Windmills (Part 1)

Sitting in the top right drawer of my desk is a nineteenth-century edition of Don Quixote.  It's a big red thing, lavishly illustrated by Gustave Dore, and is among the nicer books I own.  It looks a little like this:

It's sitting in my desk because I can't decide what to do with it.  It was supposed to be a gift for Joey - a gift for a best man who was just about to head off for Spain and who, I knew, would inevitably plan to read the biggest, oldest, most famous book about the place that he could think of.  If it'd been Switzerland, and not Spain, he would probably read The Magic Mountain.  If it'd been Russia, probably Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov (he'd already read War and Peace, but hadn't yet read much Dostoevsky).  France?  Oh, I don't know, probably all of Proust.

Not that I expected him to read this specific edition of Don Quixote: besides weighing several hundred pounds, the book's translated into a very olde worlde sort of English that is well-nigh impenetrable.  But I figured he could have this on his shelf while he read a more modern paperback edition during his travels.  The last time I saw him he confirmed, thanks to some sly prodding on my part, that, yes, he was planning to read Don Quixote this year, but not quite yet.  He was trying to work his way through some shorter books first, and then he'd tackle it.

I want to emphasize this: my brother was planning to read Don Quixote, a sixteenth-century Spanish novel of roughly 1,000 pages, during his third year of law school - a period when, we can assume with some certainty, he would have had several more pressing (but, to him, less interesting) reading obligations on his hands.  And he would have done it, too.  His priorities were very much in order.

So I felt pretty proud of myself for having found this book, but a little uncertain about how I was going to fit it into my luggage when we flew up for the wedding.  Of course, it never came to that, and now it sits in the drawer like someone else's unopened mail: I can't deliver it or throw it away, but I'm not sure I should keep it.

There was one obvious thing to do, though, after his death.  When Kate and I drove to Oklahoma City for the funeral, one of our first stops was the Full Circle Bookstore, a place that I had visited with Joey just a few months earlier (I had bought a Dickens book, he had bought a Forster).  It's a surprisingly good bookstore for Oklahoma City, with a friendly and knowledgeable staff, roaring fireplaces, free coffee, an excellent selection of local books, wi-fi, poetry journals, rolling ladders, and generally enough warmth and charm to make you forget that it's in a mall.  It's really one of the best independent bookstores in the country, a community bookstore of the sort that is becoming rarer and rarer, where authors and readers congregate and where books are treated like books, not like toasters or screwdrivers or some other commodity that must be shoved out the door as quickly and efficiently as possible to make way for more product.  Joey always made a point of buying something there when he was in town - not, as he put it, because he needed the books, but because he wanted to give them a little financial support (a donation, he called it) - and I had been there with him many times for just that purpose.

So it was natural, I suppose, that Kate and I should go there the week of his funeral.  We actually dropped quite a bit of money on one thing and another - Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honor trilogy (Joey was a big Waugh fan), a copy of All The King's Men (the last book I gave Joey, which I am currently reading) - and, of course, I bought a Penguin paperback of Don Quixote.  Since Joey didn't have a chance to read it, I reasoned, I would read it for him.  And I did.  Over the next several weeks, as visitors came to the house to offer food and condolences, and as doing anything at all - grocery shopping, television watching, dinner eating - became tedious to the point of meaninglessness, I stole every opportunity to escape with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into the dusty sixteenth-century Spanish countryside.

I do want to say a little about the book itself and how it helped me survive those first few difficult weeks, but this post has already gotten away from me, and now I'm hungry and need some oatmeal.  So I'll pause here and return to the topic here in a few days, possibly over the weekend.