I had one of those crazy, I’m-going-to-change-the-world, high school English teachers. Except that she’d been teaching awhile, she clearly no longer had any belief that she was going to change anyone, and had accepted that fact bitterly. The pathetic disillusioned type, who still wanted to pretend they cared.
On the last day of class, after the final, she gave everybody a bookmark. They were the cheap, crappy plastic but laminated kind. Some had tassels through the rough hole punch cut off center at the top. You could tell she had just raided a Hallmark and swiped all the bookmarks without really reading them. She’s had this tradition for years now, and maybe when she started she agonized over every student, matching them with their bookmark soulmate. But not anymore, she was reading some grocery aisle romance novel, one with Fabio on the cover, and pointed to a shoebox full of these bookmarks, and everyone just took one.
Mine was different though, I passed my final in last, I had zoned out about half way through, and it took me awhile to focus. So, I gave her my final, and instead of just pointing to the box, she actually looked through it. Now, I don’t really read, I couldn’t care less about this stupid bookmark. Besides, every single time I try to use one, it falls out. I’m shuffling on my feet, wondering what time it was, and if I was late for lunch at The Commons with everybody. But she’s going to town in the shoe box, like Mary Poppins, head buried arms searching, when she finally comes up she hands me this orange and brown ugly bookmark, and it’s got some pyramids on it, it’s also missing a tassel. I’m just wondering what’s so good about this one, but she was already packed up and leaving, shoebox in hand before I get a chance to ask. It didn’t even have one of those corny over-inspirational quotes, like from Thoreau or Dylan.
A couple years later in college I end up taking a trip to Egypt. And I guess I’ve always been a pessimistic person, but I never realized it. When we take the token trip out to see the pyramids, I’m just dead depressed. They were huge and amazing and all, but on a whole, not that great.
When I got home, I rummaged through all my high school crap and I found the bookmark, it was in my yearbook. I don’t think I’d opened my yearbook since a few weeks after graduation, the spine still creaked, unused to being open. But the pyramids looked a lot nicer on the bookmark than they did in person.
Now, I have a wall covered in bookmarks of places. Some of them are the crappy plastic laminated kind with off center tassels, some of them have cheesy quotes by Whitman or Billy Joel. And I take pictures of me in search of these bookmarks, my anti-photo album on my wall. I don’t know if I should title it or not, Bookmarking Places I’ll Never Be, Reminders of Disappointment, I don’t know, we’ll see. My next quest is a bookmark of Victoria Falls.
Vee1987's Brain Vomit 