Speaker 1: There's something almost ceremonial about pushing open the green door
Speaker 1: to Mahoney's booknook. The brass handle is once moothed by
Speaker 1: decades of hands, mine among them, a reassuring anchor in
Speaker 1: a world that generally prefers frictionist novelty. My shoes always
Speaker 1: catch the rubber matt just enough to remind me I'm
Speaker 1: no longer outside. The warmth and fassier of the bookshop
Speaker 1: rises to meet me, blend in the perfume of old
Speaker 1: paper with sun worned would polish, and the promise of
Speaker 1: gentle company. Tuesdays are my day for Mahone's, a habit
Speaker 1: formed after retirement, hadleys in my calendar and left me
Speaker 1: searching for both purpose and a place to carry my
Speaker 1: lists inside. The world continues as it should. Missus and
Speaker 1: Mahoney herself is shelving hardback along the fiction wall, humming
Speaker 1: under her breath red aproncot on the corner of a shelf.
Speaker 1: Missus and g Ever prisoned in her knit a bray
Speaker 1: is at the crosswood spinner, shaking the little rack as
Speaker 1: if it might release just one more penny collection from
Speaker 1: years past, neared back mister dar Silver Justice by fuckals
Speaker 1: and squinted at the latest stamp catalogs, methodically turning pages
Speaker 1: as if every perforation has prosed no significance. Conversation hums low,
Speaker 1: observations about the weather, speculation about the mayor's new parking scheme,
Speaker 1: news of an upcoming cross fair. The world outside of
Speaker 1: the world, with its headlines and dizzing changes, can be
Speaker 1: held at bayfron out here. The sale table, though, is
Speaker 1: what first draws my attention. It always sits by a
Speaker 1: sunlit window, orbiting just out of the main stacks, where
Speaker 1: dust motes outline each hard edge in late morning light.
Speaker 1: Sale are all his books? Reads the sign letter in
Speaker 1: a hand I recognize as enders, though she streaked it
Speaker 1: with new marker over the years. If you visit regularly,
Speaker 1: and I do, you develop a sense for its odd,
Speaker 1: stable and stable composition. It isn't that the titles never change,
Speaker 1: nor that they rotate as a shelf might and a
Speaker 1: well managed library. The table feels as if somehow it
Speaker 1: belongs to a separate rhythm, ignoring the usual commerce of
Speaker 1: books to day. Is no exception in among the stack
Speaker 1: of volume on or chemical recipes, faded cookbooks, a church's
Speaker 1: Cessqua's Centennial Commemorative Affair, a book of tourist sketches. My
Speaker 1: eye is caught by something powerfully familiar, Junior Encyclopedia of
Speaker 1: the World, nineteen sixty eight edition, Brown Library, Buckram, bright
Speaker 1: gold on the spine and a constellation of tiny exact
Speaker 1: dentil on the bottom, where I remember with a winds
Speaker 1: dropping it on gravel as a child. My own pencil
Speaker 1: inscription should be on the inside cover property of Philip
Speaker 1: by please return. I found my hand had been nervously
Speaker 1: careful to be looped twice. But as I opened the cover,
Speaker 1: the inscription isn't there. The page is pristine, no trace
Speaker 1: of a raised graphite. The dust jacket, which was battered
Speaker 1: nearly to oblivion when I donated at fifteen years ago,
Speaker 1: is chris barely faded. The edges that should have been
Speaker 1: chewed by housecat and time seem smooth, almost new. What's more,
Speaker 1: the notes, the ones I'd inscribed in the margins about
Speaker 1: spiders and the Bay of Fundia missing. The boat fills cold,
Speaker 1: as if it's freshly come from some untouched shelf, and
Speaker 1: not the one I crowned it into a secret relief
Speaker 1: in some shame. If I honest among my clean out
Speaker 1: boxes and approaches, then armsful of dust jackets, Ah, Philip,
Speaker 1: on your regular mission, find something good to day. The
Speaker 1: sleeves of her cardigan are always pushed back, just enough
Speaker 1: to reveal the freckle tattoos of flour and ink. She
Speaker 1: peers kindly at the encyclopedia in my hands, head candied,
Speaker 1: isn't that a sturdy looking polyume? I believe it's one
Speaker 1: I donated myself, I say, angling the books so she
Speaker 1: can see the pasted the library cartholders at the back.
Speaker 1: But it looks better than the day I brought it in.
Speaker 1: She takes it and weighs it thoughtfully, then shakes her head.
Speaker 1: No memory of looking that one. I'm afraid. Sometimes books
Speaker 1: just find their way out here. People leave things on
Speaker 1: the sale table, or maybe I wheel something out now
Speaker 1: and then strange, isn't it things land where they meant it?
Speaker 1: Or so? I think? Her laugh is light If I
Speaker 1: organize it strictly, I'm sure the whole system of rebel.
Speaker 1: I study her, trying to discern a joke or feigned apology,
Speaker 1: but she's already moving toward a trins stack of reader's digestinthologies.
Speaker 1: The sale table, as ever, has a life that's partly hers,
Speaker 1: and yet somehow a part. I turn the encyclopedia over again.
Speaker 1: Its weight is undeniable, page is clean, the paper gul
Speaker 1: and holding a subtle with flight, newly trimmed grass overlaying
Speaker 1: old linen. The comfort of familiarity, the wholeness and strangeness
Speaker 1: of a book change beyond explanation. Sits squarely in my hands.
Speaker 1: Are you sure you don't remember this one coming out
Speaker 1: on the table, I ask gently this time, but she
Speaker 1: is distracted, chuckling at something. Miss esseng is saying books.
Speaker 1: Wonder Philip, she replies, and her tone is vinal, sun
Speaker 1: bright but unhelpful. Best not to let them catch you out.
Speaker 1: I find my usual seat, encyclopedia in hand, curiosity quietly
Speaker 1: anchoring itself beside the warmth of the shop's routine. Most
Speaker 1: of what I know about Mahone's as rooted in years
Speaker 1: of consistent routine. A weekly comfort are structured and undemanding
Speaker 1: is breeding. It's not the only bookshop in town, nor
Speaker 1: the oldest, but with its uneven floorboards and stubborn heat registers,
Speaker 1: it feels like someplace that has always existed. I'm a
Speaker 1: creature of habits, retired now from public librarianship thanks to
Speaker 1: a reluctant tourne in my lower back that finally convinced
Speaker 1: me the heavy boxes must become someone else's burden. My
Speaker 1: day's move in an orbit predictable enough to keep loneliness
Speaker 1: at Bay morning walk down Maple Lane, waved to misses
Speaker 1: laundry as she fills bird feeders. Brief deitra passes so
Speaker 1: called historic mural on Sandersen, which was pained to twelve
Speaker 1: years ago and already flakes like old pastry. Then Mahoney's
Speaker 1: for the bulk of my browsing, where the chairs are
Speaker 1: mismashed and the old cash register makes a satisfying corchunk
Speaker 1: each time ender rings up so much as a bookmark.
