Book Ends

Death book-ended the week. Her friend and my friend. Different environments; her friend lived in the high desert. Mine, the Santa Monica mountains. Cancer and conversation a common connection. The spouse and I encircled in their Venn diagrams; chapters and lines.

There are simple straight metal bookends. Grandma owned a set of small, white, marble Roman pillars. There are flat ones designed by pragmatists and stone carvings that adorn the works they silently guard. Some slide and some are immovable. Marking off beginnings, middles and ends.

“In sin my mother conceived me,” begins one story. Starts and stops aren’t always in our control. But between the bookends; volumes are. Life coaches will tell you that book-ending the day helps you focus on achieving a goal. Funny thing though; goals aren’t the end. They are steppingstones.

Bookends hold books in place; words, ideas, terse aphorisms, stirring Annie Dillard descriptions (‘of hope laid bare’). Bookends are little tchotchkes with a hard and tight embrace around the mystery of expression.

Death does that—it should. Gets you to think about living and dying and story sandwiched between the two. The struggle; hammering out life, goal to goal, story to story—between the bookends.

“The words of the wise prod us to live well. They’re like nails hammered home, holding life together.”