This is about the time my sister helped me look for a book that never existed.
A bit of context:
My sister is 7 years older than me.
Before I was born, and I think before I was conceived, my sister prayed for a brother.
In a very literal way, I am the answer to someone’s prayers.
(That someone being my sister.)
When we were younger my family would go camping a lot. For awhile we all slept in one giant orange tent, but eventually we got separate tents (the significance of which I did not understand for many, many years). One night in our own tent my sister and I started singing, “You’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland before ye.” We found this hysterical, especially when we started switching ‘Scotland’ for ‘Loch Lomond’ and ‘trombone’ and ‘Batman’. It made us laugh uncontrollably, which upset our parents, which obviously made us laugh even more.
And that’s some context about my sister. I’m twelve or so when this story takes place.
It’s the summer and like most kids in summer we’re spending a lot of time reading indoors. My book of the moment is William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. Most people know it from the movie, which is excellent and warm-hearted and embiggening. If you’ve not done so yet do yourself a favour and read the book.
The book is something else entirely.
The plot in both is framed by a meta-narrative around storytelling, with a grandfather reading out the classic tale to his sick grandson. But where the movie, understandably, stops there, the book takes it one level deeper.
In it Goldman reveals he is the little boy being read to, and it’s this memory that inspires him to hunt down a copy of The Princess Bride for his own son.
To his amazement, he discovers the original version, by S. Morgenstern, is terrible, filled with endless meandering passages about the currency trade and what princesses like to pack for long journeys. His grandfather was live-editing the book. So he sets out to carve it into the version of The Princess Bride his grandfather read to him.
That’s the book we get in the form of William Goldman presents S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love. Now, you don’t need to be a seasoned deconstructionist to see through this creative conceit. But at 12 I had no idea anyone could be clever enough to create a book that is a condensed version of a book they had made up.
And so I told my sister, I want to find the original The Princess Bride.
There are a number of ways you can respond to a request based on false information. You can say you don’t think such and such is a thing, and leave the person to go away and figure it out themselves. You can simply explain the error.
Or, if you’re my sister, you can say, let’s find that book.
So we go to the Yellow Pages (we are old, old, old) and we look up all the bookstores in Vancouver and start calling them. Just like that. We start at AAA Books and head down the list, call after call going something like this:
- Hello. Do you have The Princess Bride by S. Morgenstern?
- We have The Princess Bride, but it’s by William Goldman. Is this… a different book?
- No, it’s the same book but the unedited version. You see William Goldman…
And so on and so forth, a precocious 12-year-old and his teenaged sister, flummoxing the booksellers of Vancouver, who, to their credit, never let on that the book we were looking for was a literary device. A ghost.
(When Goldman died in 2018, people took to Twitter to express how they were similarly fooled.)
As I get older I’ve been thinking about moments in my life I didn’t appreciate in the moment. I’ve written about a few of them here. This is a lot of navel gazing, but at what I assume is the halfway point of my life I’m trying to work out the best way to live the next half.
I mean, it’s only a crisis if you panic, right?
And to keep the panicky tendrils down I’ve been taking stock, looking into the ol’ Thom warehouse and finding out what’s stored there. What do I have in reserve? When the zombies come and Trump’s in his eighth term and AI are writing all the words, what will I rely on for succour?
The cool part about this (shut up it’s cool) the cool part is I’ve discovered my warehouse is full. Not of gold, which would probably be a bit more specifically useful, but people and moments and opportunities.
A pallet-load of opportunities where, as a certified halfwit, I was very wrong about something, and the people around me thought, well, what happens if we just let him be wrong for a bit?
A big box of having a sister who, when faced with a quest for something that doesn’t exist, said - let’s find it.