Speaker 1: I like having a task in mind. A missing volume
Speaker 1: from the nineteen forty seven reference set, a school year
Speaker 1: from the forgotten class at seventy three, sometimes even a
Speaker 1: naive hope of finding a first edition, but as often
Speaker 1: as not adrift by the sale table just because it's there.
Speaker 1: The store of regulars anchored the place Missus and g
Speaker 1: claims are spot every Thursday, amassing puzzler magazines, and sometimes
Speaker 1: reciting the best cluses of testing us for a wit.
Speaker 1: Mister DAWs Over travels from the next suburb ofver for
Speaker 1: the Postal catalogs, his knowledge of international issues so deep
Speaker 1: he might as well be the editor in chief. Thou
Speaker 1: trance in browsers students hunting cheap study, guides parents steering
Speaker 1: small children away from the fragile shelves. Even the autourists
Speaker 1: come to photograph the exterior for its old charm. The
Speaker 1: sale table, by consensus, is its own zonea curiosity for most,
Speaker 1: a source of bargains for a few. No one ever
Speaker 1: appears in haste. No one, as far as I've seen,
Speaker 1: buys the full table or clears it out after a
Speaker 1: single visit. Books linger there, and when they vanish, new
Speaker 1: ones replace them so seamlessly that even a librarian's instinct
Speaker 1: can't spot. The join end to herself is always in motion,
Speaker 1: but not what i'd call efficient, Her circuit never quite logical.
Speaker 1: Her explanations for inventory ships full of harmless hand waving.
Speaker 1: Ask her about the prudence of a lithograph or a chapuck,
Speaker 1: and she'll spin a tale about ve niece's cousin clearing
Speaker 1: a storage locker or a school library donation, but seldom
Speaker 1: does she locate the details you seek. Inventory lists, she claims,
Speaker 1: only need to exist. When the city licensing board appears
Speaker 1: with a clipboard about the sale table, she is most obscure.
Speaker 1: It keeps itself lively, She's fond of saying, and that's
Speaker 1: as it should be. When I compare notes with my
Speaker 1: friend Helen, the closest thing our neighborhood has to a
Speaker 1: living time, Stampa usually gets mart crisp bunsers. She's the
Speaker 1: local authority on architectural history, keeper of old walking through pamphlets,
Speaker 1: and a fierce defender of the correct order for display
Speaker 1: windows at holidays. Helen has a memory as sharp fild
Speaker 1: wire and a low tolerance for madrifocor. Her perspective, coupled
Speaker 1: with evidence from other regulars, has always made me confident
Speaker 1: that I know the boundaries and best secrets of this
Speaker 1: quarter mile historic block. And yet the sale table continues
Speaker 1: to elude accounting its occupation of the sun. That patch
Speaker 1: by the window is constant, but its dietary habits, so
Speaker 1: to speak, defy all expectation. Some books return weak to
Speaker 1: week only to disappear with no explanation. Occasionally a title
Speaker 1: won my call unsaleable, like the physics of postal sorting,
Speaker 1: second edition reappears after an absence, with no evidence of
Speaker 1: pre change or stocking. Yet the turnover is never brisk.
Speaker 1: The table neither empties nor fellows, but simply endurers, always
Speaker 1: in a state one might call barely altered. It is
Speaker 1: small wonder, perhaps that I'd begun to accept this as
Speaker 1: one of the harmless oddities of neighborhood life, like the
Speaker 1: chronically wrung clock over the cafe, or the muralist who
Speaker 1: keeps repainting the same scene in slightly weird to colors.
Speaker 1: Until this morning, I out of bed a libraries worth
Speaker 1: of old catalogs that I was on familiar terms with
Speaker 1: the logic of Mahone's stacks. My sense of satisfaction at
Speaker 1: having donated that battered Encyclopedia childhood relic, perhaps more shame
Speaker 1: than treasure, had faded years ago. Seeing it, though now
Speaker 1: suddenly restored and stripped at my marks, set off a small,
Speaker 1: persistent ditch. Why was the sale table displaying a book
Speaker 1: that seemed in finer fattle than when I released it?
Speaker 1: Why was my name erased, both literally and in a
Speaker 1: way figuratively. It was enough to make a habit driven
Speaker 1: man question what else he'd missed. The next Tuesday, I
Speaker 1: arrived with the plan, after my usual circuit of the
Speaker 1: antique rail maps and a brief chat with mister Darsilva
Speaker 1: about rare Brazilian air MILS, I paused at the sale table.
Speaker 1: I had half expected the encyclopedia to be gone, but
Speaker 1: there it sat, now shifted afoot to the left, its
Speaker 1: cover angle toward the window. This time my gaze shifted
Speaker 1: to another book, Memories of Maple Square, a slim hark
Speaker 1: of a with fading gilt letters and a heavy photographic insert,
Speaker 1: a booklet about the local garden park. Its opening pages
Speaker 1: introduced the reader quite confidently to a belove town tradition
Speaker 1: since nineteen fifty four reading for other Confusion, set in
Speaker 1: Maple Square. The location from the addresses and nearby shop
Speaker 1: fronts in the black and white photos was a mistake
Speaker 1: ofly drawn from familiar streets and intersection just two blocks
Speaker 1: north of Mahone's, where now only a tangle of rose
Speaker 1: bushes and an electricity substition fizzle quietly on Sunday, mornings.
Speaker 1: Yet these emerges showed another version, a wide green fenced
Speaker 1: by wooden benches, crowded with gelips and children's floats, cheeks
Speaker 1: draped up of cheerful picnickers Gulip Festival nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: hand painted in curve the faces for much younger versions
Speaker 1: of old neighbors, the buildings so precisely situated, so mistakably familiar,
Speaker 1: but all slightly off the book comfortently referenced to you
Speaker 1: as of festivities, volunteers, fundraisers, a brief attempt at a
Speaker 1: Tuesday even concert series in nineteen seventy two. Two elaborates
Speaker 1: seemed for a forgery. And yet I could not recall
Speaker 1: this park, nor could I reconcile its existence with the
Speaker 1: realities of the tangle of utilities and half forgotten chain
Speaker 1: link fens that have defined that intersection. As long as
Speaker 1: I remember, the street names were correct, the building's barbershop grosser,
Speaker 1: even in some photos, a glint of the Mahoney sign
Speaker 1: clear and recognizable. The only thing missing, persistently was my
Speaker 1: memory of any park, any festival, or any announcement in
Speaker 1: the town newsletters. Enda returned from the register, and I
Speaker 1: called her over. Did you see this maple square? Was
Speaker 1: there ever a garden park at seventh in Kessler? She
Speaker 1: leaned in. Not that I recall, Philip looks pleasant, though,
Speaker 1: doesn't These sorts of things pop up from time to time.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was proposed and never built. She thumb threw
Speaker 1: the photos, humming appreciatively at the parade float. Boksgi gek cre.
