Learning about advertising in the shop around the corner.

Across the street from my favorite movie theater, there is a little bookstore. Inside, not too far from the entrance, there is a table on which the owner places new releases, both fiction and non-fiction, and that's where I spotted Juliet, Naked. Now having previously read About a Boy, Hi Fidelity and Slam, I wasn't immediately sure whether I wanted to read another Nick Hornby story. But then I saw a tab sticking out from it. It was a homemade book marker, a thin strip of cardboard that someone had cut out with a pair of scissors and left peeking out from the pages to arouse curiosity. Of course I picked up the book. The subtlety of the device was masterful.

Hmmm. Could it be clever salesmanship? No way, not in my quaint village bookstore.

Upon inspection (and sorry about the poor quality of my photo), the book marker had been part of some product's packaging, a section of it that had plenty of white space to write a prospective buyer a short note. 

The delivery was effective. The medium was perfect. It wasn't written on an index card or piece of paper, something that the author, Kristen, would have had to seek out. No, I imagine she had finished the book, simply had to share her thoughts, grabbed whatever was handy and let her enthusiasm rip.

I loved the little indications of emotion–-the caps on letters that don't call for caps, and the exclamation points after each of the two sentences. Nice touches. It was perfectly imperfect. It was authentic. Clearly there wasn't a company behind this note––this was personal. It wasn't advertising; it was communication. It was too good to be advertising.

I became curious about the author. How old was Kristen? She couldn't have been too old––she was in college or had recently graduated, that was my guess. Her enthusiasm was young-ish, sort of like when kids tell their friends about a cool new band that they just "LOVE," but revealed enough experience to know something about "Relationships." Oh well, there wasn't enough information there for me to say if I liked Kristen, but I certainly didn't resent her and her testimonial.

Needless to say, I succumbed. I bought the book.

Did I like it? It doesn't much matter if I liked it, does it. I was sold.

Part of me suspects that she's a very, very crafty manipulator, this Kristen.

Buying into all that holiday stuff.

"Love the giver more than the gift." 

-Brigham Young

I don't get excited about the holidays the way some people do. Jingle Bells over the mall loudspeakers is little more than a nice din. But this holiday season there was indeed "something special" in the air and part of that was, unfortunately, caused by my dear old aunt who passed gas on Christmas Eve.

I thought about this flatulence. I haven't thought deeply about flatulence in awhile, not since reading The Miller's Tale in college, but this must have been interesting enough to take notice. It was sort of trumpet-like, a tat-a-tat-tat-tat. It curled up, grabbed my ear and I thought about how unabashed my aunt had let them rip––"them," plural, since the flatulence occurred with regularity before and during dinner.

I wondered how certain illness affect one's faculties of self-awareness. The first blast I attributed to absentmindedness of old-age, my aunt being 89. Then I realized that Auntie had been recently in the hospital and hypothesized, "What? Did the doctor accidentally abstract her sense of smell?" But then I wondered if you just reach a point when such things aren't such a big deal. Maybe you just start paying more attention to things that really matter.

My aunt has had a rough go of it. A couple of years ago, her husband died. Hers had been an old-fashioned marriage, one in which she was dependent on him for everything, and that left her not knowing  much about getting around or how to balance a checkbook. Every so often you see her mind drift and she'll blurt out something sad. It tells me that depression always hovers. Though no amount of understanding could make her "something special" pleasant, I did conclude that if her being there with us, her family, was worth hanging in there for, then I could, I suppose, get over it.

That was the kind of holiday it was.

My parents are getting old, as well. My mom is growing shorter. She still has her spry moments, but her maternal authority has been replaced with cuteness. She'd probably remind an outsider of David Letterman's mom, cute but just around the bend from forgetting whether she just made an apple pie or a pumpkin pie. And my dad...he's lost some weight. After a couple of heart attacks, several angioplasties and a hip replacement, he huffs and puffs to rise from his comfortable chair and walk to the bathroom. He now accepts that he needs a wheel chair to get through an airport.

And then there are my other two aunts. A year ago, the eldest of the two sisters had heart failure, leaving her hunched over and frail. In her younger days, she was a teacher, a great teacher, and the reason I once became one. She's my godmother and I have always felt a special connection to her, so it kills me to see her hunched over, her head practically horizontal with the floor. Her sister, my third aunt at the table, worries about her and loses a lot of sleep. She has bags under her eyes and her hair is a little out of place.

Anyway, at some point during Christmas Eve dinner, which is a big deal in my family because that's when we have all the fish, the calamari and the baccala that is our way of continuing Italian tradition, a wash of sentimentality came over me. I began to appreciate our time together. I mean, my parents and my aunts won't live forever. Life is indeed short. We should savor these moments, the good and the bad of these moments. And I know that that must sound like a Hallmark card, but that's what I felt. Yeah, something special was in the air.

Sometimes the truth is so typical it takes something surprising to get you to appreciate it. Sometimes it takes something like a trumpet to wake you up.