I remember what's IN the book, not where I've put it

Photo by Melanie Hughes on Unsplash (Flannery O’Connor post = obligatory peacock pic)

Among the many things that annoy me about myself is the way I lose track of physical objects. Of what use is a prodigious memory when seemingly only 2% of its storage space is available for the location of items I put away myself not long ago?

I mean, I’m thrilled that I have a good memory for conversations and general knowledge, especially things I’ve read—but, like, wouldn’t it be more useful to remember where I left a book I pulled off the shelf last week than to recite verbatim the conversation I had with my 4th-grade teacher about a drawing I made in class? And do I really need to have so much memory allocated for things I can easily Google instead of, say, where I stashed the power cord for the sewing machine?

It’s maddening, honestly. And of course I’ve developed systems for keeping track of where objects are (we even have a Slack channel called where-mom-put-the-thing). But you can’t stop to make a note every time you pick something up and put it down somewhere new.

I basically have to Always Keep Things in the First Place I Laid Them Down (another impractical technique)—or in a pinch I wait until my daughter Rose comes over. She has an uncanny ability to find the items I’ve misplaced.

I spent a silly amount of the weekend searching for two books whose permanent location on the shelves I absolutely believed I knew until I needed them. One of them (on Korean patchwork techniques) never did turn up, which is infuriating. But I’m relieved to say I did eventually find my beloved old copy of Mystery and Manners—two floors away from the bedroom shelf I would have sworn in court contained it. Its spine, once a buttery yellow, has faded to cream; but I was prepared for that. I’m aware of the tricks books like to play when you’re looking for them. Faded spines are a well-known camouflage technique employed by wily tomes.

But I’ll never know how that book made its way to the basement.

Well, I have it now, and I’m putting it here so you can remind me if I forget: it’s on the middle shelf next to the gray chair. Which is to say, about a foot from where I’m sitting. This should not be a forgettable fact. I do almost all of my print-copy reading here, so that’s where the books congregate.

I’m relieved it turned up, because the

FrizzLit

Book Club is doing Flannery O’Connor in October (!!!) and I wanted to revisit my favorite Flannery nonfiction. The class, which will explore six of O’Connor’s short stories and her novel Wise Blood, is being co-taught by

Christopher Frizzelle

and

Brian Bouldrey

, which I gotta say fills me with all kinds of Hulga Joy.

(Ba-dum-bump.)

I think it’s been at least fifteen years since the last time I read Mystery and Manners, a collection of essays and lectures published after O’Connor’s death. My copy is full of marginalia, some from college and some from later perusals. Mostly I just underlined things, with some stars and exclamation points in the margins. I’m quite an excitable reader.

Here’s one of my favorite quotes:

I find that most people know what a story is until they sit down to write one.

Flannery’s tartness is what I love most about her.

Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.

Ha!

Well, the book may have taken me a stupid amount of time to find on the shelves, but at least my memory didn’t utterly fail me when I happened upon an appallingly incomplete note in my worst handwriting at the end of the “King of the Birds” chapter: Alice Walker. It took me a minute, but I recollected that Walker wrote an essay about O’Connor, whose work she, Walker, appreciated. “Beyond the Peacock: The Reconstruction of Flannery O’Connor” appears in Walker’s book In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose.

Walker writes:

I remind myself of her courage and how much—in her art—she has helped me to see. She destroyed the last vestiges of sentimentality in white Southern writing; she caused white women to look ridiculous on pedestals, and she approached her black characters—as a mature artist—with unusual humility and restraint. She also cast spells and worked magic with the written word. The magic, the wit, and the mystery of Flannery O’Connor I know I will always love. I also know the meaning of the expression “Take what you can use and let the rest rot.” If ever there was an expression designed to protect the health of the spirit, this is it.

Whew. How way leads on to way. It seems the next book I need to lay my hands on is Walker’s.

Note: Bookshop.org links earn me an itty-bitty commission. I’ll spend it on more books, probably to replace copies I’ve already bought and lost.