Speaker 1: You know you should ask mister DAWs Silva. He's been
Speaker 1: here long enough to remember just about everything. I turned
Speaker 1: to missus Nji, waving the book. You too, you remember
Speaker 1: a tulip festival? She squinted, then shook her head. No
Speaker 1: tulip's there, no square or eater. But that looks like
Speaker 1: the old page Bickery sign, doesn't it. That bakery, as
Speaker 1: far as I know, existed three miles away on lake
Speaker 1: Front and closed before I was born. I purchased the
Speaker 1: book five dollars, no argument before your collection. Enda smiled
Speaker 1: as if she knew she'd handed me a puzzle that afternoon,
Speaker 1: and deep into the next I fell down the pleasant
Speaker 1: stubborn hole that is the public records archive. I began,
Speaker 1: as any one of librarian Stockwood with the bissitt check
Speaker 1: mahone's neighborhood survey maps, park development proposals, city council minutes. Nowhere,
Speaker 1: Not even during the flower maudboom of the late sixties
Speaker 1: was a Maple Square documented. The utility company had held
Speaker 1: the property for at least sixty five years. I produced
Speaker 1: the town's news at her index, flipping backward past the
Speaker 1: holiday craft's fairs, pancake breakfasts, and portraits of every earnesty
Speaker 1: the scout who devastacticin for charity. No Chilip festivals, no
Speaker 1: mention of parades through that block, no photos, not even
Speaker 1: a whisper in editorials lamenting the lack of green space,
Speaker 1: Feeling the quiet thrill of a proper hunt. I checked
Speaker 1: every detail. Memories of Maple Square dropped, cross referencing names, shops,
Speaker 1: and annual events. Three local businesses, the cheese Shop and Cobblers,
Speaker 1: a pet shop with a friendly corky mascot, appeared to
Speaker 1: robust into books accounts during the supposed sixties heyday closing
Speaker 1: according to their narrative, just before the gas station and
Speaker 1: utility enclosure expanded. But everywhere else I looked, no mention,
Speaker 1: even the city library shelf of a lost shopping districts
Speaker 1: skip the square entirely. I checked photo Archhouse in the
Speaker 1: Historical Society's website, scrolling slowly through every yellowt digitized image.
Speaker 1: None matched. At home, I pulled out my own shoe
Speaker 1: books of family snapshots, hoping by some accident to find
Speaker 1: a photo from a Mother's Day parade or summer bake off.
Speaker 1: All I could find were familiar faces, my father grinning
Speaker 1: in sunglasses at the wheel of our old station wagon,
Speaker 1: a neighbor, Missess Finn's logging potted violets, but no sign
Speaker 1: of community gathering in a stretch of town. A week later,
Speaker 1: returning to Mayonnies with both a sense of defeat and
Speaker 1: deeper intrigue, I found the sale table once again reconstituted.
Speaker 1: The encyclopedia was gone. Now Maple Square sat directly atop
Speaker 1: a bat at Kopokitt's title, in the same looping front
Speaker 1: as the cover had used for the bread basket A
Speaker 1: century of baking in our town. The illustration showed a
Speaker 1: bickery at a junction I woke across weekly full of
Speaker 1: shop as a motorcycle's parked in a neat row. The
Speaker 1: block was unmistakable. Yet I've never known a bakery to
Speaker 1: stand there and never seen a photo so crowded and
Speaker 1: lively on that stretch. The book's introduction was effusive. For
Speaker 1: a hundred years, The bread Basket has filled our mornings
Speaker 1: was sent and purpose, from the first Wells Fair entry
Speaker 1: in nineteen twelve to the Thursday bagel races. It has
Speaker 1: been the hard of our mornings. Schedules, bigarf histories, community
Speaker 1: service volunteers, all documented with the matter of fact affection
Speaker 1: of someone who had truly lived this. Moments and more photos, crowds,
Speaker 1: opening ceremonies, the mare congratulating a child in flower dusted
Speaker 1: overalls at the cafe, crossed the street, I met Helen.
Speaker 1: She was delighted by the find. If a bakery of
Speaker 1: that size in that spot ever existed, I'd have the
Speaker 1: city permit logs to prove it, she insisted. She ran
Speaker 1: her finger down the list of contributors. These are real
Speaker 1: family names, yes, but none ever ran a bakery. Whoever
Speaker 1: wrote this had access to the local gossip. At least
Speaker 1: we sat together, leafing through the Bread Basket and memories
Speaker 1: of Maple Square, examining every face in storefront. I tried
Speaker 1: to detect photo at its stray pixels unusual shadows, anything
Speaker 1: out of place. The paper fell slightly cool, The color
Speaker 1: sections had a faint newness, despite the day line on
Speaker 1: the copyright page published nineteen eighty seven by the Maple
Speaker 1: Civic Association, a group that, by my research, last met
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty eight. Are you sure this is in
Speaker 1: a university prank, Helen asked, though her tone was half play.
Speaker 1: It's uncanny. The details are off kilter, but the confidence
Speaker 1: is total. Over the next several visits, I began collecting
Speaker 1: whatever impossible books appeared on the table. I kept a
Speaker 1: log in print data, subjects any referent yet and confirm
Speaker 1: their physical feel or cover notes. I started to notice
Speaker 1: patterns in the parade of peculiarities. The sale table did
Speaker 1: not appear to cycle through books in it any logical order,
Speaker 1: nor did it rely on anyone's recent donations. More than that,
Speaker 1: some books seemed to display their own unique, almost playful anomalies.
Speaker 1: I leaf through Pickick Memories nineteen seventy three at listed
Speaker 1: day Smith's embarked that, to my knowledge, had never been
Speaker 1: more than a vacant lot. The pose photographs show children
Speaker 1: and banners, and beneath one in the lower margin, a faint,
Speaker 1: looping pencil annotation. Was it always this way? The handwriting
Speaker 1: gave me pause. It bore a striking resemblance to my
Speaker 1: own early couse of similar enough to make my heart squeeze,
Speaker 1: but just slightly off, the capital letters larger. The habit
Speaker 1: for looped ads reversed. Some volumes smelt of typeertanks so
Speaker 1: fresh it over road the underlying paper mold. Marginal notes appeared,
Speaker 1: some fading as I read, others vibrant and full of
Speaker 1: tiny notations, queries about recipes, arrows pointing to grinning faces.
Speaker 1: A few times book plate saw library card pockets matched,
Speaker 1: and I recognized catalog numbers from systems i'd never seen.
Speaker 1: Each volume constructed its own, intact, detailed vision of a
Speaker 1: community history, so close to the real that I questioned
Speaker 1: on more than one occasion the security of my own recollections.
Speaker 1: And yet no terror, just a deep, continuing age, A mystery.
Speaker 1: I tugged my professional pride, in my amateur sense of belonging.
Speaker 1: What was the table surfacing exactly forgotten? If emmer deliberate
Speaker 1: hoaxes by an anonymous massalgia artist, or were he's honest
Speaker 1: and tell the Ghosts of Memory? Released by the gentle
Speaker 1: encouragement of regular footfall and un critical attention. Helen and
Speaker 1: I tested everything we could, the Fire Department's archive, the
Speaker 1: newspaper's microfiche census, w reca's searching for bakery owners, parade permits,
Speaker 1: floral supplies, and even summer employment logs kept at city Hall.
