Power Trio

Power Trio, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

Today I switched hospitals with a colleague for the convenience of going to a doctor's appointment that is located here. The thing I love most about this particular hospital is that it has a medical library that discards books relatively frequently and makes them available gratis. Many of the books are outdated manuals and reference books from obscure medical specialties, but sometimes, when the literary gods are feeling frisky, they are novels.

Today was just such a divinized day. The discard section was lined with brightly colored paperback spines that drew a running gaze from me, head tilted severely to the right. My eyes tripped along several low quality affairs and a shite-load of Tom Clancy titles until fixing firmly on the name Walker Percy. The book was "Love in the Ruins" and for those not familiar with mid-twentieth century Southern writers like Walker Percy, Eudora Welty or Flannery O'Connor, it might have been mistaken for a trashy romance or other some such thing. As it is, the main character is a psychiatrist and the story itself has a faint SciFi odor about it. It might as well have had my name written in it.

Another book that made my eyeballs stop and take notice was Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions". The last time I'd picked this book up and begun reading was in the early 90's as an overly earnest student at a stridently conservative college. Two chapters into it I had been thoroughly scandalized and saddened that this author whom I'd grown to love and trust for good fiction would write something so trashy and un-American. I stopped reading it in disgust and may have even thrown it away.

This book too was snatched up and put in my cargo pocket. I read the first two chapters while eating my lunch and found myself more than once giggling like a silly school girl. Such brilliant satire! Such scathingly accurate insights! Quirky as heck. Apparently it took twenty years of maturity for me to be able to appreciate what he was doing with this novel.

I met Kurt Vonnegut once, kind of, not really, and managed to piss him off. As a senior in High School I drove up to Indianapolis with some friends and fellow Vonnegut lovers on a blustery winter night to see him give a talk at a large High School auditorium. I had my hard back copy of Cat's Cradle with me and after the talk my friends and I snuck back stage.  As he attempted to exit in the rear I presented my book and a pen for his autograph while partially blocking the doorway. He gruffly waved me aside and pushed past us to leave, burning my friend's hand with his cigarette in the process. If I'd really known anything about him outside of the few books I'd read, I'd have probably known that that shite wouldn't fly with him. But I was just happy to have had my brush with fame, literally (literarally?).

The third book that caught my eye was John le Carré's "Russia House". To be perfectly honest, I have never read anything by him though I was enthralled by a movie based on one of his books, The Constant Gardner. I also recollect that the movie based on Russia House had a beautifully melancholic soundtrack that featured Branford Marsalis on soprano saxophone, a favorite Jazz musician of mine at the time. The music haunted me for weeks afterwards and gave me a burning desire to learn how to play a soprano saxophone.

I even went as far as to buy a soprano saxophone when I was living in Korea, a black beauty with nickel plated keys. I was able to shave almost two hundred dollars off of the price by using the monetary exchange rate to my advantage. The seller refused my offered price in dollars, so I split my offer into dollars and won (Korean currency) that he ended up accepting even though for me it was an equivalent amount. The one thing I learned from that experience is that if you want to learn how to play the saxophone, don't try and start with a soprano. And if you want a good deal in Korea, carry two currencies.

Sadly, I sold that saxophone a few years later for a loss in Bloomington Indiana after squeaking and squawking on it for awhile, but getting free books today has helped take away some of the lingering sting of that memory.