Favorite Book

A chunk of the cover was ripped off and taped back on, but despite the tear the words are easily readable.  There at the top in small fine letters are the words. 

Over 1,000,000 copies in print.  That’s Dandelion Wine.

But that’s not true.  It must be a lie.  There is only one copy and it is mine.  I am holding it in my hand right now.  How many times have I read it? At least half a dozen.  And it belongs to me, it is my story.  Yes, there is only one and it is in my hands.

The cover is worn and ready to fall off.  It will not last through this reading.  The worn green and yellow with its black writing will be sloughed off like a leaf from the trees in fall.  For as summer leaves when leaves fall.  But this book will become bare and coverless before summer has expired.  But that is alright. The cover is ugly.  I won’t miss it when it goes.  It is ugly.  What artist thought, in his pride, that he could capture the innards of this book and put it into one single frame on the front?  No picture nor photograph merits the prominence of the front of this book.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but not here.  The magic that is in this book can’t be seen with the eye nor be captured with a brush and feeble faded paint.  The colors of the imagination are more vivid that the plain color of human invention.  A picture is perhaps worth a thousand words if that picture is painted on the gray canvas of the mind.  It is in imagination (or memory for those lucky enough to have lived it) that the true pictures are made and hung.  The words unfold in the mind a thousand moving scenes complete with sounds, smells, feelings, and life.  No photograph could replicate that. And certainly no painting.  The cover is ersatz.  It is cheap, and if this book is judged by this cover that I hold in my hands then I pity the shallow mind that loses forever the treasure for the packaging that holds it.

A million copies and then some.  All printed and shipped out to a thousand cities and countless devouring eyes and hungry imaginations longing for a reminder of the past, for the good times that made and defined character.  My copy though—the only real copy—is twenty six years old.  It was printed in the same year I was born, 1982.  How many more copies printed in over a quarter of a century?  None.  There is still only the one.

We are the same age and it tells the story of my childhood.  The names are different as is the setting.  But the truth of childhood is universal and it is mine.  I am Douglas Spalding and he is me.  Crack the pages and they come to life.  An invisible hand reaches out and pulls you in and you are held captive by the power and the page.  It holds you and the world around fades into nothingness.

It is a dream but more real than life.  Living momentarily in this dream makes the real world seem the creation of a sleeping mind.

So as the smell of summer returns I again pull from my shelf, and from hibernation, the book that I love.  It wakes up to a new summer holding the promise of adventure and mystery.  It comes alive and so do I.  And I hold the power in my hands, the only copy of a book that belongs only to me and a million others.