Speaker 1: We found nothing to link this impossible archive to the
Speaker 1: living record, nor any reference to the bakeries, parks or
Speaker 1: pageants described in the sale books. Yet the sale table
Speaker 1: never abated in its gentle were the always new books,
Speaker 1: always the sense that the next volume might finally settle
Speaker 1: a single stubborn question. It was a month in when
Speaker 1: my understanding shifted. I began, as I now always did,
Speaker 1: with catalog I'd started at home a spreadshee states, authors, locations, pages,
Speaker 1: every entry tracked and footnoted. But the patterns emerging now
Speaker 1: were different. While some books were reference plausible but undocumented
Speaker 1: street fairs or the opening of a butcher shop in
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifties, others began to reference subtly different timelines,
Speaker 1: mayoral elections with winners. I never recall teachers and neighbors
Speaker 1: described as retiring years before their real counterparts did. Or
Speaker 1: running for positions in clubs or concils I had never
Speaker 1: heard of. Then there was neighborhood Parade nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: a children's float, crape wrapped and festuned in sun floras,
Speaker 1: rolling past a corner stone I passed daily. There was
Speaker 1: a photo caption young Philip by between Henry and James
Speaker 1: En celebrating Maple Founder's Day. The grainy image was cropped
Speaker 1: to fit the narrow page, but the child front right,
Speaker 1: glasses slipping down, a small nose, hair carrying a stubborn
Speaker 1: licklot moral like me than coincidence would allow. I examined
Speaker 1: the faces of the two boys at my side. The
Speaker 1: names meant nothing. Henry ann James wre not classmates, I remembered,
Speaker 1: but the feeling was powerful, at pulsing half formed familiardi,
Speaker 1: more like the send of a childhood lunch books than
Speaker 1: a name. I held the image at to Missus and
Speaker 1: g at the crosswood spinner, who's quinted and declared he
Speaker 1: looked like your father there, Philip, But I don't remember
Speaker 1: any founders Day parade? Was this before my time? Her
Speaker 1: tone was gentle, almost indulgent. Missus Dossover drifted over we
Speaker 1: had buried in the fifties and sixties. Sure, mostly for
Speaker 1: the school and sometimes Halloween, but never in that direction.
Speaker 1: He peered closer at the float and said, some flowers.
Speaker 1: I thought that stretch was always rock garden in an
Speaker 1: empty field. Helen, when she visited later, was quietly fascinated
Speaker 1: and amuse. It feels familiar, though, doesn't it? But I
Speaker 1: would have bet plenty that no found as they parade
Speaker 1: ever passed down Mibble Lane. The more I compared notes,
Speaker 1: the more apparent it became that the anomaly was personal
Speaker 1: and so short. Once books from the sale table referenced
Speaker 1: events for which even those present in the shock could
Speaker 1: find no independent recall. Yet the photographs, unless had a
Speaker 1: certain plausibility, never at landish, always within the boundaries of
Speaker 1: what might have been. I sat late into that night,
Speaker 1: leafing through my note book. It occurred to me perhaps
Speaker 1: the sale table wasn't merely surfacing for garden recos, but
Speaker 1: manifest in GAP's whole histories that guarded all lost, not
Speaker 1: in arch house, but in the ebb and fall of
Speaker 1: community memory. The differences in handwriting, the physical oddities the
Speaker 1: personal notes all suggested a mechan is a more creative
Speaker 1: than mere misfiling a memories leap point, a scribble book
Speaker 1: summoned from the spaces between certainty and possibility. From that realization,
Speaker 1: the mystery changed color. It wasn't simply about keeping a
Speaker 1: running tally of oddities or collecting every title for comparison.
Speaker 1: It was about mapping a living shifting border, the edge
Speaker 1: where memory fades into the unclaim. There never was systematic
Speaker 1: observation took over. I arrived every Tuesday, sometimes slipping in
Speaker 1: on an extra Thursday or Saturday to catch the table
Speaker 1: in a different cycle. I recorded the table's inventory at opening,
Speaker 1: noted any new arrivals or adjustments to the display, and
Speaker 1: counted the volumes of closing. Though Endel was always quick
Speaker 1: to clear up after dusk, I tempted gently to keep
Speaker 1: books in place, subtly marking a volume's orientation in relation
Speaker 1: to the chair nearest the window, just in case there
Speaker 1: was some magical rotation or anonymous browser at work behind
Speaker 1: the scenes. Cross several weeks, patterns emerged. Titles always changed
Speaker 1: the first morning of each week, just after the shop unlocked,
Speaker 1: as if by invisible appointment. Never did a sea end
Speaker 1: or anyone else physically rearrange or a stop. The table
Speaker 1: book some times lingered for two even three weeks, but
Speaker 1: subsequent offerings never repeated close together. Each was a fresh incursion,
Speaker 1: or perhaps reclamation from on saint shelves. Some volumes were
Speaker 1: wholly ordinary attacks guide from the seventies, a Handbcoon, Dog Breeds,
Speaker 1: a romance novel, but even these, on close reading, displayed
Speaker 1: small corrections. A passage from a gardening manual described southern
Speaker 1: exposure windows in nearby houses I was sure had never existed.
Speaker 1: A cooper contained a recipe attributed to non Aglass, a
Speaker 1: neighbor I remembered from school days, but occasion for its inclusion,
Speaker 1: though Glass Family Bike Off nineteen eighty three was absent
Speaker 1: from all family newsletters or city history. Another book annotated
Speaker 1: the winner of the Chamber of Commerce's Best store Front contest,
Speaker 1: setting a florist, who I learned after vigorous inquiry, had
Speaker 1: never quite passed the planning board. I tried, as delicately
Speaker 1: as I could to draw ener into a conversation about
Speaker 1: the table. Is there really no one in charge of
Speaker 1: the sale table? She turned from a stack of resorted magazines,
Speaker 1: her expression now almost mischievous. You know, Philip. I don't
Speaker 1: think anyone remembers exactly who started the habit. It's just
Speaker 1: a part of the shop. Maybe it's always been there,
Speaker 1: she laughed, rather more softly than usual. I sometimes think
Speaker 1: the books pick themselves. If I cleared the table away,
Speaker 1: I suspect it would all just reappear by morning. The regulars, too,
Speaker 1: when pressed, were of two minds. Mister Dossolver, though prideful
Speaker 1: about his memory, shrugged. I've seen the table every week, sure,
Speaker 1: but I'll be down if I could tell you what's
Speaker 1: on it week by week. Missas Enji said, it's nice
Speaker 1: that it changes, makes the place feel alive, but if
Speaker 1: you ask me to name a specific book, I'd struggle.
Speaker 1: I don't think about it much. It's just there. Helen
Speaker 1: accepted my offer to borrow mable square and a bread basket.
Speaker 1: When she returned them, she stuck little color of flacks
Speaker 1: inter sections. She found truly odd references to a privet
Speaker 1: maize a sequins describing how cross bun races. Some of
Speaker 1: this is deep, a strange, she admitted. I feel like
Speaker 1: these are places where some one nearly persuaded me of
Speaker 1: something I must have seen, but then it's gone like
Speaker 1: a memory of a dream you wish you could make real.
