Something Unusual in a Past Ritual

 "Wear the old coat and buy the new book."

Austin Phelps

Rituals.

Everyone of a certain age and comportment remembers The Book of the Month Club. Not the watered down 2025 version. The coupons and deals BOTMC. Four books for a dollar (you mailed in a card with actual stickers you pasted on) with the agreement that you'd buy four more over the next year...or something.

That deal was sometimes problematic, as any working-class parent would know. So a new book was a treasure, a moment to savor. This was especially true when it was a long-awaited offering from a beloved author.

The book arrived in the BOTMC box. It would sit for a day, sometimes more. Then, the kids in bed, the dogs settled... Pour a glass of wine, struggle with the box and open the cover.

The book binding crackled. New hard covers had a certain fragrance, of glue and paper. The tactile sensation and unblemished perfection of turning pristine pages was prelude to the ideas impressed in black letters on each page. Reading was not just an intellectual journey but a sensory bouquet.

So I buy an actual book from time to time, as I did recently. Social media puts one in touch with individuals who share interests (in history, here) and exchange opinions about books they have read. One person said he'd finished a particularly gripping account of a WWII bomber pilot, Those Who Fall, and recommended it.

It was available, used, on Amazon. There were no sticker perforations with which to struggle, no waiting "4-6 weeks." An envelope arrived within ten days.

The rituals today are simpler. Our kids are grown, the dogs have their niches. I'm retired and so the only question left to answer is...tea, or a restorative? I take a seat in the recliner, extend the porch for my reading and writing buddy and open the package.

The book has felt other hands. It is, in fact, a former library book that retained not just the dust cover but the due date card that showed it was checked out in 1999, 2003 and 2012. Stamped on the title page was the identity of the previous owner:

Post library, Dugway Proving Ground, Dugway, Utah. Property US Army

 What a long, strange trip this book has taken into my home. One wonders - is it possible that the personal observations of a B-17 bomber pilot have fallen so out of favor that it was read three times in 13 years on an Army post? Still... The author does not write in the modern manner - "Write the first chapters until you get to the action. Then, delete everything except the action scenes." He begins calmly, almost laconically. Tent living, eating military meals, flying out of bases that are rudimentary airports, even for the times.

Years after the war, this man sat down and memorialized a time that, he writes, "Something unusual happened to me."

Please, sir. Tell me more. 

Softly

 "I heard he sang a good song. I heard he had a style."

Killing Me Softly With His Song

Noting the passing of singer Roberta Flack.

It was impossible to walk down the hallway of a college dormitory in the early 70s and not hear Roberta Flack's clean, sinuous voice. She'd released a number of singles, each wonderful in its own right. Then came the song that made her ubiquitous.

It's not just a great song, with an involved and very music-business back story. It captures a world that escaped many at the time, and continues to be lost in the 60s/70s continuum many people think they know. Somehow, this woman from North Carolina grasped the deeper meaning of this elegant tune, married it to a lush arrangement and brought it to life.

The song was about singer/songwriter Don McClean, of "American Pie" (and so much more) fame. A young woman named Lori went to see McLean at a concert and left spellbound, having written her thoughts on a napkin. She reported all of this to her music collaborators, with whom she wrote a song.

When Roberta Flack recorded it... What a beautiful, expressive way she had with the words, with the melody, with the meaning. She sings with a vibrant vulnerability, at once lamenting and at the same time marveling at the genius of her subject.

He sang as if he knew me, in all my dark despair. And then he looked right through me as if I wasn't there.

 During an era when men were going off to war, when America was still wrestling with questions the 60s did not answer, Roberta Flack took a song about another artist, and made it hers. She took an idea, that there is beauty in the simple act of singing about how a musician can touch someone so deeply, and made it ours.

She had a long and successful career, charting popular songs into the 90's. She was still performing into the Twenty-teens. She passed this week at eighty-eight, another of those timeless icons who cannot be as old as the numbers seem to suggest.

There was a time - it doesn't really seem that long ago - when a young woman sang a simple song in such a compelling way that it never ages. That's the gift of music. That was the gift of Roberta.