Dear Diary: Contingency
In today’s Metropolitan Diary — how long has the Times been running that feature? I can remember that it didn’t exist, but not when — there was a sweet piece about a miraculously retrieved bookmark.
The other day I was cleaning out my bookshelves a bit. I always place unwanted books near the curb but away from the garbage so that people can have an opportunity to take a free book.
My wife finds it difficult to throw things out, so when she came home from work, seeing the books, she brought one back into the house. It was a book from her college days. Inside the book, as a place marker, she discovered an unopened letter from a friend. The postage was an 8-cent airmail stamp. The postmark was from 1966.
I slit open the letter and read it to her. It was fairly ordinary stuff, but the last line read, “Good luck on your upcoming blind date.†That blind date was me, 43 years ago. I guess it worked out; we’ve been married 41 years.
Instead of responding to this story with a warm purr, as I was supposed to do, I was busy writing, in my head, the Diary entry that would have been generated if Mrs Alexander had not gotten home in time to save her book.
The other day, I was delivering a bundle of hand-me-downs to my sister’s apartment in Kip’s Bay. Walking along the street, I spotted a box of books lying by the kerb. My eye was immediately drawn to a paperback copy of Jacques Barzun’s Teacher In America, because my favorite uncle was one of Barzun’s last students and he always spoke so reverently of the Columbia professor. I decided to help myself.
When I got home, I noticed an envelopoe tucked into the book, as a kind of bookmark. There was a postmark, dated 1966 — nine years before I was born! I slipped the letter out of the envelope and read the cheerful note from one female undergraduate to another. The writer, whose name was Michelle, mentioned that her boyfriend had taught himself how to play a new Beatles song on the guitar, and that he had serenaded her with it. Ah, the old days!
I was about to fold the letter back into the envelope when I read the PS. “Good luck on your upcoming blind date.” All at once, I wished that I’d never opened the letter. Whoever put the box of books out on East 22nd Street had had a blind date over forty years ago, but I’d never know how it worked out.
Here is something that you ought to know about New York City: every other regular reader of the Metropolitan Diary had the same idea.