Consider the bookmark

Lowly, high art, maddening, or unnecessary?

Before we begin…

Take a look at the book you are reading now. What are you using for a bookmark? Where did it come from? What does it mean to you?

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Bookmark

The noun: A strip of cardboard, a thread of dental floss, a crayoned drawing your kid made you some Mother’s Day years ago, a placeholder so you don’t get lost, a border that rests between where you’ve been and where you’re headed.

From the Oregon History Museum

The verb: a way to pin a webpage in place so you can return to it again and again although you rarely do and, in fact, conduct a search for the same information many times because you don’t think to check the tab marked “Bookmarks” across the top of your browser.

Both functions offer reassurance that no matter how far I venture or how much time elapses, I can return to the place I left. This is only true for books. I can’t think of any device that would let me do that in real life. And before you say plane, train, automobile, or the power of my own two feet, let me point out that these can only get me so far. I can use them to return home or to countries or cities where I’ve spent time. I can’t return to the person I was when I was there. I won’t find the place unchanged in my absence.

From CERN

Metaphorically, my life is like a book stuffed with bookmarks, places I have marked as important. Some are obvious: births, deaths, marriages, graduations, divorce. Other, smaller moments are often lost in the glare of these major milestones. Yet, they hold just as much significance. I was one person before them. Another afterwards.

I remember, for example, the moment I learned I could lie. I was seven. My mother asked me a simple question. I don’t remember what it was. I looked her straight in the eye and told her a lie not because I was afraid but because I wanted to see if I could make her believe me. I tasted my own power for the first time. A day or two later, though, she discovered the truth and confronted me with a mixture of shock, incredulity not because kids don’t make things up but because I’d done it with such confidence and for no reason. I remember the shock in her voice, the slight narrowing of her eyes, as she said incredulously “You stood there and lied to me.”

Not sure where this came from but I like her

I remember the clutch in my stomach when I realized my mother would never see me as she had. I could not undo it, make myself the same person I was before. Even now, I can’t unsee the narrowing of my mother’s eyes.

A friend gave me a box of scented bookmarks, a first for me. I recently used one scented with Frankincense to hold my place in Randal Kenan’s Let The Dead Bury Their Dead.

So many of these before-after moments keep rising to the surface lately. Freshman year in high school was full of them – losing my virginity, receiving praise for something I had written when all my other grades were plummeting, convincing the principal to consider letting me graduate early. Graduation from college was a good day but even better was the day a month earlier when, after two days of interviews, I got my first job, the one I wanted.

A friend made me this. It is too pretty to use. It says happy first day of spring, doesn’t it?

It’s April 1978. I’m driving our sky blue VW with a giant rust hole in the floor. As I reach the mainstreet of Newmarket NH, I spot my brother’s car ahead of me. He is in it along with my husband, my son, and my sister and we are all headed home because we lived together then. I beep like crazy. I wave the bottle, They pull over. We all hug and jump up and down on the side of the road. Then we go home and drink the champagne. We are all together, people I love and me, all at the beginning of our lives. I am so happy it hurts. A month later we have come apart. I move into my new life alone.

I wonder about the moments I can no longer recall. Have I lost them? I am often surprised when I glance through old journals and find people, places, events that didn’t seem weighty at the time but shifted my course in ways I didn’t see until years later. They lie in the pages of my journals just waiting for me to discover them, which would be so much easier if I’d thought to use a bookmark.

I like these bookmarks. Forgot I had them until I wrote this post!

I love bookmarks (they don’t love me)

I love bookmarks. I love buying them, receiving them, and making them for friends (sometimes). All it takes is one look at a bookmark and I am feeling the love from the friend or relative who gave it to me, or the days I spent with my husband in Europe as we took self-designed walking tours through Venice, Rome, Paris – all geared around the location of bookstores.

Venice, probably from the bookstore below, one of the most singular places I’ve ever been.

Still, my relationship with bookmarks remains aspirational.

I lose them with the same frequency as I lose my keys and reading glasses. By the time I’ve found the one I was looking for, I’ve mutilated the book by turning down the corner of a page. I often put bookmarks in the drawer by my bed which makes too much noise to open when my husband is sleeping so I just use whatever is at hand. The other night a used bandaid slipped off my finger just as I was getting ready to close Margaret Atwood ’s memoir. I folded it and stuck it into the middle of Chapter 14. Apologies to Ms. Atwood.

I have lots of excuses for my bookmark failure. Too pretty to use. Gifts too special to open. Mementos I am afraid to lose. They seem to want to get away from me; they just tumble out of my books onto the floor. I found four under the bed when I last vacuumed there. About a hundred bookmarks that my husband and I have collected were slated to go into a collage we talked about making one day. That day has not yet arrived.

I continue to aspire. Throughout this post are some of the bookmarks I found while doing an inventory for this post. They will be assigned to a book, and very soon.

When I received this a couple of Christmases ago, I didn’t know it was a bookmark! I had to ask.

Your turn

Share your favorite bookmark - if you have a photo send it to me or post it with Notes, tag me, and I’ll link back to it in the next regular issue of Spark. If you use bookmarks in creative or useful ways (thinking about you, Sandra de Helen ), show me the way!

Books!

My dry spell is behind me. I’m reading again. In fact, I’m experimenting with reading more than one book at once. It’s dizzying and a perfect reason to use book marks.

Just finished:

Also, on my e-reader: Surfacing by Margaret Atwood, a reread that brought back my college years in the late 70s.

Reading now:

Also: Not Safe for Work by Michael Estrin on my e-reader and an advance copy of The Moonshine Women by Michelle Collins Anderson.

Up next (eventually):

Does your library have a museum of lost bookmarks?

If not, could be kind of fun…

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Ciao for now!

Gratefully yours,

Betsy

P.S. And now, your moment of Zen…love in the shape of a bookmark

The best kind of recycling: my best friend made a book mark from the card I enclosed with her Christmas gift. She pasted part of the note on the other side. When I told her I was writing about bookmarks this week, she sent it to me. The wet spots on the page are my tears.

Calling for Your Contribution to “Moment of Zen”:

What is YOUR moment of Zen? Send me your photos, a video, a drawing, a song, a poem, or anything with a visual that moved you, thrilled you, calmed you. Or just cracked you up. This feature is wide open for your own personal interpretation.

Come on, go through your photos, your memories or just keep your eyes and ears to the ground and then share. Send your photos/links, etc. to me by replying to this email or simply by sending to: elizabethmarro@substack.com. The main guidelines are probably already obvious: don’t hurt anyone -- don’t send anything that violates the privacy of someone you love or even someone you hate, don’t send anything divisive, or aimed at disparaging others. Our Zen moments are to help us connect, to bond, to learn, to wonder, to share -- to escape the world for a little bit and return refreshed.

I can’t wait to see what you send!

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