Speaker 1: Thessas Enji had to go at picnic memories, reporting only
Speaker 1: the cheese club is missing the president that was always
Speaker 1: Missess Tibbins, wasn't it? But here it says Miss Surle,
Speaker 1: I'm sure that's wrong, or else I'm slipping. She did
Speaker 1: not appear deeply troubled, more amused and slightly perplexed. To
Speaker 1: test this phenomenon, assembled day lending file. Any one interested
Speaker 1: could borrow one book in return with annotations about discrepancies
Speaker 1: or feeling sparked by the text. Over three weeks, the
Speaker 1: notes I received of for some times contradictorily, depending on
Speaker 1: who had read the book. Helen agreed to Park never existed,
Speaker 1: but said one bicker for a voescene so true it
Speaker 1: made her teeth ache for sugar Nessess and g insisted
Speaker 1: the annual charity fare described in Festival Days nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: nine rang true, but every supporting detail ended with the
Speaker 1: question mark. And yet Daily Life stubbornly refused to acknowledge
Speaker 1: these quiet uplings. The store Thrive, the coffee house hosted
Speaker 1: its trivia nights. Children played half cotch on crack stones outside,
Speaker 1: and at sunset the shop letsglore gold on mable lane.
Speaker 1: No one acted threatened. There was no sense of loss
Speaker 1: or danger, of only the unsettling. But I resistible, since
Speaker 1: that in some corner of town a whole world of
Speaker 1: almost was weighted to be known. Ah Now I found
Speaker 1: myself organizing not just of impossible books, but my responses
Speaker 1: to them, creating a second catalog events, places, the people,
Speaker 1: cross referenced by levels of personal familiarity, emotional resonance, and
Speaker 1: degree of contradiction with the public wrecord. It had begun
Speaker 1: from me as a suspicion about library Miss Fazora and
Speaker 1: a slip showed inventory. Now it expanded quietly and insistently
Speaker 1: into a theory. Mahony sale table wasn't a dumping ground
Speaker 1: for forgotten trivia. It was a leak point of val,
Speaker 1: perhaps gentle and even purposeful, through which lost or discarded
Speaker 1: memories surfaced again, camouflaged as battered nearly true books. In
Speaker 1: the photo, I find myself again, the child on the
Speaker 1: parade float, hand lifted in a with that I feel
Speaker 1: in my own shoulder, as if Masso Memory itself had
Speaker 1: written it. I cannot recall the boy at my side,
Speaker 1: neither can I remember not knowing him. As more and
Speaker 1: more improbable titles appear, each one stitch delicately into personal, communal,
Speaker 1: or physical discrepancies, I understand the mystery doesn't lie in
Speaker 1: tracking down the provence of a single book. It lies
Speaker 1: in the table itself, in the ordinary, enchanted choreography of
Speaker 1: books that should not exist, surfacing worth the boundary between
Speaker 1: memory and forgetting its thinnest. And so, with mounting curiosity
Speaker 1: and a sense of responsibility, A resolved to continue watching,
Speaker 1: to catalog, to convene friends, to I ask, and to wonder.
Speaker 1: Whatever force or foucorps animates or perpetual book sale I believe,
Speaker 1: cares nothing for accuracy or even coherence. Instead, it offers
Speaker 1: possibility and waits for someone to notice. The wonder of
Speaker 1: watching the sale table became, in time a kind of partnership.
Speaker 1: I no longer just cataloged odd books and circled their
Speaker 1: mysteries in red pencil. I waited for them as one
Speaker 1: waits for a friend's sly wink in a crowded room,
Speaker 1: half expecting, half hoping the conversation would tilt furtherskew. If
Speaker 1: the table was a leap point. It seemed lately as
Speaker 1: though the leak had grown more intimate. I was no
Speaker 1: longer just a chronicle, but against all professional decora and
Speaker 1: a participant. It began early one Tuesday with a book
Speaker 1: that broke the table's own innate reserve. Lying on top
Speaker 1: of a stack of out data travel guides was a
Speaker 1: thick and tidy scrap book, spine reinforced by clear tape,
Speaker 1: its label pasted from the back of a greeting car
Speaker 1: to read in curling, bluing skirt from the desk of
Speaker 1: Ee Mahoney. I knew in his handwriting instantly at the
Speaker 1: exaggerated leaped capitals, the way she dodded these with faint
Speaker 1: high hooks. My day began and ended with thuscrit, always
Speaker 1: scrolling payment receipts or recommended reads. Yet the contents of
Speaker 1: the scrap book were an impossible blend. Event fliers, handcoffet poems,
Speaker 1: funny letters, hand drawn maps of the store and surrounding streets,
Speaker 1: all stitch between pages, conicling neighborhood knights, staff bout their rosters,
Speaker 1: and even a detailed list of committee minutes for events. Nobody,
Speaker 1: least of all, and I had ever mentioned to me.
Speaker 1: I paged through the book, my hands prickling. There was
Speaker 1: a programme for a book club meeting dated four years
Speaker 1: ago in the shop's basement. I remembered a moldy storage room,
Speaker 1: never a gathering of thirty readers called together for poems
Speaker 1: of protest and pie. A photograph tiped crookedly to the margin,
Speaker 1: showed ender and myself, dusted in flour and grinning, posed
Speaker 1: over a stack of children's books, a tawble laquer table
Speaker 1: I had helped polish only once, and then only in
Speaker 1: preparation for health inspector, not a book launch. In a
Speaker 1: section near the middle, a minute by minute I erary
Speaker 1: outlined the neighborhood stories night with misses sn G, the
Speaker 1: same messess in g now at her crossword, wearing an
Speaker 1: identical beret, apparently reading aloud to ring of local families,
Speaker 1: and the small child in a dinosaur sweater. I had
Speaker 1: no memory of such an event, could not even summon
Speaker 1: a plausible date, and as penciled notes A good job
Speaker 1: reading the fox poem fully nervous but well received, missus
Speaker 1: and g offered crosswood price felt like appearances, memory gentle
Speaker 1: but alien overlaying a life for isn't but not quite
Speaker 1: touching mine. I waited until Enda was, for once still
Speaker 1: shelving new deliveries in Hamming, before venturing my question, was
Speaker 1: this yourror's ender? I set the scrap book open to
Speaker 1: her careful line of blue ink. She blinked and let
Speaker 1: her hands fall atop the books in her basket. That's
Speaker 1: well my writing. Sure, I even recognized the card, but
Speaker 1: I've never kept a proper scrap book in my life,
Speaker 1: except for the one glued together by a nissandowed grade this.
Speaker 1: She turned the pages, squinting when she reached a poem
Speaker 1: that was distinctly hers in style but foreign in content,
Speaker 1: A gentle alogy for retiring the noisier conditioner in seven
Speaker 1: signed you neuronically, your friendly shopkeeper. Her smile flickered wider,
Speaker 1: half embarrassed, half chaunt. I suppose I'd like to have
Speaker 1: written half these things, but if you say they happened,
Speaker 1: I'll have to take your word. Some of them didn't, Enda,
Speaker 1: or maybe they did, but some more sideways. I riffled.
