Book Scraps

One of my favorite books is Michael Chabon's The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. I read it a few years ago, having first borrowed a copy of it from the local public library in Cerritos. The book wholly absorbed me, transporting me to a lively, sweaty vision of post-war New York. And by the time I read its last words, it was in my own newly-purchased copy, in my own newly-rented apartment in the East Village. This was at the tail end of summer, in 2009, or perhaps a little later, given the length of time it usually takes me to finish a book like that.

When I think of the book now, I think of certain things -- love and art and war and loss and defiance and hope, but -- perhaps a little too obviously -- more than anything, I think of escape. I cannot help but romanticize the notion that this book, so poignant in its treatment of varied forms of escape, stood watch over my own escape -- from the city I grew up in to the city I Grew Up in.

But beyond the spectrum of emotions it still elicits, blurred by time but still vivid in depth, it also culls from me one of those random memories I can't explain, not because I don't know where or when it came from, but because I can't say exactly what about it made it stay with me.

I think of a girl I went to high school with, who was a few years ahead of me. I did not know her personally, but I remember watching her play the lead in a high school production one year, and I remember her being very good. I saw her again, years later, when she was an actress and I was a production assistant on an AFI thesis film. The first day on set, I brought up that we had gone to the same high school. She had only the vaguest memory of me, but she was friends, at least in passing, with my older brother, and that friendship extended naturally and very warmly to me, in that genuinely cordial but entirely transient way friendships can spark on set. A few days later, on one of those chilly LA nights when the temperature only just dips below 50 yet the cold still somehow bites hard and bites deep, I was away from set, alone on fire watch. She passed me on the way to her trailer and noticed me reading the book. "That book," she had said, smiling broadly, familiarly, "will keep you warm on a cold night."

It did then, and I find that it still does now.