Patience

And now a peek behind the veil at the mind that weaves its insanity into words.

When I was sixteen, I lived with my father for several months in Fernandina Beach. For those who have never been there, it's a small town just north of Jacksonville. It's an odd mix of rural Florida and ocean-side honky-tonk. If you've ever seen the movie "Sunshine State" you'll know exactly what I'm talking about as it was filmed there and captures the place completely.

Nestled among the bars and diners and nautical-themed tourist shops on the main street was a small bookstore. When I say small, I mean basically the size of a single suite in a late '70's strip mall, though like all the historic downtown it maintained a classic brick facade. Their selection was quite limited, catering mostly to the tourist crowd. It might not even have been exclusively a bookstore, but a newsstand that carried a few shelves of books, like you would see in grocery or a pharmacy. All their books faced front cover out; that's how few they had. But being a voracious reader, I haunted the place in search of fresh paper.

One day I ran across a fantasy novel by an author I'd never heard of. It was sitting on the lowest shelf beside two or three action titles. "All Darkness Met" by Glen Cook. The cover art included a man with a sword and shield wearing chain mail and a winged helmet, a scantily clad woman, a sorcerer casting a spell and a tiger. I mean, how much cooler could it get? I skimmed the short description on the back cover and decided it might be worth a read.

Now you have to remember that back then, a sixteen year-old in a bookstore wasn't given a lot of time to make a decision. Unlike in Borders or Barnes and Noble today, reading more than the back cover or hanging around for longer than a few minutes without buying something was frowned upon, literally. The proprietor, a guy probably just over my age now, watched me with the eyes of a shepherd zealously guarding his flock against perceived wolves like me. No one, especially a teenager he didn't recognize, was going to nick even a tuft of wool, let alone a whole lamb-chop, not with him on watch. So I scooped up the book, laid down my dollar ninety-five plus tax, and left.

Again, unlike modern bookstores, in this kind of shop at this time everything was pretty much a final sale. It was best to choose wisely, as they didn't accept returns. At that point in my life, two plus bucks was a considerable entertainment investment. My allowance was $5 which I needed to cover all the other necessities of teenage life: food, movies, dates, games, you know, the essentials. I also had to use that money to fuel my father's 1970-something Buick land-ark that got single digits to the gallon if I wanted to drive the five miles back and forth to town and see my friends. Gas was cheaper then, but not that cheap. This was just beyond the peak of the second oil crisis.

Imagine my dismay when I picked up the book that night and noticed it was the third in a trilogy. It was right there on the cover, hiding in plain sight, overlooked in my nervous haste under the proprietor's scrutinous eye. As soon as I could, I returned to the store on the off-hand chance that they had the first book of the series. No such luck. Even if they had, I'm not sure I would have bought it right then. I'd already dropped two dollars and change into the unknown. What if it wasn't any good?

So here I was, stuck with a book I wasn't sure what to do with in the wilds of Nassau County where this bookshop was considered to be the height of civilization. Even the few times my father and stepmother made the trek into Jacksonville, bookstores weren't exactly high on the list of their shopping priorities. What to do, what to do?

I decided I would read the first twenty pages to see if they were any good. If they weren't, I hadn't lost any more than if I'd bought the first in the series and found it disappointing. If the short sample of this book was decent, I would know to look for the previous two. I figured twenty pages was enough to get a sense of the writing without ruining whatever story came before it. Sixteen year-old thinking.

I read that first score of pages the next night, and then just a few more, thoroughly enjoying every one. This was a fantasy novel unlike any I'd read before, edgy sword and sorcery with gritty characters who acted like they might in real life rather than as if they inhabited Tolkien's Middle Earth. It took effort, but I managed to close the cover after reading just two chapters. I resolved right then that I would wait to finish this novel until I found the other two. I mean, how hard could that be? If the third book was popular enough to find its way into a downtown bookstand through the time-warp that was Fernandina Beach, the first two had to be falling off the shelves of Waldenbooks in Merritt Square Mall. Right?