Speaker 1: The page's heart thumping morooned between stygia and strangeness. It's
Speaker 1: like the table's books as started borrowing from our own lives,
Speaker 1: or maybe offering a sum as any of her feel
Speaker 1: right to you. She laughed, uneasy, more like a dream.
Speaker 1: I wish i'd remember properly, if nothing else, it has
Speaker 1: my best handwriting. Where did you find it? I nodded
Speaker 1: at the sale table. It was waiting for me. Her
Speaker 1: brows climbed, but she led the moment drift. Well. I
Speaker 1: due clean in the mornings, but I promise I don't
Speaker 1: ever set those books out, never this one. She gave
Speaker 1: me an a praising look, as if she hoped I'd
Speaker 1: bluff a confession. Perhaps Mahonie wants us to keep better
Speaker 1: records than we do. The scrap book made my catalog
Speaker 1: feel poultry. Here was conjecture, may charming artifact, private moments
Speaker 1: rendered into something communal but unverifiable. A storehouse could have
Speaker 1: beans recorded in a hand that was undeniably real, but
Speaker 1: words that felt now unanchored from any one person's memory.
Speaker 1: By now, Helen was my closest collaborator, equal part skeptic investigator,
Speaker 1: an indulgent friend. I brought the scrap up to her
Speaker 1: for coffee, shilly through eyebrows twitching higher as each new
Speaker 1: page introduced a deeper contradiction, her own name listed on
Speaker 1: Ney neighborhod History and Night. Reading from transcripts of a
Speaker 1: World War room and two interviews, she insisted never occurred
Speaker 1: about a cake rescue with Helen's quickly and icing, which
Speaker 1: she conceded sounded delicious but was not her own. Phil
Speaker 1: is the table proposing these things to us or reminding
Speaker 1: us what we'd like to have done? Chias voice lower,
Speaker 1: I feel was full, not confused? Was full unseen? A
Speaker 1: flicker of unease, softer than dread and sweeter than clarity,
Speaker 1: curled round us both. Over the next week, I studied
Speaker 1: the oldest books for self reference books, referring to other
Speaker 1: books or explicitly crediting authors, contributors, and occasions from the
Speaker 1: Table's recent offerings. The effect was cumulative, as if the
Speaker 1: shocked conscience, if I can call at that, were weaving
Speaker 1: a thicker braid of overlapping memories, lacing private, communal, and
Speaker 1: invented moments together in a spiral bound cook book. Festival
Speaker 1: cook nineteen seventy five. I read the opening many thanks
Speaker 1: to Philip B. For his caramel bread pudding, crowd favorite
Speaker 1: of last Sum's cook off. I had never entered a
Speaker 1: pudding contest. Yet the photo accompanying the note was my
Speaker 1: mother's Tucker's bakeware. The one lost to moving misappen eighty
Speaker 1: two a picture of a girl, possibly my cousin, possibly
Speaker 1: my mind's composite balance to warbling plate beside a fair
Speaker 1: ground tent. The tent, let me add stood in a
Speaker 1: field that had since become a parking lot, its background
Speaker 1: showing clouds to half remembered from a Sunday pivioic. My
Speaker 1: family certainly never hosted not there. Sometimes the books referenced
Speaker 1: each other upright footnoting memories of Maple Square according sections
Speaker 1: of a neighborhood parade. It didn't take long before I
Speaker 1: shared a table with Helen and missessng G, each of
Speaker 1: us making notes in the margins of our respective borrowed books.
Speaker 1: Heen flagging the maple dance described on a block she
Speaker 1: had measured for a real estate client the year after
Speaker 1: the supposed event. Misssen g clock clocking of a cryptic
Speaker 1: crosswclues signed by E. Mahoney, but written in a code
Speaker 1: even she admitted had never passed through her mail books.
Speaker 1: The more I shared these books with others, the stranger
Speaker 1: the contradictions grew. Each reader seemed able to find a
Speaker 1: familiar groove, wriggle into it, and then lose hold of
Speaker 1: what exactly was familiar verses what was wholly invented. A neighbor, Margaret,
Speaker 1: who had lived here forty years but moved away after
Speaker 1: the city split the street car lines, visited at my invitation.
Speaker 1: She appeared at a book celebrating Arbor Day nineteen seventy nine,
Speaker 1: and puzzlingly recognized a face she was sure belonged to
Speaker 1: her late husband. Abo pictured an event she had never attended,
Speaker 1: set beneath hanging paper lanterns that struck curR is almost right,
Speaker 1: but off by a season. Some degree of possibility seemed
Speaker 1: to hover in every new artifact, a spectrum whose boundaries
Speaker 1: differed by observer. When I asked the shop's rare part
Speaker 1: time assistant, Jacob, whether he had ever stocked the table,
Speaker 1: he looked up from the register, smirked, and shook his head.
Speaker 1: I just ring people up, always figured Missess Mahoney put
Speaker 1: whatever needed shifting, or that it was the regulars leaving
Speaker 1: things behind. He paused, as if trying to recall, then
Speaker 1: shrigged it off. Funny though I can never remember actually
Speaker 1: carrying books out there. Maybe they're just always showing up.
Speaker 1: His face registered neither concern nor amazement to men, content
Speaker 1: to let miracles, if that what they were, occupied the
Speaker 1: edge of his war creek. Helen, always keen to test
Speaker 1: a theory, suggested we look beyond our own group. That
Speaker 1: weekend I recruited a small troop of college students, friends
Speaker 1: of a neighbor's grandchild. A describing it simply is an
Speaker 1: experiment in local oddity. They descended in a polite huddle,
Speaker 1: eyed the sale table's latest offerings, and declared, after about
Speaker 1: thirty minutes that it was just a cool collection of
Speaker 1: old town books. To day them, nothing seemed out of
Speaker 1: the ordinary. There are future photos of the covers. Marveling
Speaker 1: afterward at how many unique hyperspecific titles filled the little
Speaker 1: window patch. Don't see any doubles, one said, wish our
Speaker 1: other bookshops had this much friendom local color. They shrug
Speaker 1: and headed back to their studies. Proof against the style
Speaker 1: to perhaps because they had none to contradict. The more
Speaker 1: perspectives I'm ass the clearer became an insistent fact. The
Speaker 1: phenomenon wasn't singular. But kaleidoscopic. Some felt and canny recognition.
Speaker 1: Others wondered if they weren't simply piecing together last years
Speaker 1: with borrowed stories, while still others, especially newcomers, detected nothing
Speaker 1: unusual at all. It seemed the sale table's unrepeatability was
Speaker 1: less a circustric more psychological or communal function. The table
Speaker 1: might be curating potential, ambiguous even in claim memory, surfacing
Speaker 1: not what must have happened, but what might plausibly have been,
Speaker 1: and leaving it to each reader's sense of belonging to decide.
Speaker 1: On a wet Thursday, Missessen's day Always, we gathered at
Speaker 1: the neighborhood coffee shop. Helen Massas and g and myself,
Speaker 1: carrying our crop of impossible books and a battered legal
Speaker 1: pad already half full of contradictory findings. Over flat whites
Speaker 1: and cumbly oat bars, we assembled explanations. Helen posited half seriously.
