Previously...

I recently finished John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. After putting the book in my "Read" stack in the back of the shelf, I looked about trying to decide on my next read. The possibilities ranged from Stephen King (Misery or Hearts in Atlantis) to Neil Gaiman (Anansi Boys) to T.C. Boyle (A Friend of the Earth) to William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury or As I Lay Dying) to Larry McMurtry (Anything For Billy or Streets of Laredo) to Sue Grafton (most of the early "Alphabet" novels). I hemmed and hawed and couldn't make a decision. I briefly considered posting the choices here and asking for guidance, albeit somewhat jokingly, but I needed a book right then before I left for work.

Instead of any of the novels listed above I grabbed Raymond Carver's short story collection, Where I'm Calling From, which I picked up at the Bessemer thrift store last year. It was a nice compromise, in that, if I got a itch for a certain novelist or book, I could ditch the book at the end of one of the stories, instead of feeling the need to read all the way through to the end.

Today when I plopped the book out on the table during lunch, the back cover fluttered open for a second and revealed a few handwritten pages. Two very brief, seemingly unrelated vignettes were scribbled in pencil on the blank back pages. I read these with growing fascination. Was the author of these paragraphs so instantly compelled to write by Carver's talent that he/she was unable to even go and grab a notebook or a legal pad on which to compose, and instead had, had to write, right then, on the nearest blank paper available: the back pages of book he/she held in his/her hand? And what made the author of these words decide to abandon them, and the book which held them, to the winds of fate?

The image on the bottom is another thrift store book with a surprise: inside a copy of The Portable Walt Whitman I found a dandelion and a leaf.