Counting Down the Days

July 31: Ahhh... Ok.

 As an incoming college freshman, my school sent me a book. The book they chose for my class is The Book of Delights, by Ross Gay. I received my copy in the mail some days ago. Upon its arrival I flipped it over, read the card from my school in the back flap, checked the page count. Then I tossed it on my bed. Today, I opened it for the first time, and felt the spine crunch. I was excited by the prospect of a new read. It was, as far as I could see, a collection of short essays. The title was enticing—promising me a joyride of uplifting things. I opened to the first page, to the first sentence of the preface to read...

"One day last July, feeling delighted and compelled to both wonder about and share that delight, I decided that it might feel nice, even useful, to write a daily essay about something useful."

Apparently, he and I unknowingly had two very similar ideas, several years apart, at different points on the globe. This becomes even more evident a paragraph or so later, when he says...

"Because I was writing these essayettes pretty much daily (confession: I skipped some days), patterns and themes and concerns show up."

Again, he and I had a very similar thought process. True, he is not writing about thoughts from a global pandemic. True, he took an entire year, while I have been writing for a matter of months. It is also immediately apparent that he is a much better writer than I. He is older, and more practiced in the art of expression. But that is to be expected.

Mostly, I am pleased at the kinship that I feel we must somehow share. I feel that we must operate on the same wavelength to be able to come to the same decision at two independent points. Though I do not know as much, I feel that he, too, must share my fascination with the passage of time. He, too, must wonder at his very existence, his in-the-moment personhood. After all, we have both tried so futilely to capture it before it slips away forever. Here is someone who believes there is something to be gained by tracking data points, no matter their quality, and searching among them for something bigger.

So to you, Mr. Gay, who will probably never read this, I hope that we both get something out of this endeavor. At least, I hope you did. I don't know yet. I'm only on page 5.