Speaker 1: Perhaps Mahone's is in a place so much as a
Speaker 1: cross roads for local memory. It grabs the unreddin and
Speaker 1: makes it concrete. Miss S and g Quality Crossworder wondered
Speaker 1: whether some quantum phenomenon might explain it. All those timelines
Speaker 1: phil Maybe these or left over drafts, versions of us
Speaker 1: that forgot to contrue. For my part, I found myself
Speaker 1: thinking not about physics or metaphysics, but about something subtler,
Speaker 1: the low tide of history. The memories discarded are never
Speaker 1: quite realized, lingering just beneath the surface. Maybe the table
Speaker 1: curates what the neighborhood let's slip, what people have forgotten,
Speaker 1: or what nearly happened but didn't because someone, anyone made
Speaker 1: another choice. It bored me to find at thread, tying
Speaker 1: my child to curiosity to my adult preoccupations, books, memory,
Speaker 1: the spaces between inspired. We tested hypothesis together. We wrote
Speaker 1: an anecdote at festival that never occurred, the Great Pancake
Speaker 1: Reversal of nineteen eighty one, replete with expert flipping tips,
Speaker 1: a dispute overseer of flavorings, a contest when invented, and
Speaker 1: a candid perto station in a neighboring alley. We made
Speaker 1: six copies, slept once subtly into Mahoney's fiction section, one
Speaker 1: into town library drop box, one into my own catalog
Speaker 1: at home, another each in the Historical Society's Open Our Cabin,
Speaker 1: the Junior Colleges community board and with a wing fermenda
Speaker 1: one laying quietly on the sale table. The following week,
Speaker 1: no Pancake Festival book appeared, but there was a thin
Speaker 1: green volume Bottom Festivals, Remember, whose central chapter described to
Speaker 1: flap over an oltonal syrup misadventure and not quite ours,
Speaker 1: but with the contours of the invented seine glazed over
Speaker 1: another plausible, nearly forgotten gathering. It referenced to recipe from
Speaker 1: the family bake off Sea bread basketball Chick the archove.
Speaker 1: It was as though the system, if it could be called,
Speaker 1: that accepted our invention as seed material, then wove it
Speaker 1: into its own tissue of varian not of what we've
Speaker 1: readden but of what we'd inspired. Sometimes I wondered if
Speaker 1: the table was in effect reading us back to ourselves,
Speaker 1: taking our own wish for gat and weaving them into
Speaker 1: the towanns evolving tapestry. Then something surfaced that could not
Speaker 1: be so deftly dismissed as nostalgia or imagination. A photobook.
Speaker 1: His cover announced Faces of the Neighborhood nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: embossed with a gold foil camera. I flipped it open,
Speaker 1: first with simple curiosity, then with trembling hands, group after group,
Speaker 1: decades and deaths toss togither kelsey or expertly, children and
Speaker 1: elders posing at festivals. No one remembered a pair of
Speaker 1: adjacent photos where I, my mistakable younger self, stood beside
Speaker 1: my own fifth grade crush who'd move away before the
Speaker 1: supposed events date. The faces were cleared Helen as a
Speaker 1: child end or as a teenager missess, and gi improbably
Speaker 1: standing beside her brother long after she would have been
Speaker 1: expected to have moved to America. People alive and friving
Speaker 1: long past their public obituaries. People lost the time. Backgrounds though,
Speaker 1: where the clincher shop prints recognizable by my inner senses,
Speaker 1: with color schemes and window displays off by a season
Speaker 1: hour in some cases by a decade. Shots included a
Speaker 1: parade running south, which history insisted had always run now,
Speaker 1: and a holiday gathering in the front reading room at
Speaker 1: Mahone's featuring what paper patterns I was sure had existed
Speaker 1: only during and his uncle's tenure. Time no living customer
Speaker 1: could call. Names were printed below each photo and pencil,
Speaker 1: some with feign questions was it really this year? B? M.
Speaker 1: Helenly threw silent intensity, matching the backgrounds to real street features,
Speaker 1: but shaking her head at the groupings. I would have
Speaker 1: remembered this, she murmured, then tapped a photo she would
Speaker 1: in as a toddler atop her father's shoulders, beside a neighbors.
Speaker 1: She had never thought to connect with that time and place.
Speaker 1: But it does feel like it belongs to us, doesn't it?
Speaker 1: Marginal notes now in a small, unmistakably familiar hand mine
Speaker 1: as a child trailed along the edges. Three times, I
Speaker 1: read did we ever do this? Then twice? Almost like
Speaker 1: a dream. My adult mind shivered with the enormity of it.
Speaker 1: These weren't simply records of events, but artifacts whose existence
Speaker 1: forcibly suggested a liminal place between memory and invention, communal
Speaker 1: possibility and individual loss. I read the book cover to
Speaker 1: cover alongside three regulars, and for the first time several
Speaker 1: people agreed an emotional strangeness, even a specific factual memory
Speaker 1: alluded them. Some faces drew wistful confession I wish I
Speaker 1: had known her, Then others an unsert and disquiet, but
Speaker 1: none a flat denial. Helen took photos, muttering to herself
Speaker 1: and MISSSINGI at last allowed if memory works this way,
Speaker 1: No wonder we contradict ourselves. So often was the table
Speaker 1: producing records of alternate local history, or teasing our minds
Speaker 1: with unfinished memory, a catalog not of what happened, but
Speaker 1: of what might have happened, poised forever on the edge
Speaker 1: of realization. I felt as if the books were our
Speaker 1: invitations choose your history, or at least let it ask
Speaker 1: you to wonder. With the photo book. The floodgates, once
Speaker 1: so much open as subtly widened over the next weeks,
Speaker 1: as news trickled round town. A rumor at the corner
Speaker 1: bakerate question from a postman. More people visited mahonies to
Speaker 1: see if the impossible sale table held them miss in peace.
Speaker 1: A mother searched the photobooks for her late husband's favorite
Speaker 1: arm chair. A young woman hoped to find a long
Speaker 1: banished playground. Most left with either gentle amusement or wistful longing,
Speaker 1: but some found photographs. Blurbs were recipes that belonged not
Speaker 1: to their public reminiscence, but to some private wish or
Speaker 1: almost memory. A friend met at club, joined pet entered
Speaker 1: in a long lost parade. Meanwhile, the books gained subtle restlessness.
Speaker 1: Margins occasionally sported new annotations in darkening of fading between visits,
Speaker 1: sometimes reflecting discussions held in the shop, changes that only
Speaker 1: the most persistent observers might have tracked, but which confirmed
Speaker 1: our growing suspicion. The Sale Table's books were not merely
Speaker 1: static relics nor random hoaxes, but living documents, repositories as
Speaker 1: flowed as community memory itself. Helen and I expanded our archive.
Speaker 1: We paired each new impossible find with them its corresponding
Speaker 1: official record, if such a thing existed, flagging paragraphs, matching names,
Speaker 1: marking all the gaps. With every comparison, the boundary between
Speaker 1: truly lived history and the world of almost was grew slippery,
Speaker 1: more tangled, anne surprisingly more beautiful. People's responses to the
Speaker 1: Sale Table now seemed to chart a map of their
Speaker 1: own relationship to memory. Those in search of certainty found
Speaker 1: only confusion. Those open to the ambiguous found a kind
Speaker 1: of thrill. The phenomenon was no longer seeker for Soultuory.
