The Bookcase

When I was a little girl, I had a white pressure-board bookcase in my bedroom. It was the type of furniture that comes in a big, flat cardboard box with instructions on how to assemble. I can’t remember when the bookcase first appeared next to my dusty rose canopy bed, but I do remember deciding to designate it as my “special stuff” place, where all special things without obvious purpose were to be kept. The shelves were full of items such as small stuffed animals, a glass-lidded music box, ceramic figurines, and half a dozen tin Reading Rainbow buttons. I know now that the term for those items is knickknack (a term which, in it’s very obscure semantics, demonstrates the pointless nature of such items), but in my budding sentimentality at age ten, they were nothing short of little treasures. As I was a compulsively tidy child, I remember religiously clearing the bookcase once a week, dusting the shelves, and carefully replacing the items in their proper places. Each item had a story and each story came with special memories of some happy moment in my life.

There was a purple “Ribbon of Participation” for my position as catcher on my ponytail softball team. I was never a very good catcher, but my hard work on the field was always rewarded with a post-game team snack (usually popsicles). I kept the ribbon for the memory of those popsicles.

A clear plastic Hello Kitty coin purse which was discovered at the bottom of a paper sack of hand-me-down clothing reminded me of Heather, the original owner of the purse. Heather was the much older (and much cooler) daughter of my mother’s best friend Sara Ort. When we were lucky, we would have Heather as a baby sitter. She once brought a cassette tape of “Leader of the Pack,” which she generously played over and over again for me and my sister.

There was a miniature set of cedar dresser-drawers my father had bought me as a gift during a vacation in the Ozarks. I would occasionally open one of the drawers and inhale the sweet smell of cedar wood. This made me think of my dead hamster, Deseree. The pet litter in her cage was made from shredded cedar pulp.

The two shelves of the bookcase were full of such items, and I was proud of the collection I had amassed at such a young age. I was experienced. I was cultured. I had the paraphernalia to prove it.

And then one day, when I was in the throes of teenage crisis, I lost all of my friends. I won’t bother to go into the details of the tragedy; nearly everyone has had some similar social disaster sometime in their youth. But the point is that I came home from school one afternoon, looked at my prized bookcase of wonders, and decided to re-evaluate my priorities in life.

Why had I kept all of these trinkets?

What did it all mean to me?

If the objects’ value was related to the value of memories, what would happen if I disposed of the objects?

Is it possible to throw away a memory?

I didn’t give myself long to ponder these questions. Impulsively, I retrieved an old grocery bag from the kitchen downstairs and a shoebox from the closet. Items were divided into two categories: those things which had been given to me by loved ones whose feelings may be hurt if I threw them away (to be placed into the shoebox), and those items which held exclusively personal sentimental value (to be placed in the bag). Five minutes later, I had a heavy sack of nostalgia and a smaller box of responsibilities. The sack went out with the garbage the next morning. The shoebox went onto the top shelf of my closet. The memories remained, undisturbed.

This was my first experience of letting go. That same week, I began stripping the wallpaper off my bedroom walls and removed the lacy pink curtains from their rods. The white bookcase now housed only a flat metal stripping spatula and a bucket of water for loosening the paper. I was tearing down the past. And as the inside of my bedroom changed over the next few weeks, my own malleable teenage insides changed as well. I became more introspective. I sat alone at the lunch table. I no longer coveted all things lacy and pink.

But as I purged my surroundings of seemingly meaningless riff-raff, I did not abandon the memories that were housed in my old treasures. In fact, the more I cleared my environment of visual aids, the more I was inspired to find a new way of remembering: the memories that had before been captured in trinkets and toys started developing into narratives in my mind. Instead of keeping a bookcase of knickknacks, I began to build a library of stories.

My parents will tell you that I began my personal story-telling tradition when I learned how to talk. They would have to belt me into my high chair because I would become so animated while speaking, I would try to stand up in my seat. I was a champion talker.
Even though I was an enthusiastic story-teller as a baby, I consider the clearing of the bookshelf to be the advent of my way of keeping the past.

After two weeks of neglect, I finally cleaned my apartment last weekend. I still had some unpacking to do, but most of the work was simply disposing of unnecessary clutter. When shuffling through the mess, I came across a coffee bean in the bottom of a suitcase. I knew immediately that this little stowaway was from a bag of Nairobi coffee I had picked up on my last day in Kenya. The coffee bag had torn during the long journey to America, and the bean must have got stuck in the lining of the suitcase. Normally, I would have just pitched it, but instead I set it aside on a bookshelf. It sat undisturbed on the shelf for two days, where I looked at it every time I passed it. On the third day, I picked it up, finished the story, and threw it in the wastebasket.

My brief desire to keep the bean reminded me of the white bookcase of treasures. For two days, I had gone back to the place where all things special could be put on a shelf for admiration. But after two days, the bean no longer was something remarkable: it was just a stale and dusty coffee bean. It was the value of the bean that was far too grand to be kept on a shelf.

