An Odd One ...

All right ... this is weird.

As some of you know, we are slowly selling books from our personal library (thousands of titles, eventually), a list you can see (and purchase from!) here: link to DJ Doodlebug Books, LLC

End of commercial.

Anyway, Joyce is the one who's doing all the business--the cataloging, the cleaning up, the selling. the packaging, the mailing. (I scan the book jackets for her, and I ... well, nothing else, really.) And every now and then, when she's preparing a title for sale, something will fall out--or will be inside for us to wonder about.

Often they're simply reviews or relevant news clipped from a long-ago paper. But not long ago, this 3x5 card sort of fell out. Though it didn't really fall: It had been a bookmark, as you can tell from the card's yellowing left edge.

At the top it says, in all-caps, in my lovely handwriting:  I AM A STRAIGHT-EDGE. And a few lines below--in Joyce's writing (back in the days when you could actually read it): And I will respect you. Neither one of us can remember a thing about this card. At first, I thought it was one of the cards I used to make to put in the paperbacks I kept in my middle-school classroom. Kids could sign out these books. I kept the cards like a 50s librarian.

But I just spent a fruitless Google search on I AM A STRAIGHT-EDGE as a book title and had no luck--though I did find some weird-weird stuff instead. (I invite you to investigate on your own, Google-wise.)

I also entered it in the title line of abebooks.com, the massive used-book site on the web. Nada. (Nothing, either, on bookfinder.com.)

What's even more puzzling for me ... straight-edge is not a term my family used around our house when I was growing up--neither in its literal nor its metaphorical sense. We used ruler for the former, and good little boy for the latter. ?????

So ... why and when did I write those words on that card? When and why did Joyce reply in what appears to be her lingering sly style?

And how did that card end up in that book? And stay there for decades?

I feel as if I'm having my "Rosebud" moment--and when I die, with my loved ones gathered 'round me, I, eyes closed, will mutter "I am a straight-edge," and maybe one of my grandsons (or both?) will dash off and shoot a soon-to-be classic film, Citizen Dyer, that will begin with that straight-edge moment ...


Link to video of "Rosebud" moment in Citizen Kane.