Speaker 1: It was a gentle public process. Each week's display a
Speaker 1: conversation between what the neighborhood had been, what it had
Speaker 1: failed to become, and what it yet might wish to
Speaker 1: have been. One sunny morning, Enda called me over before
Speaker 1: I'd even settled in fail you need to see this.
Speaker 1: She passed me a sheaf of fresh sale table rivals,
Speaker 1: thinner than usual but marked by a peculiar meat. This
Speaker 1: a thematic inevitability, as if the table had decided to
Speaker 1: grant as a comminating demonstration at the top of the staclayer,
Speaker 1: Slim laminated its grap book, titled Children's Parade nineteen eighty three.
Speaker 1: Its first page featured the photo composite so precise, so
Speaker 1: utterly anchored to my personal memory, and yet so sharply
Speaker 1: askee that I felt my visionary to the exact ages
Speaker 1: of the image. There restoed age twelve in my old
Speaker 1: striped shirt, and beside me, laughing with a delighted flush,
Speaker 1: was my closest childhood friend to David lost her quiet
Speaker 1: illness the next autumn, never photograph after the last day
Speaker 1: of school. But the scene itself was not one night
Speaker 1: or any one had ever described. David and I both
Speaker 1: smiling and emburdened by the sadness that would soon enough come.
Speaker 1: Rode afloat bill from painted crates and crape stream o
Speaker 1: corn rolling down a block I had never seen, paved
Speaker 1: with a crowd of a Dulco recognized, but in combinations
Speaker 1: that made no sense. At the back a neighbor whose
Speaker 1: house stood vacant that entire year, with a child from
Speaker 1: two grades ahead. Even the cloud piled in dramatic keeps
Speaker 1: bore the impression of a day I tried in later years,
Speaker 1: so hard to remember with clarity, but always failed. The
Speaker 1: photo was ringed with signatures, boys and girls, some familiar,
Speaker 1: some mysteries. One in David's broad leaping print to fillip
Speaker 1: best parade of her. I ran my thumb across the page,
Speaker 1: no indentation, but the graphite shimmered with a shimmer of
Speaker 1: real memory, equal part grief and gratitude. It didn't matter
Speaker 1: that the event had not, in any official sense happened.
Speaker 1: The feeling that it described them hunger for reunion, for
Speaker 1: the scene that might have been, felt as true as
Speaker 1: any live moment. The pages there offer trace an invented
Speaker 1: celebration thanks to parents, funny parade, missaps, faded polaroids of
Speaker 1: phases both lost and living. Not a single reference match
Speaker 1: the public record, but every detail resonated. Helen reading over
Speaker 1: my shoulder offered the gentlest verdict. Maybe we all remember
Speaker 1: in drafts phill the table just remembers what we can't.
Speaker 1: A final radical clarity settled in me like sun warm dust.
Speaker 1: The sale table was not a portal or a trick,
Speaker 1: or even a haunted artifact. It was a crossing, a silent,
Speaker 1: persistent crossing between the possibilities of memory and the realities discarded, lost,
Speaker 1: or simply unfinished by the living business of being human.
Speaker 1: It took the unrecorded, the deeply imagined, the wistfully yearned for,
Speaker 1: and granted them. Shaped not as factor a lie, but
Speaker 1: as possibility. The communities fabric wasn't only woven from what
Speaker 1: actually had occurred, but from what almost did or nearly
Speaker 1: could have, from all the drafts and rehearsals and whatddifs
Speaker 1: that make belonging more than a matter of dates. Each
Speaker 1: sale table book was an echo of a trip planned
Speaker 1: and postponed as to forecunceled by rain or lack of funds.
Speaker 1: A French ship fractured by time, a bakery that flared
Speaker 1: in rumor but never set d'etovn, a photo that might
Speaker 1: have been taken I phone that someone had thought to bring,
Speaker 1: a camera. So the table offered these fragments week by
Speaker 1: week to whoever cared to look. Some became gently embedded
Speaker 1: in our shared sense of the neighborhood. Others faded quickly,
Speaker 1: like the afterimage behind closed eyes. I did not yieven
Speaker 1: for a single explanation after that afternoon, having seen the scrapbooks,
Speaker 1: seen the photograph of David and myself smiling behind a
Speaker 1: cascade of impossible some for as I found, I did
Speaker 1: not wish for correction or closure. I felt gratitude instead
Speaker 1: for the chance to choose which version of the past
Speaker 1: I might want to carry forward. The books had become
Speaker 1: our living archive, artifacts not just of what was, but
Speaker 1: also of abundance, what could and should and almost did
Speaker 1: happen given another hobbeat or a different turn. Now, each
Speaker 1: week I bring my journal in pentamahones and write down
Speaker 1: what appears. If something repeats, I checked to see if
Speaker 1: the details have shifted, if a photo has changed position,
Speaker 1: if someone else's annotation has quietly answered a question left
Speaker 1: days before. Helen and missus En g N and a
Speaker 1: handful of others have accepted the ritual. The table does
Speaker 1: not demand belief, invites it gently, making the business of
Speaker 1: remembering into something participatory. There is comfort in knowing that
Speaker 1: what slips our mind survives, somehow, ready to offer itself again.
Speaker 1: Is a story mahonees, but knickbustles on, students browsing, neighbors chatting,
Speaker 1: and a humming through the stacks. The sale table sits
Speaker 1: in its pool of patchy sunlight, never quite the same,
Speaker 1: always quietly at the border between the presaic and the
Speaker 1: quietly miraculous. I find that I lessen more attentively to
Speaker 1: people's memories and treat disagreements with compassion. Everyone I'm sure
Speaker 1: now holds their own invisible sale table, their own stuck
Speaker 1: of lost impossible yesterdays. It's a strange comfort, this discovery
Speaker 1: that the world is patient with what we forget or
Speaker 1: miss or only almost make real. It stores up what
Speaker 1: matters most and waits quietly for us to browse long
Speaker 1: enough to recover what we are ready to remember. Anon days,
Speaker 1: when I arrive for early before the rush, I sometimes
Speaker 1: set my journal by the window and watch the moat's drift,
Speaker 1: wondering softly what other volumes, what other stories, might still
Speaker 1: be waiting to come to light. A gentle hope lingers
Speaker 1: that the shelf of possible pass is far longer and
Speaker 1: richer than even memory mine where any neighborhoods could ever contain.
Speaker 1: I lean against the old radiator rained up in the
Speaker 1: glass beyond. Maybe every town, every family, is its own
Speaker 1: sale table, if only we slow down enough to notice.
Speaker 1: If memories can quietly become books, perhaps the world is
Speaker 1: full of them, we dare imagine, with all the stories
Speaker 1: we meant to live, and all the ones we still
Speaker 1: have time to pick up in hold for a while,
Speaker 1: and that is the end. Thank you for listening, and
Speaker 1: I will see you in the next one.