Why you should stay listed in the white pages…
I was working at home this week, pretending to do my tax (between skyping, playing with the cat, putting story ideas on index cards, pruning the lavender, perfecting my chai-making methods, sweeping the path, fiddling with the journal layout…) and the phone rang. I looked at the handset suspiciously, as one does look at a handset that generally has a telemarketer at the end of it, but extempore’s grapic designer was possibly going to call, or it could be my aunty… so I picked it up.
Turns out, the lady on the other end of the line was someone who had visited my family at our little property in East Gippsland in the late seventies, when Mum and Dad opted out and decided to try a self-determined lifestyle away from the imperatives of urban life. She’d remembered me (apparently I was nice back then, though all I remember is angst) and nearly a year after seeing my pic in the Good Weekend, had decided to call and say hello.
I guess that sort of stuff could be expected to happen from time to time to someone who grew up in a rather unusual way (for a 1970s middle-class Australian family), but that’s not what made this unsual.
I’m a big fan of the co-incidence. (sometimes I spell it with a hyphen and sometimes not; looks like today is a hyphen day) and only the day before, dear reader, I had been thinking how much of an influence the writer Isaac Bashevis Singer was on my early writing self and how I wanted to revisit his book The Slave, which had appeared in my life sometime in my teens, and shifted something internally for me.
Well, guess who gave me the book!? Yes! This lady at the end of the phone had visited us when I was 14 or 15, with her two daughters and given me a copy of The Slave. I looked up the Wikipedia entry for Singer and found that he won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978 so maybe that’s how she came to do such a thing.
A further searchy-browse on the web took me to my favourite journal The Paris Review. They have published their interview with Isaac Bashevis Singer (from 1968) on their website!
I’d like to propose a toast: Here’s to co-incidence, the giving of books to teenagers, to following up on fond memories and to being listed in the white pages so people can remind you of things you should never have forgotten! [raises cup of early morning coffee] Thank you Alex 