphs, if I recall. It's all in an email account I abandoned long ago. But those were her exact words: ideal reader.
I blushed and gushed for days. A real author said I was the ideal reader.
I was so surprised by all of the things that had happened in this string of coincidences and events that I forgot about the homesickness entirely.
***
The other day I wrote about Elizabeth Berg and her beautiful, beautiful sentences. Boy, was I surprised when this message arrived from Michelle:
Angry? I was not angry at all. The Gray Jacobik incident had shown me that authors are people, too, and I've learned--especially after all this writing--that regular people can become authors with very little rigmarole. Though I'm not sure I would have ever thought to mail it to Elizabeth, I agreed with Michelle that she might enjoy knowing the scope of her impact on her reading community.
For me, the greatest surprise came in learning that someone would go to such sweet lengths to connect my writing to the author who'd inspired me. (Especially someone with six kids to keep up with!)
Michelle and I graduated high school in 1997 from the thriving metropolis of Putnam in a senior class of less than 100 students, but we were never close friends.
At age 17, 18, 19, 20, we know we are going forward into the world, and we know we'll make new friends. Still, we cling to the hope our connections with the close friends from our previous lives will last.
I never considered the idea of developing new bonds and friendships from my previous life.
Yet that is exactly what has happened.
It seems like as we get older and gain more experience, things should be more predictable and less should surprise us, but that has not happened.
Each day just keeps bringing more surprises.
Your friends are surprising you, and you're surprising them, and everyone is surprising themselves most of all because this isn't what we thought growing up would be like.
No matter how much I contemplated thirty-four from the safe naivete of those years of late-teens and early twenties, I never could've envisioned reaching out to an old friend about spiritual faith or trading secrets--dark and light--with a new friend, or staying up all night to try to bring comfort and reassurance to friends old and new.
Yet that is exactly what has happened.
Waking up and realizing that there is no longer even a trace of homesickness in my heart, and that friendship can exist outside distance or time-- all of this has been such a surprise.
I've found that I no longer need to wonder about what my future may hold, because that time can be better spent appreciating the everyday surprises that surround me today.
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