Try Shaking A Box In Front Of The Queen

Last Friday, we went through the bookshelves to send as many poor darlings off to the used bookstore as I could bear. Heartbreaking, difficult, and sad. I resented having to do it. I made compromises, so that the modernist poets went into a box in the attic to reappear at some later date and the doubles (Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Collected Stories of John Cheever, Updike's Problems) were condensed. Books that were handed down to me were spared, because they've had the temerity and wit to make it this far.

Anyroad (as they said on "Rome"), we cleared out two full bookcases, their books awaiting the used bookstore with the first case gone to public trust and the second up in the attic, but it remains a tender wound.

Today is Flag Day, which always brings to mind for me two things: the Housemartins and an obscure 1989 Vintage (or was it Vantage?) paperback of Jay Gummerman's short story collection titled We Find Ourselves in Moontown. I read the book in early 1990, and it has since travelled with me across the city and the country, changing address with me at least ten times. I don't believe I ever read it a second time, but the story "Flag Day" -- the first in the collection -- has stuck with me.

It's a story about an elementary school teacher on the last day of the year, hosting a party in his back-yard for the students in his class. Being Flag Day, the students come dressed up in costume as one of the 50 states. One girl has covered herself with yellow marshmellows to represent the state of Iowa, and there's a big potato for Idaho, etc. Details aren't crisp -- it's been at least fifteen years since I last read the story -- but it's stuck with me. But last Friday, the Gummerman book went into one of the boxes headed, middle-passage like, final-solution like, to Half-Price Books and CDs.

At work on Wednesday, I saw that tomorrow (now today) would be Flag Day. And like a Madelaine cookie, they they were: that Housemartins song and the Gummerman story. This caused me to wonder what other works by Gummerman might be out there -- other collections or novels. But everything, it seems, is out of print -- the book of stories and a later novel, itself now ten years old. A lunchtime search of Google seemed to uncover only ancient book reviews. (To me, this seems creepy and weird, kind of like the search engine version of a ghost town. I hope he's still out there, still writing, maybe teaching.) Last night, while the children were bathed by their mother, I dug through our six moving boxes of doomed books, and rescued We Find Ourselves in Moontown.

(Similarly, a listing in Amazon for John Vernon, author of Peter Doyle -- my favorite novel of my 20's and, I would submit, the finest novel ever written about Napoleon's penis -- shows only one of his books in print, along with a lot of books that aren't his at all. Peter Doyle doesn't show up until the bottom of the page... Both books, and both writers, deserve better.)

P.S. Depending on how you're feeling today, I suggest a listen of either Tom Waits' "Hoist That Rag" or Johnny Cash's "Ragged Old Glory." And, of course, the Housemartins' "Flag Day." It's a waste of time if you know what they mean...