Of Time and Books

A month or so ago, I picked a slim paperback out of a Little Free Library on one of the routes I take to or from our local library. The book was Truck by John Jerome, a 1977 non-fiction work about the author's purchase and rebuilding of an old pickup truck to use at his New England home. Think Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which came out three years before Truck, with an attitude.

I started reading it last night. From hints in the text, I deduced that Jerome was older than I was by a decade or more. Curious, I Googled him. John Jerome, American non-fiction author, 1932-2002. Among his works were Truck, On Mountains, The Sweet Spot in Time, Stone Work...

Stone Work? 

Stone Work!

I pulled out my very first commonplace book, started sometime in the second half of the 1980s. About six pages in, there were several quotes from Stone Work by John Jerome. 

I read Stone Work when it first came out in 1989. Beautiful, lean writing about Jerome's tearing down, moving, and rebuilding a stone wall on his New England property: "two stones on one, one stone on two." 

I captured this sentence too: "October in the woods is a forced march into the sensory life..."

In 1989, I was living in Stockton, California, with my then husband and a very young Ben. I found Stone Work the way I found most of my books back then, by gleaning the new book titles at what was probably the central branch of the Stockton library. Stone Work came home with me and Jerome's words buried themselves in my head and in my commonplace book.

And here I am, over three decades later, reading him again. 

I open a book, I look up the author, and the past comes flooding over me. As Faulkner pointed out, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."

John Jerome was 69 when he died. Many of his books are now out of print. But one of them, in a well-worn paperback. was here for anyone who wanted it. "Riches, riches, everywhere, just for the taking." (Yes, that too is from Stone Work.) 

I think Jerome would have enjoyed this roundabout path from 1989 to 2022. I know I have.