Admittedly, I have not had the best of luck lately. So I was more than a little surprised when I opened the cover of a book I had picked up at Goodwill and found signatures. At first, I thought it was the usual, “To So-and-so, thanks for all the good times on the lake,” or just a string of nonsense letters and numbers. That’s what’s usually in second-hand books. It’s pretty rare for people to write their own name in the flyleaf, which I always do if I plan to loan it out. Anyway, it took me a minute to realize that the book was signed, not by the author, but by the relatives of the woman in the book.
Luck glanced at me from the corner of his eye and grinned.
I’ve read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks before, a friend loaned it to me. Since then, I always knew I’d pick up a copy if I ran into one. I’m crazy about non-fiction, especially medical non-fiction. One of the things I always wondered about was how Henrietta’s family felt about the book after it was published. The signatures gave me an answer of sorts; they were okay enough with it to sign a copy.
Seeing their names boggled my mind. On one level I know non-fiction means the people written about are real; but on another level, knowing they touched the same book as I made them seem more real to me. I know that’s silly, but written words have always seemed to exist in a gap in reality.
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| The Title Page |
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This blog exists in a gap in reality.
I caught that awful cough thing a few weeks ago, call it a cold if you're proper like that. Anyway, this blog entry has been sitting in Draft mode for a long time, because I could not simply get my act together enough to turn on my computer and drop the image into it.