Sunday, May 24, 2009

Digging.



It's a bit of a puzzle, really, why I broke my toe.

I was talking with a friend the other night, phone tucked between cheek and shoulder, so I could look for a book. Something by Tobias Wolff. "Powder." At the top of my shelf, I fumbled a bookend - a marble statue of a Chinese fu lion – and it slipped off its perch, high on walnut, and landed on my foot.

I bled maybe an hour. I wrapped up my conversation (to end it earlier seemed somehow presumptuous) and had a look: my middle toe was broken, leaning westward. I straightened it, bracing it in splints made from plastic take-out knives in a junk drawer. I found a loose sandal to wear for the next week.

I like to walk, mostly to see my dogs have some fun chasing the birds, but hound dogs take their walks seriously. So, we haven't very much. I like to drive, too, but tactful pedalwork isn't a barrel of monkeys either. Yesterday, at Elliott Bay Book Co. I'd gathered an armful of books. At the top of the staircase, I lost my balance and dropped them.

A nice man helped me pick them up. We kneeled together and we might've been kids playing with marbles.

“It’s the lone sandal," I said. "It makes me clumsy.” I gathered the rest and he noticed my new copy of Darwin's Origin of Species.

"I'm having a party for Ida," he said.

His mustache was obviously conceived in madness. Broad as a cigarette, trained in exclamation, it made him as loud as he was temperate. “Our missing link. Have you read about it? I’ve been waiting for it since I was a boy.”

Me, too. I was a boy who kept his microscope set in good order, who liked to dream of our unknowns with aggravated exuberance, about the bottom of the sea and the ends of Universe, if what was there was a Heaven, or a concept, or a squall of cosmic dust unworthy of study. I looked for fossils at a rusty quarry near home, and one day - a thrill - I found a fern’s leaf on a rock.

I had a copy of Darwin's essays then, too. Numbers on fingers, hand on heart, I measured my remaining years and wondered if I'd ever get to see a photograph or an X-ray, or just a drawing, of our missing link to the apes, if I'd get to imagine what she might've been like, or what God might think.

That’s why, I suppose, I thought having a party about it seemed like such a magnificent idea. "When is it?" I asked.

Here was a man, furious in mustache, flushed with a boy's found certainty, invitation in hand. He looked for fossils too, and I said: “I’ll go."

I wonder what it might be like to write about it for a newspaper - I don't do that anymore - and if it would be like writing about Neil Armstrong or Chuck Yeager's barrier or the war of the worlds. But I’m happy enough in the moment, to have a moment, when a grand question is leavened with a bit of certainty: it's a great thing, all that’s ahead, new ideas and arguments and conversations and books, all impossible to figure.

I don't have a microscope anymore, though.

I don't know if Ida's 47-million-year-old fossil will change the world, or illuminate any better our life's quotidian riddles and canals and turns. I don't know yet what I've learned, I suppose, and neither am I sure what I can. Except, maybe, this: if you haven't limped and tripped into a bookstore on a weekday and dropped everything, you haven't really walked.

© 2009 Matthew Ebnet

2 comments:

  1. Warmly introspective jaunt into a bookstore. On your next foray into rusty quarries... keep me in mind. I collect fossils. Petrified wood specifically. Or anything dead. Woodies... I call em.


    Your cousin Alan.

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  2. This was nice.

    One question: Why is it copyright 2008 if you wrote it for May 2009's short story month?

    I notice small, odd details.

    Again: I enjoyed the story.

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