Simple Pleasures, by Jenny Bahn

The package is yellow and affixed to my brass doorknob with two thick rubber bands.  Inside, thin layers of bubble wrap sandwich an item I’ve been waiting for.  A book.  Thick, unrelenting packing tape coats the outside like a second skin, evidence of the sender’s extra care bordering on neurotic.

The tape proves a formidable opponent, unyielding to my own hands and I dig around for a pair of gardening clippers that I rarely use for the fresh flowers they are intended for, flowers to be cut on a crisp diagonal and placed in some vase I don’t really have.

I administer a ragged cut at the corner, the blades not taking to the tape like I had hoped.  With a finger I tear at the opening, albeit unsuccessfully.  I cut again, bigger.  Tearing, wider.  At last revealing the package’s innards: vibrantly colored advertisements from the weekend section of a newspaper – $1.99 raspberries, two-for-one avocados, clementines.  I cut and tear and cut and tear and realize how I haven’t felt this way about a package since I was a child.  The sensation is not unlike how I used to field letters from an old pen pal, back when I was five feet tall and before the internet had taken root, back when letters were sent for under a quarter and you had to lick the stamp, back when I had Lisa Frank stationary.  She’d send me chicken scratch cursive on blue paper, sometimes in a blue envelope.  Stories about boys and school and things that don’t matter anymore.

I stop, allowing the envelope some reprieve from my mangling, and stare from above.  The yellow paper and its grocery store peaches.  Torn plastic bubble wrap.  I am transported to Leonora Drive, sitting next to a tree in soft, cheap pajamas and opening squares and rectangles and other shapes that defy traditional wrapping.  Christmas morning.  I contemplate taking a photograph to preserve whatever this moment is, standing in my tiny kitchen above a lopsided dining room table, but I quickly return to manufacturing the envelope’s demise.

The last of the thick yellow paper peels away like a well-starched sock.  I open the folds of the newspaper advertisement – thick and layered with multiple pages – opening folded triangles and squares of fruit.  Within its folds is yet another wrapper of bananas, wheat bread, limes.  I flip it over, unfolding again, still not yet at my destination.

Underneath is a crisply folded brown paper bag, cut to the appropriate size and wearing thick creases like the front of a pair of dress slacks.  I smile, recalling the weeks leading up to the first day of school, driving to Staples in my mom’s Toyota Landcruiser, the late summer days hot and dry and praying for fall.  Walking through the air-conditioned aisles, picking out pens and pencils and Five Star notebooks.  Getting my allotment of books for the year and using grocery bags to protect the outside, the courses denoted with painstakingly handwritten letters, newly acquired, followed by my first and last name.  I still went by Jennifer.  There came a point when I stopped using grocery bags for book covers; I had somehow grown out of the novelty, somehow grown too cool for it.

Unfolded, the underside of the paper, printed with words in red and blue, is the name of a supermarket somewhere in Massachusetts that I’ll never visit.  But there, finally, sitting amidst a digested confetti pileup is my prize: a brittle, yellowed copy of “A Light in the Attic,” its pages unmarred, unmarked, and just as it was when it was originally printed three years before I was born.

I throw the paper in the trash and place the book on a chair, one day hoping to have a proper bookshelf for this and many other titles.  A bookshelf full of memories.

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