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Good books, old friends

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By Kara Kvasnicka

Tuesday, November 29, -0001

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But it is only late April as I put pen to paper. The forsythia is brilliant yellow. The fruit trees are pretty in pink; while, their more modest sibling species hurry to provide them a backdrop of quiet, inconspicuous green.

These, along with my allergies, are the signs. Spring is here. Yet, still reeling from the effects of a relentlessly long, brutally cold winter, I cannot muster my usual enthusiasm for it.

I have no desire to dust off my gardening tools or select annuals for my back porch containers.

Likewise, if I do not make travel arrangements soon for my vacation time in June and August, I will not be going anywhere. Unfortunately, no particular destination, including my beloved New York City, appeals to me.

I should be going for long walks every morning to try to burn off this stubborn lethargy. Instead, I sit too long at the breakfast table pouring over cookbooks I probably never will use.

Of course, as a professional librarian and amateur book reviewer, who can fault the extra time I have taken to sample the sinfully rich contents of The Book Lover's Cookbook (Ballantine Books, 2003, 326 pages, $21.95)?

If you are passionate about both cooking and reading, do not miss Shaunda Kennedy Wenger and Janet Kay Jensen's soul and palate-pleasing celebration of food and literature.

Recipes cover everything from pancakes to "pure pleasure apple pie." They are accompanied by excerpts from the writings which inspired them.

Liberally interspersed between the recipes are insights from writers on their craft. A diverse choir of voices ranging from current bestselling authors such as Mary Higgins Clark to time-tested immortals like John Keats, they also sound off on both the necessity and sheer joy of reading.

What a stark planet this would be, they remind us, if there were no books to preserve our cultural legacy. Are computers truly a more practical medium in which to store the infinite themes and variations on any given scenario the human imagination can compose? Not, I contest, at bedtime.

As I struggle to fall into the natural order of things, Jorge Luis Borges' acknowledgement of his symbiotic attachment to books particularly hits home.

"I have always come to life after coming to books."

Hmmm, maybe it's not outside my windows, but among the worn bindings on my bookshelves, where I should be looking for an antidote to these incongruous mid-spring blues.

Automatically, I first reach for my copy of the Frances Hodgson Burnett children's classic The Secret Garden (1911). It is in remarkably good condition given the number of times I have revisited it over the years.

"Magic" is the title of the long-anticipated chapter in which readers, along with the sickly, bed-ridden Colin, are finally treated to a glimpse of the paradise Mary and Dickon have labored intensively to produce in the abandoned, walled garden to which a robin guided Mary when she arrived at Misselthwaite Manor.

"The seeds Dickon and Mary had planted grew as if fairies had tended them. Satiny poppies of all tints danced in the breeze by the score, gaily defying flowers which had lived in the garden for years, and which it might be confessed seemed rather to wonder how such new people had got there. And the roses — the roses!"

Although it is much too early for planting, just a couple paragraphs about this enchanted space's transformative effects on both Misselthwaite and its inhabitants are enough to motivate me to schedule a trip to a nursery. Ready or not, it is time I started tending my own "bit of earth." My efforts, unlike Dickon and Mary's, are not likely to result in any miracles. However, they will at least give me the satisfaction of helping and watching something grow.

Should I drop by my travel agent's office before I scope out the gardening center? I have practically made it an annual tradition to spend one weekend each spring in New York City. But this year I am not sure I have the stamina for the crowds and noise that are part and parcel of the quintessential Big Apple experience.

Perhaps, a few pages from Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), with its potent sense of place, will reawaken my hunger for the sleepless metropolis' energy, variety and size.

The first chapter is all I need. It is a vibrant portrayal of how Francie Nolan, the book's adolescent heroine, spends a typical summer Saturday in Brooklyn circa 1912. Her busy itinerary includes stops at the junk man's and Gimpy's candy store, the "finest nickel and dime store in all the world." She also patronizes Sauerwein's Delicatessen for a quarter loaf of "easily the most wonderful bread in the world."

As she progresses from one establishment to another, she notes the "peculiar smells of the neighborhood; baked stuffed fish, sour rye bread fresh from the oven, and something that smelled like honey boiling."

Almost 100 years later, Brooklyn and her sister burroughs can still boast neighborhoods with personalities as distinct and interesting as Francie's. I have barely begun to discover all of them. Yikes! I had better not wait another day to start checking air fares and hotel rates if I want to go in June.

Not entirely steady on my winter-wind-chilled limbs, I seek out one last fictional refuge from reality. I find it in my journal on the page on which I have copied W.S. Merwin's poem "A Contemporary" from Flower & Hand: Poems, 1977-1983 (Copper Canyon Press, 1997, 172 pages).

Using such beguiling outdoor images as "a garden in the south," Merwin points to constant self-awareness as the most likely culprit behind the difficulty we often have keeping in step with the earth's ever-changing rhythms.

We would make much better use of the time to which mortality limits us, he persuasively argues, if we knew how to be without thinking about being; and in so doing, blend seamlessly into our exterior world.

It is mere wishful contemplation given all our man-made obligations. No matter what the season, our fragile human skin requires protective barriers from the elements.

Nevertheless, it is easy to be seduced by Merwin's daring dream of an existence primeval in its simplicity. The clock is ticking and my to-do list is lengthening. However, I cannot help but linger on this poet's tantalizing proposition of living anonymously and instinctively, "as one blade of grass."

I would be green with white roots

feel worms touch my feet as bounty

have no name and no fear

turn naturally to the light

know how to spend the day and night

climbing out of myself

all my life.

Kvasnicka, a former East Village Magazine news editor, has been the magazine's contributing editor and research consultant since 1989. She is the librarian at the Genesee District Library's Goodrich Branch.

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