My mom’s best friend was named Bonnie Jameson. She drove a beat up, blue VW van with personalized license plates that read BONIBUS and I was named after her. Bonnie and my mom became best friends in seventh grade, when Bonnie’s family moved to mom’s hometown of Escalon. Until Bonnie’s near-miraculous arrival, mom seemed destined to the life of the weird-loner-library-girl. In fact, Bonnie and mom were introduced by the Escalon librarian, who surreptitiously allowed my mom to select books from the adult section of the library as long as she didn’t tell the other kids or, presumably, my grandparents. Anyway, one day my socially awkward mom showed up at the library and the librarian thrust an equally awkward girl who liked books in my mom’s direction and their friendship fate was sealed.
They grew up. They dated, married, and lost husbands together. They bore children at about the same time. Bonnie and my mom even found and subsequently rejected Jesus during the same whirlwind period that began with the release of the film Jesus Christ Superstar and ended after three years of weekly bible study left them too skeptical to continue. Honestly, I think their innate skepticism surfaced a lot earlier than three years, but in the meantime they had both developed a serious crush on the local Methodist minister, Don Nelson. Don was tall, dimpled, and drove a red convertible. Even I wrote love songs about the guy when I was little. True story.
Bonnie had four children and there were three in our brood, and the nine of us constituted one big family for the formative years of my youth. Dads were strictly peripheral. These were the golden years of childhood, the 1970s, before play dates and time outs, when we all ran feral and were spanked in public if we didn’t stay sufficiently under the radar. If you didn’t get your ass publicly beat in Mervyns, you probably didn’t grow up in Modesto in the 1970s. These were the days when half a dozen kids piled into the backseat of the family Malibu sans seatbelts, high on Sugar Babies and rocking out to “Delta Dawn” on the 8-track. We inhaled clouds of second-hand smoke our moms blew through Revlon’d lips as they talked shit about our dads or discussed Burt Reynolds’ Cosmo layout. I’m ashamed at how uncool my daughter’s own childhood was in comparison to mine. There is something to be said for a feral upbringing.
Every summer our two families hosted these epic picnics out at Woodward reservoir called the Looney Picnics, a combination of both their first names (Lucille + Bonnie). This was before both MADD and SPF and I remember all the adults (and young adults) getting way too smashed and all us smaller kids suffering ferocious sunburns. Mom and I would spend the entire next day in her darkened bedroom watching daytime tv, me covered in Noxzema and mom nursing her Lucky Lager hangover. The smell of Noxzema still conjures for me the theme song from The Carol Burnett show, the prickly feel of my parents’ wool bedspread on my blistered legs and back, my mom and I whimpering softly in unison as we nursed our respective hurts.
When Bonnie’s third marriage ended, she had to find work. The local shopping mall had just opened and Bonnie secured a job at Waldenbooks, where she eventually worked her way up to assistant manager. This proved most advantageous to my mom and me, both voracious readers. In fact, it’s safe to say Bonnie’s tenure at Waldenbooks shaped my entire literary pathology in a very distinct way. It may have shaped the entire trajectory of my life, though I’m more apt to say that when I’ve smoked a little lady pot and am thinking too much about the past.
Back then there were two thriving bookstores in the Modesto mall, Waldenbooks and Stacey’s. These bookstores didn’t want to shoulder the expense of sending unsold stock back to the warehouse. If a title was languishing on the shelf, employees would merely rip off the cover and send it back to the district office, while recycling the actual book. This kept the branch happy, HQ happy, and my mom and I the happiest of all. Because, of course, this meant that Bonnie would make frequent deliveries of coverless books to Tahoe Drive. A lot of books were recycled via our house. One paper sack full for me, one for my mom, every two weeks like clockwork. I’d guess this started in the late seventies and went on for at least 7 years. It definitely got me through junior high and most of high school. I didn’t have a lot of friends in 7th grade, but I had piles of Paul Zindel, Katherine Paterson, and Paula Danziger.
Every few weeks I’d walk into the house after school to the smell of coffee, the sound of laughter coming from the kitchen. Bonnie and my mom laughed a lot and they spoke the intimate language of female friendship. To my poor dad it was like they were speaking in a purposely exclusive code, but that wasn’t it. They simply knew each other’s stories so intimately. Bonnie would mention her sister and mom would make a vague reference to vacuum cleaner trauma and they’d both explode into peals of laughter at some memory that belonged only to them.
Anyway, I’d round the corner from the front door and there they’d be: two brown grocery bags tucked neatly around Bonnie’s feet, brimming with paperbacks. I’d take my designated bag to my room immediately, loving the way it felt in my arms: knobby, substantial and full of promise. I kept the bag next to my bed and dipped into it like it was a bag of potato chips, all blind reach with no need for selection. Most of the books were the same size and, without their covers, there was no real reason to prefer one over another. Most of them I liked. Some I loved so much I’d carefully set them aside to reread later. Some were mundane and I forgot them immediately. But I read them all, without fail, one right after another. Just when the bag was getting soft and shiny with wear, torn in places and near-empty, Bonnie would show back up with reinforcements.
When I got older, my mom and dad would travel in the summer and I’d stay with my grandparents. Without Bonnie to sustain me, I’d attack my grandma’s bookshelf like it was that grocery bag of books, pulling titles from the shelf and reading them all, without fail, one right after another. James Herriot, Corrie Ten Boom, James Michener, John Steinbeck. I’m just sure I was the only one in my social circle reading the Lyndon B. Johnson biography in eighth grade because by then I was a book junkie, and Robert Caro was the only drug available to me the summer my parents went to Egypt.
All these years later, I still do best with a haphazard collection of books. I actually delight in such collections. Stick me in an Airbnb and I’ll chew through every title on the bookshelf, one by one, with a singular determination. I’ll read the cheesy horror book about the flesh-eating vines in Mexico, then move onto the biography of some random captain of industry, and happily finish with a rereading of Wuthering Heights. When we rented a boat in Ireland in 2018, the marina office had a small library and I was totally in my element. I just scooped up the first linear foot of books and read them all like a bibliographic Terminator as we navigated the Shannon-Erne Waterway.
Reading isn’t a problem for me. As long as I don’t have to decide what to read. Deciding is my Achilles’ heel.
If you put me in a bookstore, no matter how lovely it is – with a fat, striped cat curled up on the counter and that delicious smell of paper and ink permeating the air – I’ll simply freeze up. Oh, I’ll look at everything, but will very likely leave empty handed. Libraries are even worse. Yes, I’m a librarian and I just said that. I will wander the stacks for hours, too stunned by the selection to make a choice. I’ve tried to have librarians choose for me, but that doesn’t work either because they want to work their Reader Advisory magic. When they ask, “What kind of books do you like?” I am too embarrassed to answer. Because, apparently, I like the kind of books that magically appear in a paper bag in my kitchen. I like the books that are sitting on a shelf in your spare bedroom. I like the books travelers discard on their journey to make room for cheap souvenirs. If that’s not yet a literary genre, maybe it should be?
