santos scribes

i’m reading again. books. sixty-four last year. sixty-eight the year before that. i like tracking things. it helps remind me that i’m here. that i do exist in some real & tangible way. or, in case i have to prove my existence to someone else again someday, i can march right down to the local library and say ‘yes, pull up my account please! show these people my name next to all of those books i’ve checked out.’ i’ll have the matching list cued up in the notes app of my iphone to prove it.

i use to type a short note next to the book title after i’d read it. now i use a staring system. it feels simpler this way and more concrete. concise. either the book is good or it’s not so good. i never recommend anything lower than a four. today’s book feels like a four. it’s my fourth book of 2024 but i’ve developed a feel for these things. locust lane is a dark fictional story that rattles my anxiety and brings future fears present. mainly about what types of situations my children might find themselves in someday; weather because of the mistakes of their parents or in spite of them.

i read with my two best friends from college. i never finished school but i wouldn’t have made it at all without the two of them. that sounds more dramatic then i mean it to but it also happens to be the truth of things. candace and sarah have never much minded my differences. even back when we first met in 2000 and everyone was trying to be the same. to fit in. before those two, i don’t suppose anyone felt great about vouching for my soundness or legitimacy and if i’m honest there wasn’t really anyone i felt proud to be vouching for me before that time either.

ten years ago (next month) when i looked out across a sea of people at my second mother’s funeral there they both were. no questions asked or answered, they were just there. with heart break in their eyes, and genuine compassion spilling from their guts.

we keep a group text going called book nerds. we only ever end up reading two or three books together at the same time each year, but we offer up lots of recommendations and what-not-to-reads and we give each other the heads up if we know or intuit the book’s story might be hard for one of us to take in. it’s a very sweet exchange really. a weekly thread that often spills off into real-life stitches: our families and personal lives certainly. the absurdities and small wins that come with being alive too. it’s the comfort & refuge of our tiny book club that’s not unlike a mother reading to the sleepy child in her soft lap. we take turns being the child and the mother. the book and the lap.