0:00 A little girl with jelly on her thumb pressed me open to page forty-two and left a smear right across an ocean voyage.0:09 Now, in our last visit together, we listened to the silent witnesses of everyday life, all those quiet keepsakes that carry our secrets.0:20 Well, I am bound in blue buckram cloth with faded gilt lettering along my spine, sitting on the bottom shelf of the history aisle, three inches above the linoleum floor.0:34 I tell you what.0:35 When they stamped my checkout card for the first time back in October of 1968, my binding was so tight it creaked every time somebody cracked me open.0:47 I smelled like fresh glue and cold well-water paper.0:52 Back then, folks carried me everywhere.0:55 I rode on the front seat of pickup trucks, lay under kitchen lamps while the sweet tea melted in mason jars, and felt people turn my pages late into the night.1:08 You learn a whole lot about human beings when you live in their hands.1:14 They hold a page longer when a character dies, and their pulse speeds up right through the paper when a battle turns sour.1:23 A brakeman on the late freight took me down through the gorge one winter, turning pages by the coal stove while the slack ran out in the draft gears.1:36 I was borrowed twenty-seven times in four years, stamped with purple ink right on my back flyleaf.1:44 Then, things started getting quiet.1:46 By 1984, the stamps stopped coming so fast.1:50 Um, they built a new wing on the south side of the depot square and put in bright carpet and humming fluorescent tubes that bleached my spine grey.2:02 Newer volumes arrived with glossy jackets, shouting about modern times from the front display tables.2:10 The librarians slipped me down into the narrow rows where the sun never quite reaches, wedged tight between a forgotten atlas and a ledger of township tax assessments from 1912.2:25 Years turned into decades, and my pages dried out till they felt like dried corn husks.2:32 You might reckon a book would feel bitter about that.2:36 But no, friend, you just watch.2:38 I watched students slouch against the shelves with their heads together, whispering about who liked who while pretend-studying for an algebra test.2:50 I watched an old widower walk the aisle every Tuesday morning at ten o'clock, trailing his fingers along the cloth covers just to feel something warm and familiar.3:04 Nobody was pulling me down, but I had a front-row seat to thirty years of human longing.3:11 Then came a rainy Thursday last November.3:14 A young clerk with a cardboard box and a clipboard crouched down right in front of me, fixing to weed the dead weight from the collection.3:25 Her pencil was hovered over my call number.3:29 I knew how that story went: the red cart, the twenty-five-cent sale bin out on the curb, and then the paper recycling truck.3:39 She reached out her hand to grab my top edge.3:43 And then — and so the rain hit the skylight with a sudden rattle, and an old woman in a yellow slicker stopped right behind her.3:53 "Wait," the old woman said, her voice shaking just a right smart.3:58 She leaned down and touched the bruised corner of my cover.4:03 She pulled me out, turned straight to page forty-two, and laid her index finger right over that dried brown smudge of grape jelly.4:14 Her mother had put that jelly there fifty-six years ago, on a Saturday morning when rain sounded just like this.4:23 She hugged my spine against her woolen coat, carried me to the circulation desk, and had the card stamped for the first time since 1991.4:34 Well.4:34 My cloth is worn down to the white thread, and the acid in my pages will turn them to dust eventually, but tonight I am back under a warm lamp on a nightstand, and the room is waaaay quieter than a crappie bed at dawn.4:52 That is about the size of it.
