Martel quote: "Lack imagination and miss the better story"

I still remember coming across that quote in Martel's Life of Pi. I still remember the reaction I got from you later that night when I emailed you that passage. It was easy to get excited about the book. But I am forever indebted to that quote and how it's helped to color my life and enhance my personal philosophies about life.

It was pretty easy for us to get that bookgroup going. Wasn't even a bookgroup, really, it was just a "hey, try out this title and tell me what you think" kind of thing. Not hard to do considering we both had our noses in books all the time. Occupational hazard when you're checking in or shelving hundreds of titles a day.

I suppose you might say that it wasn't an easy start, because the first title I picked was a bit of challenge: News From Paraguay. Not entirely pleasant, sometimes nasty, brutish and hard to deal with. But we got through it and to pay me back you indulged in a bit of post Gala pleasantry by having me read along with you the first of the Debbie Macomber Cedar Cove series. Oh the joys and copious midnight thrills I got from that book! It was one of those "it's so bad it's good" kind of experiences, one that kept me running back and forth to the computer to email you about outrageous passages I had just read. I wasn't a case of "funning", it was a mutual thrill.

But it was Life of Pi that really kicked our "bookgroup" off. That weekday dinner at Puerto Vallarta was our first official "Calcopo Book Discussion Group" supper. Total membership: two, with plenty of phantom members packing the rolls as well. We talked and noshed and the pile of books on the table got plenty of attention from the wait staff and conversation flowed all the way around. I am sure that if we could have handed out library card applications at the table that evening we would have started a new trend in dining and library outreach services.

So, "Lack imagination and miss the better story". Life of Pi. I use that phrase and that book all the time to help promote our Books to Go collection. I use that title to sell our oversized trade paperbacks to the reluctant or the superbusy need something great to read right now bunch. I reread it recently with my current bookgroup, Ships Log Readers, and even posted the quote on a foamcore board and nestled in among the millions of political placards that were standing about before election day on Old Clifton Road. It goes on and on.

I think that my life has always benefited from the liberal use of imagination. I can't think of life without a full pot of it boiling at all times on the back burners. I think that too many folks rely on the pragmatic or the dogmatic or the fearful voice of the shepard to guide them, not taking into account that our days are numbered and that a healthy, joyful imagination is key to surviving the doldrums and storms that arise out of life. Without a vibrant imagination to help fill in the cracks and voids of our existance, we could be doomed forever to a life of lockstep reaction whenever our dreams on hold. The paralysis of imagination sounds to me to be a very frightful, unsavory thing.

The day I picked up Life of Pi and turned to read the first page of that novel I turned a significant page in my life, too. We picked up more than a book to read that month, my dear, we picked up and passed back and forth ideas and dreams and cooperative thinking. We turned on the thoughts and wishes and visions of authors and turned them into a skein of dreams and fantasies and wild, wild experience. We turned on our mutual imagination that day. I have yet to turn it off.

Witness this space and you know that it true. Where are your dreams these days, darlin? Where are your most precious and true imaginative resources dwelling? Don't miss the better story, M. Go find them again and run, run with them hard, and don't look back. Don't worry, I'll find you, wherever your imagination takes you.

Your WHMB