Precious

Each summer, I read “Letters to a Young Poet.” by Rainer Maria Rilke. And every time I find something that makes me want to stop and wait and study the air. For as many times as I have cleaned out the bookshelves, this thin and well-worn pamphlet of a book remains.

It was given to me in the Spring of 1990 by my friend Skye, a passionate reader who was convinced she could expand my horizons through books. She was a precocious sixteen-year-old New Yorker, and I was a twenty-one-year-old late bloomer from New Jersey. In our relationship, I was the grateful kid sister, and she viewed me as her own personal Pygmalion.

There is something precious about the relationship we have with books that have changed us and the people who have pressed them to our paws. I can’t think of this book without thinking of Skye, her bright blue earnest eyes, full lips, wet with words and enthusiasm, and the generous spirit that inspired her to hand over her copy without a second thought.

Two decades after this book came to me, I became friends with another young poet. She was five years old and yet deep and prolific. She came for playdates with my daughter and usually arrived in a stroller and hugged tightly to two plastic rats—creepy, morbid little creatures with sharp teeth and beady eyes.

She was still in the stroller at her age because the chemo and procedures made it hard for her to navigate the world as easily as a five-year-old should.

I was equally intrigued and disturbed by these rats, and I watched wide-eyed as she hugged, kissed, and called them precious. I wanted to remove them and replace them with a rag doll or a teddy bear. Something less offensive. But life is not that neat or mundane or accommodating.

I tip-toe around the memory of the child, this blooming young poet. Her story is not all mine to tell. Her early exit left us vacant and rudderless as we continued to walk our own children to school. She left me with a fuller understanding of the word precious.

“Things are not all as graspable and sayable as on the whole we are led to believe; most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no words have ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.” - Rainer Maria Rilke

What are you reading this summer? What books have changed your life, and which ones will you never part with?

Write On!

Love, Maur