So I just got back from a week+ of cabining. Did I take pictures of the lake, or the sunsets, or the amazing food and nightly beer & banjo/guitar/ukelele jam sessions that my girlfriend’s awesome family put on, just for themselves, just for the hell of it? No. I took about five pictures of books during the entire trip and called it a day.
But seriously— they were really cool books. The population of the nearest town, Aitkin, is 2,165, and yet somehow they keep open this amazing used book store that looks like something out of a neat freak’s nightmare— you have to push aside the stacks of books on the floor just to take a glance at the otherwise hidden second row of books. There are lots of romance books. Fabio is spotted repeatedly. But they also have a really impressive lit collection, which is where I found this.
It’s a copy of the Paris Review from Summer of 1988. The design is cool and the stories are great throwbacks—there’s one by Robert Cohen, “Flight of Sparks,” that’s definitely worth a look if you can find it— but mostly this book made me yell out “Oh, coooooool,” because it was a very awesome birthday present to myself.
Summer 1988 is when I was born, you see. And we happened to be browsing on the day before my birthday. And in a hard-to-describe but very wonderful-feeling way, for this particular little copy of the Paris Review to find itself all the way out in rural Minnesota, and then for me to stumble upon it three-stacks deep in this tiny little store, it made me feel like a stranger on the street had just walked up and handed me a birthday cake. Like for once, life was going out of its way to pat me on the back and say, “Way to go Jeff! This may not be exactly the right time or the right place—but it’s pretty fucking kickass anyways, isn’t it?”
Happy birthday to me.
hi, i just read this and i love you.
