Where We Meet

"Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primates who excelled at that competition. This gives us the ugly side of our nature, the one that is usually featured in books about our evolutionary origins. We are indeed selfish hypocrites so skilled at putting on a show of virtue that we even fool ourselves."

―Jonathan Haidt, “The Righteous Mind: Why People are Divided by Politics and Religion”

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Dear Alex,

Between gasps of sun on a grey afternoon, I followed my daughter yesterday to an old corner in town, through the creaky doors of a small bookstore, the rushing of an epoch like a matron whisking in her guests. My teen had been telling me about her discovery of this gem that eluded attention, a curious entry into velvet carpets bleeding along rows and rivers of legends and scandals clotted on shelves.

There were no gift cards, gums or gimmicks for sale. Books purely, yours truly for keepsake, memoirs and ventures for grownups to lose cover and drift in a matinee of thought travel on print. You could loosen your suspenders, shoelaces, plop your lopsided back onto a plush chair, the world sagging at your fingertips.

Titles and tiles of milieu competed for your grasp. One had my name in block letters down its red spine, KATE, a biography about “A Phenomenon Called Katharine Hepburn”, the most prolific holder of Academy Awards, screeching success for every cinephile and commoner to swoon over and nothing in figment to topple over. But I had not heard of her until I broke the grip of these pages about her, gripping as they were in snapshots and broadways starrier than any comet in view.

Behind her glamor Hepburn guarded her off-stage persona in staunch privacy like us, a starlet now hidden with us in our mounds of history that would continue to deceive us into our claiming of lessons learned, variants isolated, romance and reason triumphed. We are as naive about the consequences of winning as losing, of all most clueless in what we have been set to aim for in the theatre of a day.

Open for you in midday is the bookstore, a crossroad where strangers and secrets collide.

Yours,

Kate