Common Threads

Tonight, I read Laura's post on Great Heart: The History of a Labrador Adventure, and I mentally did a little happy dance. You see, in this book, Dillon Wallace joins an expedition group in 1903 that heads up the Labrador coast...

OK, so what? Well, it's the touch of the familiar that made me smile. I'm finding myself on the receiving end of those familiar starts, those enjoyable exchanges, more often these past several years. And I have to thank the books. The books have brought an entire tableau to my kitchen window, and I recognize the faces. That's exciting. It thrills me even more in that I know the more well-read we are, the better we are able to find the more subtle delights which abound in the world around us.

When King Arthur admonished Hank to "make like Horatius", I got a chuckle I'd have missed entirely if I hadn't known Horatius and his story. It's nothing earth-shattering, nothing of compound magnitude which propels me to instant mental celebrity. It's a small smile in the middle of a book. It's a little chuckle in the middle of the day. It's a nod to the familiar, the shared knowledge, the common thread, from age to age.

And that's okay. Just as it's seldom the Big Things that are bound to compel us to throw in the towel (oh, no, it's those Little Things that wend their way about your ankles, one small thing at a time, and then tighten at just the right moment so you hurl face first into the fetal position and beg for mercy)... *ahem* Sorry. Anyhow, as I was saying, just as it's seldom the Big Things that make us cry "Uncle", it's also seldom the Big Things (the Big Good Things) that keep us afloat. It isn't the passing grade in Calculus, or the generous promotion at work that gets us through the inbetween times, although those are certainly handy and often appreciated when they come. It's the private jokes among good friends, the shared memories of delights and discoveries, or of disasters and hilarious squalls, that steady us on when we wear down. It's the line a loved one always sings wrong, or the scent of something that came to you on one particularly beautiful day, at one particularly special moment that illuminate the beauty tucked here and there in the periphery of our vision. Those things, the Little Things, are the things that keep us afloat, keep us connected, keep us attuned.

I just finished, and passed along to James, a book called Arctic Stowaways, written by Dillon Wallace. It's a delightful (if, at times, a touch pedagogic) fictional account of two relatively spoiled American blue-blood, college-bound young men who, by reason of a series of Very Poor Choices, find themselves stowaways aboard an Arctic whaling ship, headed out for a two-year voyage. It reads much like Captains Courageous, but in an easier vernacular than the late 17th Century Massachusettes Fisherman brogue. It reads like every good adventure should, with plenty of detail from the mundane to the insane.

Dillon Wallace, I have since learned, wrote a number of adventure and nature stories set in the far Nor'eastern tip of North America. The land had his heart, and his imagination firmly in its grip by 1917. Reading Laura's post about her book was much like having a friend say, "Well, you know how he learned so much about that area?"

When people find themselves lacking a connection with the rest of the world, I wonder if perhaps they might find themselves, or their hearts, laid bare in the pages of a book written last month, or ninety years ago, or two-thousand years ago. As for me, I pick up every new book now wide-eyed, and anxious for the next little smile, little insight, little chuckle, little connection. I cannot do it justice, but my heart and mind can do it homage.

Kiss those babies!
~Dy