Wrong. The inside cover listed the publisher as Berkley Books, "printed by arrangement with the author." Oh, not good. Not good at all. When I returned to Merritt Square, Walden's had nothing by the Glen Cook. Even though both earlier works were listed in their tome of published fiction, they weren't titles the store could special order. But I was told at the service desk that they sometimes carried them and might get them again if the main office decided they needed another set. It happened sometimes. Just check back every now and then. Yeah, sure.

From that point onward, finding those two books became my quest. I scoured every bookstore I came across, which was no small number. I love bookstores. I still seek them out wherever I go. Small, large, new, used, it doesn't matter. Before I had access to that miracle of '70's culture called the mall, I would peruse the five and dime, the grocery and the drugstore, or any other place that carried a selection. I still do today, much to my wife's puzzlement while we're waiting for a prescription to be filled. But I've found several books that have stuck with me in such places, "Das Boot" and "The Cross of Iron" to name two, even a novelization of Shakespeare's "Henry V" once. When we vacationed in Wales two years ago, we drove half a day out of our way to explore a town that boasted thirty-six used bookstores, just to see what the English had to offer. Worth every precious pound and moment. Next time Karen will have to pry me out.

It wasn't weeks or even months before I met with success in my self-appointed task, almost right back where I started, in a bookstore in the mall. As I went through what was by then a pro forma ritual of searching for these missing titles before moving on to greener grazing, there they both were, the first with the same burgundy spine as the third, the second in a bright yellow as if emerging from a particularly vivid dream. "A Shadow of All Night Falling" and "October's Baby." They were real. They actually existed and I had found them. The manager hadn't lied; they really did sometimes randomly restock them. I snatched them up possessively and headed for the register. Within moments, both were finally mine. I started devouring the first that very night. That was two years later.

All three books were well worth the wait. They each lived up to those initial twenty-three pages, and then some. I thought they were better in many ways than the author's signature series, which I can still remember my excitement at stumbling across in a recently opened bookshop while I was in college. Perhaps I liked this first set better because I'd had years to anticipate reading them, my appetite whetted by just that one brief taste. As with many experiences in life, some of the best get even better with anticipation. Just ask your partner.

Some people would say I am not a patient man. Most days, I'm not. I don't deal with frustration easily, nor do I long suffer situations I believe to be wrong. Some see that as impatient, which it is by any meaningful definition of the word. I am a person who has no problem stepping into a fight to defend another, even on a principle, even when someone isn't willing to defend themselves. A person who gets annoyed too easily when I think someone's prejudice is showing, intentionally or not, and am willing to point it out, often too sharply. A person who insists the cable company fix their signal, no matter how many annoyed phone calls I have to make, no matter how high in the organization I have to go. In these things I allow my emotions to rule me, probably to my detriment. It doesn't help that I'm a somewhat of a perfectionist, though you might not know it from reading my messages.

But I can also be long-term thinker and planner, a strategist who implements a five year plan to pay off the mortgage so I can live my dream. A person who can sometimes wait for the obnoxious neighbor to move out on his own without any push from me. A person who sometimes will find a central location to wait for someone I'm looking for to pass by rather than chasing around after them. A person who always brings a book anywhere I think I might have to wait. A seeming contradiction in nature that afflicts many people I've met in one way or another.

On days I berate myself for sending a message before a meticulous editing can catch all my errors in my excitement to share my creation, I remind myself of that time almost thirty years ago. I still have those novels, which have passed through the hands of many of my friends since then. Their spines are faded and cracked, their covers torn and taped together, their pages folded and yellowed. But they remain on my shelf as treasured keepsakes to be reread, if only to remind me of the rewards patience sometimes brings.

Ok, that's probably enough reminiscing. I should let the veil fall back into place before you discover what other type of OCD psychotic you might be dealing with here.

Thank you again for reading these messages despite my less than perfect editing. To paraphrase the iconic Alton Brown, I hope your own patience with them has sometimes been rewarded.


© 2008 Edward P. Morgan III