absentmindedness
Remembering back, there were five places I could have left the book. [ 1 ]
These past few years I've returned to my childhood habit of borrowing books from libraries: public, church, school, institutional (the USIS in Davao City!), well-off friends' personal collections (Bong Aviola's family — he always had the latest Hardy Boys books). [ 2 ]
Soon after seeing Christopher Nolan's epic re-telling of Homer's The Odyssey, I wanted to re-read it, having forgotten most of the details from my first reading of it way back when I was in high school in the early 1970s. But when I looked up Emily Wilson's 2018 translation in the SFPL app, I saw that all of the copies had been lent out and there were more than a hundred on the waitlist. [ 3 ]
So one afternoon my daily constitutional took me to Clement Street and the Green Apple bookstore there, where there was a small stack of freshly printed Wilsons still available. Spent 20 of my rare and precious extra shekels on the volume, and started reading the Translator's Note on the walk home. That was almost a month ago today. [ 4 ]
Then, last Saturday, I lost the book; on Sunday morning, as I prepared to go out, I realized I'd left it behind somewhere along the previous afternoon's long walk. It was such a sinking, disheartening feeling, given my current impecunious condition. ::chuckle:: So I cast my mind back — with its frayed short-term memory state needing desperately to be defragged, as it were — to determine where and when I could have left it. [ 5 ]
The first possibility was at the MUNI bus stop outside a pet shop in Bernal Heights, Bernal Beast. I'd just left the SFPL branch there, where I'd spent some time reading and writing, and was going to catch the 24 Divisadero to start my ride home. Standing at the stop, I looked up to see the afternoon sky's articulate story (continuing that same day when it was unusually chatty) and thought to snap a pic of it. Laid my book down on the A-frame announcement board on the sidewalk in front of the shop, turned around and took some shots of the firmament, heard the bus arriving, boarded it. Without, I think, first retrieving the Homer. [ 6 ]
But I wasn't absolutely sure about that; so, the second possibility was that I'd set it beside me on the 24. Instead of reading, I'd decided to continue listening to Ian McKellen reading the epic (the legendary Fagles translation), gripped as I have been by his rendition which is both subtle and dramatic; so I must have been fiddling with my iPhone on the ride the 9 blocks down to Mission Street where I'd alight and transfer to the 49 Van Ness. Sans the book, possibly. [ 7 ]
The third possibility was at the guerrilla bus stop bench at Mission and Cortland. These benches, mostly around the Mission District in the city, are DIY (unpermitted) transit benches courtesy of the San Francisco Bay Area Bench Collective, a group of citizens concerned with MUNI bus stops lacking seating. The benches are a godsend to the old, the young, the harried... but could be a liability for the forgetful who may indeed leave items behind when catching the arriving 49, like beloved epics. ::chuckle:: [ 8 ]
My ride on the 49 itself, back to the northern edge of the peninsula, was typical: long, bumpy (the roadway on the Mission is ragged), and Gandalf's voice in my ear must have soothed me into a fitful nap along the way and, when I was jolted awake by the voice of the bus driver announcing the last stop at the bus' terminus at Van Ness and Bay, I got off minus the book, which I could have set down beside me: thus the fourth locus of possibility. [ 9 ]
A block away I stopped at North Point Grocery for a small pint of Häagen-Dazs strawberry ice cream, placing the book, I could have sworn, on the top of the low ice cream case by the cashier's station right by the entrance to the bodega: possibility fifth. Next morning, after starting on my Sunday walk, the first stop was NPG to ask if I'd left my copy of The Odyssey there the previous early evening; Mohammed said nope, sorry. So, that was strike 2. Strike 1 had taken place a half hour earlier at my apartment when I called Bernal Beast to ask if I'd left the book propped on their A-frame board — the woman who answered was apologetic; it was in fact she who had brought the board in at the shop's closing that afternoon. [ 10 ]
After hanging up, I went online and filled out a Lost-and-Found form at the MUNI website, in the event I'd left it either on the 49 or the 24 and someone thoughtful would have brought it to the driver, who in turn would have brought it in to L&F. I didn't have much hope for this, but who knows, the volume itself might manifest its own little odyssey and find its way back to the Ithaca of my 3-mat hut in Lower Russian Hill. ::chuckle:: [ 11 ]
But such a thing happening would have taken weeks, at least, and I really wanted to keep reading the epic (I had just finished Book 8), and there was still a long line for the thing at the SFPL. What happened next, though, is grist for the mill of tomorrow's escarpment post, as this one has already gotten long and windy (both senses) and has been penned in stream-of-thought writing style which, come to think of it, is a reification of the cognitive condition of absent-mindedness itself. [ 12 ]
Ah, well, such is the state of one's mind on this day. Stay tuned then, reader; yes, you... the only one who reads this place with any sort of attention (or imposed fealty ::cough::). ;-) [ 13 ]
[ The book's last time as an element of the SLS, that afternoon somewhere near Holly Park in Bernal Heights... ]
