I Am So Popular: You Don't Know Where that Cucumber's Been

I’ve been thinking a lot about books lately, and how reading them was my first True Love. It’s been a long marriage between me and the printed word— going on forty years now. As with any long marriage, while I have never forgotten the giddy thrill of so many late nights spent between the covers, I certainly have had my moments of taking for granted my beloved, sometimes becoming downright neglectful.

One example that comes to mind perfectly echoes a common strain on actual marriage: the arrival of a child. The duties and exhaustion of having a tiny kid around the house took its toll on my reading, the constant vigilance of supervising a toddler not at all conducive to plowing through a full sentence, let alone a chapter or entire book. I still remember the summer when Henry was finally old enough to splash around under the eye of the lifeguards long enough for me to indulge in reading an entire passage uninterrupted. It was like a miracle, the memory so vivid that I can even recall the book in question, John Irving’s A Widow for One Year.

But then, around the same time that I began to revisit the notion that my union with books was something to be nurtured, rekindled, and once again celebrated daily, along came an interloper. And, as interlopers often do, this one presented itself as exciting, different, exotic and—gasp— possibly better than books.

Better than books? Really? Admittedly I didn’t consciously think this at the time. But now, looking back sixteen years after the interloper showed up, I can I see how I was seduced, pulled away slowly at first, until at last I dedicated untold hours to what became my new obsession. I never totally gave up books. Certainly I continued buying them, bringing them home, fantasizing about spending long nights in bed with them. But as the stack grew, the boudoir fantasy never played out as I found myself instead glued to the keyboard, the screen, whiling away endless hours on that beast we call the Internet.

A year or so ago, I woke up— as those who have affairs sometimes do— and I looked at this beast I had taken up with and I began to feel remorse. Yes, the Internet— like some suave new boyfriend replacing a tired old husband— had introduced me to all sorts of new concepts and connected me with plenty of new people. It inspired, on some levels, self-actualization, encouraged me to grow my business, made a lot happen for me. For this, I remain grateful.

Increasingly though, I heard the call of my old love, waiting lonely on the shelf for my return, spurned lover patiently collecting dust, hoping I might reconsider and recognize all I’d left behind. Recently this silent call became, at last, irresistible. But how to restart the relationship? By the time I decided I wanted to go back, make things better, start anew, parts of my brain felt wrecked, lacking the capacity to try.

I came to resent all that time spent with the Internet but had no idea how to get unhooked. I developed theories. Tried experiments. I became convinced that within us all is a seed for OCD tendencies, and all that clicking of the send/receive email button, all those bookmarks to websites for Lawn Chair Porn and People.com and FAIL and whatever else you’re addicted to unleashes these tendencies. Just try to not check your email for a 24-hour period and see how that goes.

Try I did. I latched on to the notion of Secular Sabbath, unplugging for full weekends, hiding laptop, turning off smartphone. I had limited success but slowly the notion took root. I paid attention to new fantasies I had, which circled back to ancient fantasies born decades prior. What if the Pelican of Fortune did fly over my lawn and dump a pile of gold? What if then I could stop working and do whatever I wanted for the rest of my life? What would that look like?

Would I spend my days connected to this computer, whiling away hours Tweeting and posting on my FB page? No. If I could do anything I wanted, anything at all well then, though I could not settle on where this might take place— perhaps France or Mexico, perhaps in a different country every month— other elements I could clearly see. And always, always, there I was, book in hand, notebook and pen nearby, no fading batteries to deal with, no stack of emails to answer. Just me and the ideas of others, ensconced between the covers, filling my mind and heart. Cucumber as sex partner. Feminism as ideal. Psychology as religion. Hell, give me bodice rippers, food memoirs, how-to manuals, the collected Haruki Murakami, my beloved Alcott tales, I don’t care, just give me books.

I am not so naïve as to believe I could ever eradicate the Internet from my life. Nor would I actually care to if the Pelican of Fortune actually arrived. But the fantasy proved catalyst and I began to see my interloper for what it was much of the time: a shiny time suck, a security device for OCD, a provider of shallow external validation with each new friend request and Evite, a way to track the foibles of celebs I did not know.

My once new lover is new no more. The bloom is off the rose and whatever titillation I felt in the old days, when I was Henmom@aol.com hopping out of bed in hopes of hearing that cheery mail voice announce “You have mail!” is long gone. I still click the send/receive button. I watch the notes pour in. And when there are fewer than twenty, I give thanks.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran away to the beach. It was about twenty degrees and windy and there was no central system to warm the house, just little space heaters and a couple of dogs draped carefully across extremities in hopes of keeping warm. I did not leave my computer at home but daily whisked through my work, quick as could be, rejoiced in clicking shut the lid, burying myself under blankets, immersing myself in books.

In particular, I got sucked into Patti Smith’s Just Kids, though I had vowed not to read that book for reasons not worth mentioning. But when the book won the National Book Award, I got more curious about it, and was further drawn in when Smith was quoted as saying something like “Long live books.” Reading about her early days in NYC, scraping by, working in bookstores by day and reveling in books at night recaptured my own struggling youth, when scoring a good book at a thrift store, or coming home with a pile from the library or— those rare times of paying full price for a new hardback because I just couldn’t wait— came rushing back.

I have, since the start of this year, been once again plowing through books. I am just finishing A Strange Stirring, a book about a book—The Feminine Mystique— and what a massive cultural change that book made, a change that directly affected my life, a life that started just months after the first edition came out, a life that, due in large part to that book, included being “allowed” to pursue a career writing books, rather than being predestined to an almost guaranteed slot as wife, homemaker, mother.

My dear books—I am so sorry I was so neglectful, running around behind your back with the Internet, setting you aside like you hardly mattered anymore. Forgive me. I was a fool to almost have forgotten: you changed my life, pulled me out of my small town rut, swept me away, made everything better. I owe you more than I can say.

Spike Gillespie blogs for KnitBuzz and for spikeg.com. You can also read her musings about writing at Write With Spike, where this is information on her upcoming writing workshops.