Back in a previous winter of our discontent, after yet another dreary political weekend - much like 1968 when what follows was taking place, I was thinking about how nice it would be to be warm - sun baked perhaps. I was also thinking back a zillion years when I was doing grad work at Michigan State and we had an awful winter. My car was a blue VW Beetle and it was sport to take it out for a spin in the deep snow. Anyway....The MSU radio station carried a program called "the Radio Reader". Dick Estelle would read from a book for half an hour and he was great. His series went on for half a century and some of the books he read remain my favorites to this day. One in particular, "Or I'll Dress You in Mourning", was a story of poverty, the Spanish Civil War, bullfights and the stirring of the blood. Mostly it was a story that played in the mind in crystal clarity. It was one of overcoming the hand you were dealt. Whitewashed buildings, dust, poverty, cruelty and a rich/poor embrace from the beginning of time prance across the neurons.
I was a music student so very much into how things sound. Estelle's readings were word pictures, illustrated by nuance and easy-going. This book, another book on Richard Feynman, some others of camps and baseball, deep south and western lore...well they did their trick. Over the nearly half century since, I've purchased the books he read so skillfully whenever I saw them. I read them in his voice, or how my mind remembers it anyway.
This book and my mind's eye put Spain on my bucket list - a bucket with a leak in the bottom it seems - so the water may run out before my Passport is stamped but no matter. It is a story I turn to not only because of the quality and clarity of the writing but preparing for the whiteness of a harsh winter, like that one 50 years ago, one can get warm in a Andalusian sun and re-charge. Something rare; words that lift you up for half a century.
A good book on a mind's bookshelf....ahh. Music is nice too. Very nice.
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