We spend our lives deciding what to keep and what to throw away. We clear through the clutter of our messy kitchens and untidy bedrooms, picking the keepers from the disposables, the valuables from the rubbish. We are constantly evaluating what we can live without and what is indispensable. Clearing the white bookcase was my first experience of deciding what is important to me. It was a small event, but it shifted entirely the way I remember the past. By letting go of the treasures of the bookcase, I was able to find a deeper place within myself: a vast library of books half written, full of empty pages awaiting the next twist in plot.

Takeoffs and Landings

I never used to be the type of person who is afraid of flying. My first time in an airplane, I was so excited about the shrink-wrapped airplane food and barf bags embossed with the airline’s logo that it didn’t occur to me to be afraid of the fact I was being propelled through space thousands of feet above the ground. (And it was some years later before I learned I should also have fear for the food and the bags, and the relationship between them.) I made my first trans-Atlantic flight when I was fourteen, and specifically remember feigning fright so that the young man in a cowboy hat who was sitting next to me would hold my hand to “comfort” me. But secretly, the thrill of flying overpowered any worry about the safety of the mode of transport.

My favorite parts of flying are, ironically, the most dangerous: takeoffs and landings. Sitting on the runway is rather boring, but once the jet’s engines start to hum and the armrests begin to vibrate, the fun begins. There is always a moment when the mounting churning of the engines breaks from a rattle to a forward push, and it is this moment when, without fail, my heart begins to beat faster. I am pushed back into my seat as I careen to look out the window to see the ground flying by. Similarly, landings provide the exhilaration of the fast approaching ground and the invisible force of momentum pulling me forward as the plane rapidly decelerates. Takeoffs and landings are not frightening; they’re thrilling. My discomfort is reserved for cruising altitudes above 30,000 ft.

Looking out the window and seeing, thousands of feet below, nothing but an endless sheet of blue ocean is not relaxing. The reclining seatbacks and child-size pillows do little to ease my concern about the unlikely suspension of our multi-ton aircraft.

I am a reasonable person. I have reasonable confidence in modern understanding of aeronautical physics. Our heroes Mr. and Mr. Wright took to the skies over one hundred years ago, and commercial air transportation has since become a multi-billion dollar industry that transports millions of people all over the world every year. So why can’t I just sit back and enjoy the mini pretzels and five-dollar cocktails?

On my last flight, I found myself asking this question somewhere over the Arctic. Cruising alongside a four-hour sunset reflected in a sea strewn with cracked sheets of aquamarine-edged icebergs, I turned to the young man sitting in the seat next to me and pointed at the view out the window.

“Why is that so scary?” he looked confused, and leaned over me to get a better look at the ice below.

“I didn’t see it. What was it?” he clearly was having trouble matching the concern on my face with the beautiful sunset.

“That,” I pressed my palm against the small plastic windowpane, “that huge ocean full of ice and freezing water.”

“Ice is freezing water,” he smirked, “and anyway, that’s nearly six miles below us. We’re safe up here.”

“Safe?” I balked, “That’s exactly the problem: we’re up here. And what is keeping us up here? Do you see the wings moving?” I knew my argument was making me appear like a lunatic, but really I just wanted someone to talk me back into a rational place.

“Actually, the wings are moving. Can’t you see them flopping around at the tips?” I could. And it was not making me any more at ease. “Look, if it bothers you, just close the shade. Try to relax a little. Airplanes are, after all, the safest way to travel.”

And there it was, the phrase that everyone likes to tell the sweating pteromerhanophobic: flying is the safest way to travel. And suddenly, like the doorbell ding of the fasten-seatbelt sign, I realized that my fear of flying was not a fear of crashing, but a fear of safety.

It would seem that a fear of safety is oxymoronic; after all, aren’t we usually afraid of things that threaten our safety? But fear can also be understood as unwillingness to accept the unknown. My fear of cruising altitude, of safety and security, is just another way of interpreting my fear that my life will become, for lack of a better word, comfortable. Of course, I enjoy the comforts in life. I have been extremely fortunate and am deeply grateful for everything I have. And yet, I fear becoming too settled into any one place or situation. I yearn for the dramatic perspective shift of takeoffs and landings.

Though this elevated epiphany helped occupy my thoughts for the remainder of the flight, it did not relieve my uneasiness about our impossible yet secure suspension above the freezing -and frozen- ocean. I found my relief seven hours later as the plane crossed Japan’s eastern coastline and roofs and cars began to loom up from the terrafirma below. As we bumped along the runway and were jostled in our seats, I turned to the young man next me. He was firmly clutching both armrests with white-knuckled fists.

“Why is that so scary?” I asked him, pointing out the window.

“Landing is the most dangerous part of flying. Anything could happen,” his lips pressed into a concerned grimace. I turned back to the window and let the momentum of the halting plane pull me forward from my cushioned seatback.

“And isn’t that wonderful?”