A sales receipt long tucked between the pages of a book can tell a story of its own. I am known for using the receipt handed to me at checkout as a bookmark for the purchase I don’t wait long to read. Discovered years later, it often seems like a clue, giving away a snapshot of a former day and a former self—the date of the transaction, the location of the store, the other books I bought along with the one I chose to read first. Something more seems to be said about the book itself and the thoughts going through my head at the time—a memoir chosen on a road-trip far from home, a classic wandering story acquired during an uncertain time of transition in college. Moby Dick was purchased alongside Till We Have Faces, a novel I picked up simply because the title caught my attention and a book I would later describe as changing my life. It is a glimpse at myself often forgotten, a specific day in the past speaking to the present one: I was here. I was searching. And in hindsight, the present often seems to answer: And perhaps I was not alone.
A receipt fell out of a book I was rereading not too long ago. It was tucked in the pages of a small book depicting the fragmented thoughts of a grieving father. Written by a professor of philosophical theology, Lament for a Son relays the beating heart and exasperated soul of a man forced by a tragic accident to bury his son at the age of twenty-five. But the sales receipt that marked its pages furthered the illustration of grief therein: the book was purchased on the year anniversary of a lament that rattled me to my core.
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